Jon Mirsalis on Piano The Three Godfathers, the Peter B. Kyne story that was filmed at least four times (John Ford did it in 1948), tells of three bandits who adopt a foundling in the desert and must see the baby to safety, battling sun, sandstorms and cynicism. Hell's Heroes, Wyler's version, was shot in 1929 under extreme conditions in the Mojave Desert and the Panamint Valley (on the edge of Death Valley). "Hell's Heroes was Wyler's first adult work. It was the first film where he imposed his concept and where he showed he had broken with formula westerns. Despite the cameraman's objections that skies without clouds looked flat and unending and pancake landscapes were horrible, he forced Robinson not to prettify the photography. 'I want it to look horrible,' he shot back at the cameraman, squinting into furnace vistas. He moved the company to ever more hellish locations and near Mojave, California, found pancake desert...Hell's Heroes had its measure of sentimentality, but it succeeded in catching the spirit of westerns two decades earlier-and four decades later, when badmen could be heroes. The picture disregarded the 1930 imperative of a happy ending and Charles Bickford's Sangster was played in the best tradition of William S. Hart...'It was uncompromising, completely bleak and it received a great deal of attention,' Wyler recalled" (Axel Madsen, William Wyler). Our print is the silent version of this transition-year film.