Jon Mirsalis on Piano Note: Maiden and Men was not shown. Replaced by The Ranchman's Nerve The finest silent Westerns, to my taste, come early-before 1914-in a brief era before the industry-wide expansion to feature length. Our opening program tonight samples short works-in rare 35mm prints from the Library of Congress-produced by the era's three most innovative Western filmmakers. Maiden and Men (1912), one of the few surviving among literally hundreds of one-reel Westerns directed by Allan Dwan between 1911 and 1913, is hauntingly simple, a windswept fable of misplaced romanticism and sexual jealousy. D.W. Griffith's The Last Drop of Water (1911) is on a higher production level altogether. Blanche Sweet's "Weakling" suitor makes his "atonement" when thirst-maddened pioneers are reduced to "the last drop between life and death." Spectacular for its one-reel brevity, it's a blueprint for the "westward-ho-the-wagons" subgenre at its crest in tonight's second show, The Big Trail. If Griffith, in this era, is indisputably master of film form, he was light years behind Thomas Ince in realism and authenticity, so evident in Ince's The Invaders, one of the great early Westerns and, at three reels, an epic for 1912. Producer Ince was sparing with public credit to his directors, but The Invaders was probably directed by Francis Ford, who also stars as the cavalry commandant. The film plays like a taut draft for his brother John Ford's Fort Apache, mixing a large-scale Seventh Cavalry battle with a domestic drama of the commandant's daughter. The Indians here (played by Sioux who lived and worked at Ince's "101 Ranch") are savage yet justified, never simply an evil force. Scott Simmon