My Dear Tom Mix

These days, most people tend to forget that silent films were truly a universal medium, transcending boundaries of language, nationality and race. In this story an older woman, whose main entertainment is the silent cowboy films of Tom Mix, lives with her nephew. She seems to live the stories in the films almost as much as she lives her outer life, and she initiates a young boy into her mythological world when he comes to visit the family. Since her family disapproves of her fantasy life, she has to sneak out to get to the movies and watch her beloved hero in action, and they are dismayed that she is polluting their young visitor's mind with her foolishness. The town she lives in suffers from occasional visits by marauding banditos, and she writes to Tom Mix to ask him to help them out. However, by the end of the movie, she and some locally grown heroes sort things out on their own. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi