The Winning of Barbara Worth

Henry King, Samuel Goldwyn, 1926, from Harold Bell Wright. Ronald Colman, Vilma Bánky, Gary Cooper (replacing Monte Blue) in a reclamation-plot Western around the Colorado River and the 1905 flood that made the Salton Sea. Silent, about eighty-nine minutes. King spending the budget on water and a town that should not have been built there. Cooper not yet the star; Colman already is. The dam and the break are the story; the marriage is the contract the desert will test.