Latino Images in Film: Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Warner Baxter on TCM

Turner Classic Movies‘ series "Race in Hollywood: Latino Images in Film" kicks off this evening.
So what if "Latino" isn’t a race? So what if it isn’t even an ethnic or a cultural group, but merely a US-made sociopolitical construct? I’d say that what matters here are the films themselves — all Hollywood productions. And hopefully some of the introductions, provided by Robert Osborne and UCLA professor of film and media studies Chon A. Noriega, will be illuminating.
Tonight, TCM watchers will be able to catch Hollywood’s foremost couple of the 1920s, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, playing Spanish-speaking characters (by way of English-language intertitles) in, respectively, the D. W. Griffith-directed early short Ramona [...]

IN OLD ARIZONA – Warner Baxter, Edmund Lowe

In Old Arizona (1928)
Direction: Raoul Walsh and Irving Cummings
Screenplay: Tom Barry; from O. Henry’s (aka William Sidney Porter) 1907 short story "The Caballero’s Way"
Cast: Edmund Lowe, Warner Baxter, Dorothy Burgess
 

 
TIRED IN THE SADDLE
What makes Irving Cummings and Raoul Walsh’s In Old Arizona (barely) watchable decades after its highly successful initial release is its sheer bizarreness. Technically, the picture, billed as the first outdoor talkie, is of interest solely as a museum piece. Despite the use of the American Southwest’s wide-open spaces as background, In Old Arizona is really not that different from other static, slow-moving, and poorly acted films of the period. From a thematic standpoint, however, this racy Western is a must-see because of its in-your-face pre-Production Code sensibility, [...]