The Girl Ranchers
R: Al Christie. D: Lee Moran, Stella Adams, Marie Walcamp, Ramona Langley, Laura Oakley. P: Nestor Film Company. USA 1913

“The one-reel gender comedy The Girl Ranchers is part of a wave of stories, sweeping through American popular culture in the early 1910s, about intrepid girls who prove themselves on the land. Hundreds of novels began to be published about such adventures, including several Camp Fire Girls series (in the years after the organization’s founding in 1910) and Girl Scouts series (after 1912). (…) The ranch girl films may have drawn loosely, if without acknowledgment, on Margaret Vandercook’s popular Ranch Girls novels: ‘The Ranch Girls and Their Great Adventure’, ‘The Ranch Girls at Boarding School’, ‘The Ranch Girls’ Pot of Gold’, and others. (…) The Girl Ranchers was at least the second girl-rancher comedy from the Nestor company, the first studio located in Hollywood itself and by this time part of the new Universal Pictures conglomerate. If the film is not, as ads claimed, ‘one continual scream of laughter,’ its amusing stylizations of male and female behavior make for a nicely escalating battle of the sexes. (…) After the battle and race to the rescue (a comic variation on D.W. Griffith’s The Battle at Elderbush Gulch, filmed earlier that year), the women invite the now-shaved ‘GALLANT COWBOYS’ to a closing dance. As Nestor’s publicity put it, ‘the need and uses of ‘man’ having been deeply manifested,’ and the women having proved their worth, the Rough Neck Ranch — alias Maidens’ Rest Ranch — can begin a new chapter.”
Scott Simmon
National Film Preservation Foundation

Broncho Billy and the Western Girls
R: Gilbert M. ‘Broncho Billy’ Anderson. D: Gilbert M. ‘Broncho Billy’ Anderson, Bess Sankey, Evelyn Selbie, Lloyd Ingraham, Victor Potel, Harry Todd, Fred Church. P:  The Essanay Film Manufacturing Company. USA 1913

“This short from G.M. ‘Broncho Billy’ Anderson doesn’t show a lot of progress over the simple Western stories he’d been telling for years now. The appeal is his folksy charm and good nature, and the opportunity to imagine adventure in the Wild West for a few minutes. (…) It’s understandable if Gil Anderson wasn’t quite up to matching D. W. Griffith’s suspense during the break-in and ride to escape, but you would think that ten years after appearing in The Great Train Robbery, he could stage a Western chase scene with a bit more deftness. (…) Anderson still comes across as the classic genial Western hero, and it’s fascinating how the women in his movies never look made-up or glamorous, just like the plain women one would expect to find living on the range.”
CENTURY FILM PROJECT

“(…) A wooden door won’t stop armed men, this movie makes clear, and while two girls may be no match for three men with guns, that doesn’t mean their only recourse is to cower. Over at Keystone, Griffith’s race-to-rescue-the-helpless women became the formula for the Keystone Kops, while at Kalem, the women were quite capable of rescuing themselves — and the men, too. Here, it’s given a western touch.”
IMDb (boblipton)

>>> Vitagraph’s Cowboy Girl Westerns

>>> A Kalem Girl: Gene Gauntier

>>> A Robust Western Woman