I mentioned about a month ago that there was an edition of TCM's Silent Sunday Nights that ran a pair of Tom Mix movies in one time slot, so I inadvertently recorded two features, not that I'm complaining since the YouTube TV "DVR" is more or less unlimited. The second of those movies was The Big Diamond Robbery, not to be confused with a 1950s movie called The Great Diamond Robbery.
Tom Mix, unsurprisingly, does not play the diamond robber, or even the diamond itself. The other unsurprising thing is that Mix plays the sort of character you'd naturally find in a western, even one that's more or less set in the present day of 1929 when the movie was released. That character is Tom Markham, a ranch foreman on a ranch out in Arizona. He works for George Brooks (Frank Beal), who owns the place but doesn't spend all 12 months of the year there now that travel is much easier. Instead, he lives in one of the big cities; as the movie starts, Tom is in the city visiting Brooks for an annual meeting on how to manage the ranch and whatnot.
Brooks also has a daughter of the fashionable age to be a female lead, something that seems to happen way too often in westerns as it's an easy way to introduce that romantic lead. But then the first half of the movie really isn't a western either as it's all set in the city. That daughter is Ellen (Kathryn McGuire), and Dad has recently given her a pricey gift of a named diamond (oh, that trope again) that he's put in a ring and that one guesses would help her attract a husband, since there doesn't seem to be a real boyfriend in the picture.
Oh, there's a male acquaintance, Rodney, who is supposedly a friend. But in reality, he's the head of a gang of jewel thieves, and they plan to steal the Regent Diamond from the Brookses. Tom gets wind of the plan and is more or less able to thwart it in a sequence that looks like it's set in a hotel or somesuch. Tom is going to take the Regent Diamond west to the ranch, with the two Brookses set to follow.
Of course Rodney overhears the plot, since the Brookses don't know his true nature, and he gets his men to follow the Brookses out to the ranch where they hatch a scheme to get the diamond. This is where the movie becomes more of a western, albeit one in the tradition of the singing cowboys if you were to take away all the singing.
Looking back 95 years, The Big Diamond Robbery feels like a decided B western. Studios didn't really know how to do the genre once sound arrived, since getting the right sound in outdoor location shooting was much more difficult in the early days of talking pictures. That's part of why Mix's career fizzled out, although he was also pushing 50 by the time he made this movie and wasn't going to be the matinee idol much longer anyway. Having said all that, however, The Big Diamond Robbery is an entertaining enough silent, although it doesn't have the more spectacular photography that Sky High did. Mix looks like a natural for the western half of the movie, and it's easy to see why he was a big silent star and why it's such a shame that a vault fire destroyed so many of his movies.
The Big Diamond Robbery survived because it wasn't made at his home studio of Fox, and because a copy survived at the Library of Congress and didn't degrade. If you can find it it's definitely worth a watch.
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