Zane Grey and Tom Mix at the Port Jervis Free Library

Inspired by a recent internet B Western Movieland Mystery Photo Contest I responded to a flyer posted on a community bulletin board and went to the Port Jervis NY Free Library this past Saturday, April 20th, for a showing of the 1925 silent Riders of the Purple Sage starring Tom Mix and his Wonder Horse Tony. The library has a weekly film program in which movies are shown free to the public. Most of these I believe are the old silent films although I think there have been more recent films as well. This particular program was co-sponsored by the Zane Grey’s West Society. Robert Lenz was their spokesperson.

Mr. Lentz explained the mission of the society …I have enclosed a link to their web site and so I will not duplicate that information here. He displayed a copy of the most recent edition of The Riders which the society painstakingly edited to be an accurate facsimile of the original edition, replete with embossed cover art and dust jacket. It includes five essays on Grey’s love of the west, a map showing where the story took place, and program notes of the five filmed versions of the novel. Printed in an edition of 300 it sells for $70.00. A paperback edition has been under consideration.

One of the interesting facts presented by Mr. Lentz was that Mrs. Grey served as her husband’s business manager. It was she who suggested that they move to California so that he could sell the movie rights to his work and thereby multiply his income from each. It was her idea as well that the sale of the rights would be limited to only seven years. Thus the rights could be resold any number of times and this explains why this title has been remade five times, most of the versions are seven years apart.

Setting the record straight Mr. Lentz also let it be known that Zane Grey and Tom Mix, at one time neighbors on Catalina Island, Were Not Friends.

The screening was held in the recently renovated community room in the basement of the library. This is divided into two rooms with a large opening between them, each room about the size of the average family living room. The renovation includes new sheet rock, dropped ceiling, and new carpeting. The reception room’s muted gray walls were lined with six foot folding tables on which were displayed 26 reproduction one sheets in various sizes from many of the Zane Grey Movies …a surprisingly large number of them produced by Herbert Yates and starring Scott Brady. Another table displayed the books written by Bob Lentz; biographies of Lee Marvin, Gloria Graham, a history of Korean War themed films, etc. I purchased a copy of the last of Lentz’s printed newsletters dated 2009. Since then it has been an internet web site under the name of Filmbobbery.com. At the door to the screening room a table offered popcorn and potato chips in large paper cups, a one-fold Playbill with the art work, cast list, and a synopsis of the film, and a two-fold informational brochure of the ZGWS.

Films are screened in the adjoining room on a wide format LG digital screen. This particular film was on VHS cassette. (There was much consternation getting the film to play until it was realized that the cassette merely needed to be rewound.) The audience included three members of the Society, the library representative, and seven members of the movie going public, none of whom I believe were under seventy. On Sunday, April 21, the Society presented a free screening of The Riders, the 1996 Ed Harris version, in the basement meeting room of the Pike County Historical Society in Milford, Pennsylvania. Milford is about 8 miles below Port Jervis on the Delaware River.

To explain my proximity; I live across the river from Port Jervis in Matamoras, Pennsylvania. It is a twenty minute walk from my door across the bridge to Port. Matamoras is on the eastern border of the state at exactly that point where New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania meet. That point is marked by a surveyor’s plaque on a rock at the edge of the river. This, as you might guess, is known as The Tri State Rock.

Being shown the facsimile copy of the novel I was intrigued as to how so much information would be distilled into a one hour film. In fact I was intrigued that Grey had written such a lengthy tome. My first experience with his works was seeing my father read them back in the late forties and early fifties. My father was an iron worker in the construction industry and so this should answer the questions as to what people did before there was TV. TV came to our Kansas town in 1954. As I remember them those editions were the cheap five cent paperbacks. And of course I have seen thousands of hardcover editions at yard sales over the years. In fact they are about the most ubiquitous items at a yard sale and prove without a doubt Grey’s one time immense popularity. Despite this constant exposure, I have never read a Zane Grey novel.

This was not the first Tom Mix movie I have ever seen: as a kid I remember going to see a rerun at a local movie theater some sixty years ago. My father was born in 1914 and my grandmother once told me that it had been his boyhood ambition to go to Hollywood and become the new Tom Mix. I took a look/see back then because I was curious as to the look and character of his heroes. During this screening I observed Mr. Mix with care, finally deciding that my father was likely odder than even I remember him.

In the film, which flirts with the bizarre as most silent films seem to me to do, there is a key plot development and new characters introduced in every scene. It is an understatement to say that the film is a rapid fire condensation of the book. Tom Mix plays a man who spends many years searching for his sister and niece. In the end he abandons his quest for revenge in the name of love. (The parallel to The Searchers was astounding: it hints of plagiarism.) During all these many years Tom Mix always wears the same black costume that is never less than immaculate. Occasionally he breaks the narrative to perform a few rodeo tricks with his lasso, induces his horse to be deceptive, and fashions for himself a device with the rope and the horse in which he literally rides the sage. When challenged he is always the fastest draw in the west, although this is implied but never shown until after the smoke has cleared.

What makes the film so very odd is that this stout middle aged man wore what appeared to be black painted sideburns from the Groucho Marx School of make up as well as lipstick that was perhaps a shade too dark. (This bizarre make up caused me to questions my father’s boyhood aspirations. Prior to this I had not had any suspicions…)

About twenty minutes into the film I longed for it to be over. Then, suddenly, an element of movie magic was introduced: finding himself trapped by his pursuers the young juvenile lead discovers climbing aides carved into the rock walls of a high mountain and climbs up to the top not knowing where he is going and disregarding the obvious that he has become an ideal target for the gun totting varmints hot on his tail. At the top he finds the ruins of ancient Indians’ abandoned cliff dwellings with a beautiful view of Yosemite Park that looked to me to be an inserted Carlton Watkin photograph, herein proclaimed the Lost Canyon. This episode had the dreamlike visual quality of a Murnau film.

Somehow the handsome young man was able to get back down off the mountain top. He returned with plentiful supplies, telling the ingénue that they now had enough provisions to live there the rest of their lives, ( I interpreted this as late adolescent bravura), and later still he climbed up again followed by the ingénue, Tom Mix, the damsel in distress, and all nine members of the Riders of the Purple Sage. As we had been lead to suspect, Tom saves the day by tipping over the balanced rock the Indians had placed there for protection many years ago and which, literally, in one fell swoop wipes out the band of evil men on the cliff face.

I have to confess that I was greatly impressed by the magnitude of that shot. It did not appear to have been done with models or other special effects. I was impressed by the evidence of such disregard for the environment …the destruction was extensive …in the name of commerce. Surely this was the first of the disaster movies. I could only assuage my consternation by wondering if that shot too might not have been stock footage, like the Watkin photograph, and from some more commendable topographical alteration.

Although the ZGWS arranges programs in various other parts of the country the reason for doing so here is that Zane Gray and his wife Dolly lived 26 miles further up the Delaware River in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania. And despite their subsequent lifelong wanderlust …the Grey’s owned a number of homes in points west, as well as a yacht, shades of John Ford …their ashes are interred in the Lutheran Church cemetery right next door to this former home. When I first moved here in 1980 the house was an inn, The Zane Grey Inn, and in the late 80’s it was sold to The National Park Service and has since become a maintained tourist attraction. Late in his life when my father paid me his only visit after I had left home, and my not knowing what to do with him, I drove him and his wife to the Zane Grey House. He was surprised that I had remembered his earlier interests and was visibly and awkwardly pleased.

I explained to my father that Grey had moved here because of the opportunity to fish at his doorstep. Grey was a renowned fisherman. I wonder now if Grey might not have been the source of my father’s love of fishing. Living in Kansas, which is dry as a bone and where the rivers when they run run about twelve inches deep, I had always been curious what had inspired my father to take up the rod.

The equivalent of two blocks to the south of the Grey house in Lackawaxen the Roebling Bridge crosses the Delaware from Pennsylvania to New York. This is one of about eight suspension bridges Roebling designed and built in the area and it is the only one of them extant. All of them were maquettes, trial runs, for his larger construction, The Brooklyn Bridge, in New York City. This structure, still in use, is protected as a National Landmark. My father was equally pleased to have been given a walking tour of the bridge, a sort of bus man’s tour as it was. Two days earlier, after a whirlwind tour of New York City, we had driven under the Brooklyn Bridge and over the George Washington.

For about seventy miles, from the Delaware Water Gap in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania north to Narrowsburg, New York, the Delaware is a protected waterway. From Stroudsburg to Milford, about 30 some miles, and for one mile inland on both sides it is a National Recreation Area. Over two million people a year take advantage of this natural environment. This parkland, begun in 1980 after the cancellation of the Tock’s Island dam project, a project that had resulted in the removal of the population of several villages and many private farms, all of which were later razed, has exempted this area from over-development. From just above Milford to Narrowsburg it is classified as a National Scenic River. All development in the river and along the sides here is prohibited. By contrast from below Stroudsburg to its estuary into the Atlantic below Philadelphia the riverbanks resemble a revolving diorama of Camden, New Jersey.

During the 1980’s and 90’s Pike County, the area of Pennsylvania that includes all of these mentioned Pennsylvania towns above Stroudsburg, was the fastest growing county in the eastern United States; when I moved here in 1980 as a summer resident the population was 5,000 with a summer population of 10,000, and during those years of unprecedented growth increased to a year round population of 55,000. That this long, beautiful riverscape with crystal clear waters has been preserved just as it was when the Greys lived here convinces me that big government is the solution not the problem.

The notable literary distinction in Port Jervis is that it was here that Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage. As for Milford it was the home of the retired New York City school teacher Frank Mc Court while he wrote Angela’s Ashes; in the 1970’s Milford was the home of The Science Fiction Writers of America.

When the early Biograph Studios were still on the east coast the area in and around Milford often served as film locations. A number of films…seven or eight…were shot here entirely. D.W Griffith worked here along with his star Lillian Gish and others whose names I can not recall off hand. I remember Lillian because at one time in the 80’s she was invited to a function at the Historical Society but, alas, her speaker’s fee was beyond our means. John Barrymore filmed and vacationed here and is reputed to have patronized the local bars. Local resident Farley Granger recently died at his home here. The Pike County Historical Society has a good archive of those early film days including many photographs. For the past ten years or so Milford has presented an annual film festival that maintains the tradition and with aspirations of similar greatness.

The only literary distinction of Matamoras is that it is the present home of the author of these long blog entries, Gary Martin.

A tip of the hat to The Zane Grey’s West Society for their efforts in keeping alive the name of a culturally significant literary and film personality, a man who, whatever his level of genius might have been, engaged in two forms of public art that spurred many a private fantasy and no doubt several worthwhile causes such as a love of and respect for the native land.

Thanks as well to the Port Jervis Library and the Pike County Historical Society for promoting film as a significant cultural experience.

For other film programs at the Port Jervis Library:

http://www.portjervislibrary.org/portjervis/


For other film programs at the Pike County Historical Society:

http://pikecountyhistoricalsociety.org/news.html


The Zane Grey’s West Society:

http://www.zgws.org/index.php


The Bob Lentz website:

http://www.filmbobbery.com/


The Zane Grey House in Lackawaxen:

http://www.nps.gov/upde/historyculture/zanegrey.htm


The Movieland Mystery Photo website:

http://ladailymirror.com/


The Black Bear Film Festival

http://blackbearfilm.com/