“To regard Hell’s Hinges as merely a Western is a mistake, for it more resembles The Atonement of Gosta Berling than it does Riders of the Purple Sage.” Film historian William K. Everson wrote this in his 1962 volume The Western: From Silents to Cinerama (co-written with George Fenin), the first serious Eng- lish-language study of the genre, and a book dedicated to “William S. Hart, the finest Western star and director of them all.” Hart’s use of landscape, his austere moral vision, and his refusal to decorate his films with the usual Hollywood conventions (the comparison is specifically to Tom Mix), suggested to Everson the spare masterworks of Sjöström and Stiller. Is the final conflagration here mere spectacle, as in a Mix picture, or a moral statement that suggests (and prefigures) the burning of Ekeby Manor in Stiller’s great film? Screenwriter C. Gardner Sullivan took the basic dramatic set-up of a simple Ince-Hart two-reeler, The Conversion of Frosty Blake (shot six months earlier), and turned it into something other than a “mere Western”. Hell’s Hinges mocks the notion of the moral superiority of the Western plains over the Eastern cities, directly challenging one of the central tenets of American Western mythology. This place is neither garden nor wilderness, merely a few tawdry storefronts and pleasure palaces, a moral sinkhole which sucks in even the local minister. In an extraordinary climax that suggests both High Plains Drifter and the Biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Hart character incinerates the town and drives all the surviving inhabitants, good and bad, into the desert.

Richard e Diane Koszarski