49-17, directed by Ruth Ann Baldwin (1917), is a silent film that demonstrates some of the possibilities and problems of narration without sound. Set in 1917, the year of its making, the film introduces Judge Brand, a former goldminer come East who longs to return to the freedom of the Old West and his former lifestyle. He dispatches his secretary, Tom Robbins, to California where Tom hires the company of an "Old West" show to recreate the Judge’s old mining town. In the process, Tom falls in love with one of the performers, who is later revealed to be the judge’s supposedly lost heir. Jim Raynor, another member of the company—later discovered to be the man who had stolen the wife of Hugh Adams, the judge’s deceased mining partner—eventually attempts kidnapping and robbery, only to meet his death in a fall from his horse while trying to escape.

Based on a magazine story, this seemingly simple tale has a sophisticated narrative structure created mainly through elements of classical continuity editing. Although individual shots in the film are relatively static, its plot is advanced through such stylistic features as relatively restrained performances, a complex structure of flashbacks and tinted frames that signify mental subjectivity, the passage of time, contrasts of setting and time of day, and emotional cues. However, the film also features an overt, overdetermined heterodiegetic narration through the use of intertitles that offer redundant or unnecessary information. These titles themselves include illustrations that mark additional excessive "narration" beyond the needs of the fabula/story.

The devices of continuity editing themselves, while sometimes striking, do little to evoke a sense of agency outside the diegesis. At the beginning of the film, for example, the Judge is going through his trunk and finds his old gold pan. He gazes at the top of the trunk and "sees," superimposed on the lid, shots of Indians and pioneer wagons, apparently prompted by his memories. A little later, as Tom boards the train to go West, he looks at the judge and envisions him dressed in miner’s clothes. In both cases, we understand the shots as examples of what the characters "see" in their minds, but they are cued as mental constructions of the characters, not as commentary by an outside narrator.

More typically, editing is used to manipulate time and withhold information. Early in the film, the Judge holds a necklace in his hand and talks to Tom about the woman he loved who had married Hugh Adams, his former partner. We then see shots of Hugh, his wife and their child, followed by a scene depicting how the wife had run away with another man. Only toward the end of the film is it revealed that Jim Raynor is that man. At another point, the Judge reveals that Peggy Bobbett, daughter of two members of the Wild West show, is Hugh’s daughter and his own heir. That revelation, however, turns out to have been a ruse by the Judge who hoped to use it to snare Raynor. It is notable that the scene of Hugh’s wife packing to leave her husband is offered as a visual flashback that still obscures Raynor’s identity. On the other hand, both of the Judge’s revelations about Peggy are simple verbal acts that avoid running the risk of a false visual "narration" that might be perceived as a "lie" by the audience (as is often the reaction to such a flashback in Hitchcock’s Stage Fright).

A similar example of suppressed information occurs when we see Raynor attempting to blackmail Peggy’s father for having killed another man. Only later do we learn that the victim was Hugh Adams, who lived long enough to blame Raynor for his misfortunes. In both of these cases, the information is suppressed in the visual representation and presumably in the verbal narrations that we do not hear. In typical fashion, though, the visualization of those past events is not directly attributable to the character-narrator. It is not clear that the Judge is deliberately hiding Raynor’s identity from Tom, and it is not clear whether the memory of the shooting of Hugh Adams "belongs" to Raynor, Bobbett, or some other agency. The interweaving of the flashbacks with the narrative, though, makes it doubtful that such questions will be provoked for spectators. The flashbacks offer important, if incomplete, information that does not need a cue for its specific agency beyond the motivation provided by a character’s memory.

Even for a film of 1917, this type of complexity in the use of flashbacks is not really atypical. Maureen Turim has pointed out how flashbacks had evolved in complexity throughout the silent era. Such shifts of temporal order were fairly common in popular fiction at the turn of the century and by 1917 books on screenwriting were discussing the technique in film writing at some length (22-29). Turim’s description of a 1916 Raoul Walsh film could apply to 49-17 too: "The film is preoccupied with the way past personal history forms values and incites actions, a concern which it plays out by stopping its melodramatic action for inserts of past incidents" (38). Such editing, in fact, demonstrates the difficulty of the concept of a single film "narrator." While in literary fiction such verbal flashbacks must always be rendered by the written language of a narrator, film offers at least two avenues to present past actions. Editing for temporal order—the flashback or flashforward—is one; verbal narration by the characters through dialogue can be another. We cannot automatically assume that "the camera" or some other entity stands in for the narrator as the agent of the flashback, which is motivated by the spoken words of the characters. In fact, one could assert that giving the audience access to the subjective mental images of a character, as when the judge sees images of the West in his trunk lid, is more intrusive and more evocative of a narratorial presence than the actual flashbacks. Dialogue (rendered here as printed words in intertitles), obviously, cues the speaker as the motivational source of information about the past. Again, though, there is no need to evoke a narrational presence that controls the overall diegesis, aside from the use of the title cards (which, by convention, have no need for quotation marks or a narrator’s identifying tags, such as "he said"). Such scenes, then, certainly have narration but few signs of a narrator.

In sharp contrast, however, there is a much more obvious evocation of a film narrator in 49-17: verbal narration through the use of intertitles that are not cued as dialogue. The majority of the film’s intertitles, with white print letters on a black background, simply and typically report the characters’ speech. More interesting, though, are those intertitles that overtly mimic heterodiegetic narratorial comment. Presented on title cards with elaborate borders and pictures that serve as magazine-like illustrations, this commentary is as often redundant as it is illuminating. The illustrations have a quality of stiffness and three-dimensional modeling and are often humorous. The titles themselves give access to the thoughts and feelings of the characters, describe settings and actions, and comment on characters and situations, also sometimes in humorous ways. For instance, when the Judge explains his scheme to Tom, an intertitle reads, "It was a wild dream, but Tom understood—he had dreams himself sometimes. So two days later he left for the West." Here is an example of literary narration in a film: a heterodiegetic narrator offers us access to Tom’s thoughts as free indirect discourse [10]. In the context of the narrative itself, the commentary serves as a distraction and does not actually advance the chain of events in a meaningful way. Even as a source of information about Tom’s thoughts, it is redundant since Tom’s behavior and dialogue also indicate similar aspects of his character. Even less relevant—and outright excessive—is the illustration on the card, which shows Tom apparently "flying" West on the back of what looks like a large pterodactyl!

Similar excessive uses of humor occur elsewhere. Tom’s search for a troupe to recreate the Judge’s gold rush town of Nugget Notch is summarized by the words, "Tom soon discovered that Western types were rare birds—and shy." The illustration apparently depicts Tom in a marsh stalking a wild goose! When another intertitle announces that J. Gordon Castle, the manager of the Wild West show, is going broke, we see a drawing of a man holding out his empty pockets. When the Judge first arrives at his "gold rush" town, he joyfully tosses his top hat in the air and plugs holes in it. The intertitle shows a crowd running away and the comment, apparently reflecting the crowd’s thoughts, "This was too real!"

Sometimes the illustrations seem to contradict elements of the depicted narrative. The last title mentioned above shows men running away from someone firing directly at them. The illustration directly contradicts what we had just seen on the screen, since the judge had fired at his hat in the air. The depictions of the characters in the illustrations are also not direct caricatures of the actors. Pictures of Jim Raynor do not look much like Jean Hersholt, the actor portraying him; Peggy Bobbett’s carefree attitude is illustrated with an image of a young woman chasing a butterfly, but unlike Peggy she has bobbed hair.

As Sarah Kozloff notes, this kind of title was not untypical of the time: "In the late teens and twenties, title writing became an art in itself. Sometimes overzealousness led to ghastly purplish prose, but the writers often succeeded in creating a legendary atmosphere for Westerns and epic or in adding a witty perspective to comedies. And filmmakers constantly experimented with changes in typeface and graphics . . . " (25). The titles in 49-17 certainly work to fulfill such functions. Their importance to the narration in the film lies in two factors: First, they imply a need to reinforce and clarify visual images with verbal comments; second, their sheer excessiveness forces an awareness of narrational agency unlike anything else in the film. Not only the language but the pictures draw attention to the "telling" of the story as opposed to its "showing" through the scenes and flashbacks. The fact that the narration is often redundant or unnecessary (although charming in its way) further draws attention to this narrational overdetermination. As such, the narration—or at least the style of narration—bears witness to an origin in conventions of print fiction. Only one thing keeps that narration from getting out of hand, from letting our awareness of the film "narrator" supercede our awareness of the depicted events: the decreasing frequency of the titles. These "narrational" intertitles, and even dialogue titles, become more sparse as the film develops, ceasing altogether by the final scenes. After a courtroom scene in which the Judge has explained his past and his relationship to Raynor and clarified most (but not all!) of the film’s mysteries, Raynor manages to escape. There is virtually no dialogue, let alone narratorial commentary, from here to the end of the film.

Despite its formulaic pulp Western story, 49-17 is an interesting film for several reasons: as a film by a woman director who fell into undeserved obscurity, as a display of sophisticated structures of time and subjectivity in film, and as a mark of a style of film narration that overemphasizes explanation and humor to the point of redundancy, thus marking the presence of a cinematic "narrator." That the narratorial intrusions weaken and cease entirely by the end of the film suggest a faith in the audience’s ability to understand action and motivation without further reinforcement. That such reinforcement was felt to be necessary at all is a mark of a type of filmic narration still dependent on print models.