His Last Game (1909)

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   Kasparius

   His Last Game (1909)
   
   A Native American Baseball pitcher, Bill Going, is about to play an important game for a white team. A couple of crooks try to bribe him to lose the game through money and alcohol. When that doesn’t work, they try to kill him and he shoots one of them in self-defense. He is sentenced to death, but before they kill him he is allowed to play his last game. Once he wins, he goes to his execution. A reprieve is expected for his life, but the sheriff is too impatient and has Bill shot before it can get there.
   
   The cinematic technique is crude and the story fairly preposterous, but what is fascinating and interesting about the film is the somewhat “fair” treatment of Native Americans on film. Actually around that time it seemed to be fashionable to show a favorable view -- although usually condescending -- of the “red man’s” plight. Films like Griffith’s Ramona, White Fawn’s Devotion or Ince’s The Heart of an Indian, show a side of Western history from an Indian perspective (through the glass onion of early white guilt.)
   
   In this film the Indian is honorable and refuses to take bribes, even though he really wants to drink that firewater! When he shoots a white man in self-defense, he accepts the white man’s justice and his own death, but before that he really must win the Baseball game for that white team.
   
   It’s amusing in a way, but also heart breaking. Even when the white man condescends to make the Indians the heroes of their stories, it has to be trough the prism of their own ignorance and prejudice. 10 years 3 months ago

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