The Ranchman’s Vengeance
R: Allan Dwan. D: J. Warren Kerrigan, Gilbert P. Hamilton, Dot Farley, George Periolat. P: American Film Manufacturing Company (as Flying A). USA 1911
German intertitles

“The Ranchman’s Vengeance (May 1911) offers a striking contrast to the films Dwan would soon shoot for the company. Although cinematically conventional, the film tells us an unconventional story in that its ranchman hero is a Mexican American, Lorenz Pedro, and his revenge is directed at a white man, Tom Flint (…). Mexicans or Mexican Americans were the subject of a good number of earlier westerns, but they usually played villains – as in Broncho Billys Mexican Wife (November 1912) – victims or, characters who either gratefully were rescued by whites or sacrificed themselves for whites. The Ranchman’s Vengeance is revealing anomaly in its recasting of a figure typically seen as ‘racially inferior’ and thus marginalized in the ‘imagined community’ of the West. (…) On the one hand, the ending is more characteristic of European than American films (…) and this may have partly accounted for its popularity abroad. On the other hand, and more important, the lack of reviews (except for ‘Billboard’s, which identifies only the ‘ranchman’s servant’ as Mexican) means either that the film’s circulation was limited to marginal areas of the U.S. social order – specifically in Southwest venues catering to Mexican Americans – or that the names in its intertitles had to be expunged from any ads elsewhere.”
Charlie Keil, Shelley Stamp: American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices. University of California Press 2004, p. 145

>>> Allan Dwan, 1912

>>> Allan Dwan, 1913

>>> Allan Dwan, 1915