Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Custer’s Last Fight (1912)

This early Thomas H. Ince western stars Francis Ford and Grace Cunard, with Chief William Eagleshirt, J. Barney Sherry, Art Acord, Ann Little, Lillian Christy and Charles K. French.

To his credit, Ince employed native peoples to portray Indians in his films rather than white actors in ridiculous makeup. However, we can’t get used to soldiers saluting Custer with their left hand.

This DVD-R edition has been mastered from a fair to good 16mm reduction print (that looks more like an 8mm print) of the 1925 rerelease version of the film, which may be a compilation of Thomas H. Ince’s productions Custer’s Last Stand (1911) and Custer’s Last Fight (1912). The source print is quite soft in its picture details, with quite a few blasted-out highlights. And, yes, there is the normal amount of dust and speckling, persistent vertical scratches, and schmutz in the print.

The film is accompanied by a low-fidelity musical soundtrack culled from preexisting recordings. Truly . . . tough going.

The supplementary material is an IMP comedy from a fair to good 8mm reduction positive, with canned music.

This disappointing disc appears to be the only edition available on DVD home video and should be acquired only for the sake of completeism. This disc looks quite a bit like the budget VHS videotapes we had to endure in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Somewhere there has to be a better-looking print of the film than this. Please.

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