Out West / The Scarlet Drop

Sat 22 Aug 2026 21:00
DCP

Out West

1918 • Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle • 25 min

(USA)

A tight, briskly paced film that cleverly plays with old Western clichés, in which Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, and Al St. John let their inventiveness run wild. In the most outrageously funny sequence, the arriving Arbuckle not only sends the bandits fleeing but also overcomes the cannibal Indians who pursue him. One of Arbuckle’s best short films.

Review (mykkaelokuvat.com) »

The Scarlet Drop

1918 • John Ford • 41 min

(USA)

Discovered in a Chilean warehouse after having been lost for more than a century, The Scarlet Drop delighted audiences last year in both Bologna and Pordenone. Now we have the opportunity to bring it to Forssa for the enjoyment of the world’s best silent film audience.

Drawing on a feud between a wealthy landowning family and the despised poor, the film demonstrates that Ford was already a remarkably mature filmmaker early in his career. The film features the director’s characteristic humor as well as gripping action, alongside images and camera angles familiar from many of his later works. The heroine’s harassment through smoking in a stagecoach anticipates Stagecoach (1939), while the unforgettable final climax varies a scene from Cecil B. DeMille’s western The Girl of the Golden West (1915)—though it later became better known through Howard Hawks’s classic western Rio Bravo (1959).

Review (mykkaelokuvat.com) »