South O'Santa Fe and Other Rare Shorts (Silent) (DVD)

Mary Louise Cecilia "Texas" Guinan (1884-1933) left the state from which she took her name as a teenager with dreams of becoming a movie star. Her crass, brazen personality, forged in poverty, made stardom harder than she expected, but her leggy figure guaranteed her regular work as a chorus girl on Broadway. Moonlighting in vaudeville, she developed a cowgirl character that caught the attention of Hollywood, and was cast in her first film, The Wildcat (1917). Over the next few years, Texas would star in close to 50 pictures (though she liked to brag it was 300), all Westerns, leading movie magazines to dub her "The Queen of the West". Her fiercely independent, no-nonsense persona served as a prototype for femme fatales like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Texas, always too smart for her own good, quickly grew bored with Hollywood. When Prohibition was introduced, she opened a popular speakeasy in New York, the 300 Club, famous for its scantily-clad dancers. Guinan became one of the city's biggest celebrities, and her tangles with the law made headlines (though whether because of a corrupt police force or her own ingenuity, she never actually served a jail sentence.) Eventually tiring of dueling with the NYPD, she launched a traveling burlesque show in Europe. While on the road, she died during an epidemic of amoebic dysentery -- ironically, a month before Prohibition was repealed. The four two-reelers in this collection show Texas at her best: bold, assertive, refusing to play second fiddle to any man...and unabashedly sexy.

SOUTH O'SANTA FE (1919): The men at the Bar-K Ranch are too rowdy, so Texas is brought on to whip them into shape...literally. One of the ranchers, nursing a bruised ego, frames her for stealing the payroll as payback for humiliating him.

THE GIRL OF THE RANCHO (1919): A Mexican bandit asks Texas to marry him. When she refuses, he kidnaps her little sister.

LETTERS OF FIRE (1919): Texas wants revenge against a cattle thief who branded her with his initials years earlier.

A MOONSHINE FEUD (1920): Texas has to come to her boyfriend's rescue when he runs afoul of a gang of moonshiners.

• silent