The scenario opens in the border town of Vallejo, where roughneck poolroom operator Bully Brand (Les Bates) fancies himself the governing authority. The hulling brute has no problem with providing a beating to anyone who so much as smiles at Mary Moore (Willie Mae Carson), the chophouse waitress who's caught his eye. Brand's menace, however, is laughed off by ranch foreman Jim Gregory (Warner, here billed as "James B.") and his roly-poly sidekick Skinny Fargo (Hilliard Karr). After Gregory gets the better of the blackguard in a brawl, he and Skinny leave the humiliated heavy handcuffed and suspended from a hitching post, vowing his vengeance.
Fade across the border to a fiesta at the Rancho Del Rada, where the young mistress of the house, Mercedes Aloyez (Elinor Fair) finds it necessary to remind the wandering-eyed garrison commander El Capitan Montoya (R. Henry Grey) of the fact of their betrothal. Fate soon provides her with temptations of her own, as she engages Montoya in a horse race back to his barracks. At that moment, Gregory is pursuing a wayward steer into Mexico, and he comes to her rescue when the longhorn causes the senorita's stallion to buck, to the great annoyance of Montoya.
Upon returning to the ranch, Jim can't get Mercedes off his mind, despite Skinny's entreaties that he's asking for trouble. Soon, he's making a nightly ritual of stealing to the rancho, a fact that gets passed along to Montoya by his bribed watchdog, the spread's feeble-minded goatherd Pascal (Ethelbert Knott). With a phalanx of his troops, Montoya ambushes Jim and Skinny, with the intent of immediately marrying the senorita and handing the two interlopers a fatal encounter with his pet Gila monster as their guest gift. Spotting a cluster of Pascal's precious jumping beans spilled on the floor, Gregory soon goads the proud soldier into wagering his life against theirs--all on the chance of whose brincadore is the first to leap out of a scrawled circle.
As a curio representing Hollywood's treatment of Mexican characters during the period, Big Stakes is most definitely a mixed bag. Certain of the sentiments shared by the title cards are decidedly un-p.c. by contemporary standards, but the characters of Mercedes and Montoya were also given surprising dimension, and it's noteworthy that producer-director Clifford S. Elfelt took the risky stance at the time for depicting the Klansmen as heavies.
While his name is only remembered today by the most fervent sagebrush cinema scholars, the lanky, affably charismatic Warner plied his onscreen trade for eight years beginning in the mid-'teens. A real cowboy from Nebraska born James B. Tobias, he had little trouble wrangling work from major and minor studios; Big Stakes was the first of a six-picture stint at Metropolitan Pictures under the supervision of Elfelt. The filmmaker would subsequently be instrumental in launching the career of Ken Maynard a few years later. Upon leaving Metropolitan, Warner knocked out a string of oaters for poverty-row mogul Anthony Xydias that became his most popular efforts. At that point, unfortunately, Warner's health went into precipitous decline, and he was only 29 when he died of tuberculosis in November 1924.
Director: Clifford S. Elfelt
Screenplay: Earl Wayland Bowman (story)
Cast: James B. Warner (Jim Gregory), Eleanor Fair (Senorita Mercedes Aloyez), Les Bates (Bully Brand), Wilamae Carson (Mary Moore), H.S. Karr (sidekick Skinny Fargo), Robert H. Grey (El Capitan Montoya), A. Knott (Pascal).
BW-61m.
by Jay S. Steinberg
