Tumbleweeds (1925 film)

1925 American silent Western film

Tumbleweeds is a 1925 American silent Western film starring and produced by William S. Hart. It depicts the Cherokee Strip land rush of 1893. The film is said to have influenced the Oscar winning 1931 Western Cimarron, which also depicts the land rush. A 1926 review of Tumbleweeds in Photoplay Magazine says "Bill Hart returns to the screen in a story laid in the time when the Indian territory was turned over to the homesteaders. The scene in which the prospective land owners, waiting for the cannon's boom which would send them racing in to stake their claims, furnished a brand new thrill It is good entertainment."

Modern reviews of Tumbleweeds have lauded it as the high point of Hart's career and as a seminal film of the silent era that was unique for its era in its depiction of Indians and black Americans. Gary Johnson in Images Journal said that although Tumbleweeds was only a mild box office success, it is arguably Hart's finest film. "The movie's most impressive sequence remains the land rush", wrote Johnson. Tammy Stone wrote that Hart was to Westerns what Chaplin was to comedy and that Hart managed to "both stay in the game and go out with a bang" in his last film Tumbleweeds. Michael W. Phillips Jr. wrote in 2007 that the movie was unique in movies of the era because it included Native Americans who weren't faceless villains but Hart's friends and included African Americans among the boomers of 1889. " Today, the film holds a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Tumbleweeds was Hart's last movie.

On September 14, 2007, Dennis James, a silent film musician, performed a score to Tumbleweeds in a live performance at the Poncan Theatre in Ponca City, Oklahoma as a special commission as part of a celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of Oklahoma statehood.

In 2002, Image Entertainment released the Astor Pictures' 1939 version of Tumbleweeds on Region 0 DVD. This version, transferred from a print in the Paul Killiam collection, is regarded as the best looking video transfer currently available.