Silent Era : Home Video Reviews

Silent Era Home Page > Home Video > The Maxwell Yank in Hell’s Half-Acre

Reviews of silent film releases on home video.
Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett
and the Silent Era Company.
All Rights Reserved.

The Maxwell Yank
in Hell’s Half-Acre
(1918)

Idaho Film Collection
2006 DVD edition

The Nell Shipman Collection, Volume 2: The Short Films (1918-1920), black & white and color-tinted and color-toned black & white, ? minutes total, not rated, including The Maxwell Yank in Hell’s Half-Acre (1918), black & white, 13 minutes, not rated.

Boise State University, no catalog number,
UPC 9-780932-12944-4, ISBN 0-9321-2944-7.
One single-sided, dual-layered, Region 0 NTSC DVD disc, 1.33:1 aspect ratio image in full-frame 4:3 (720 x 480 pixels) interlaced scan MPEG-2 format, SDR (standard dynamic range), 4.5 Mbps average video bit rate, ? Kbps audio bit rate, Dolby Digital 48 kHz 8-bit 1.0 mono sound, English language intertitles, no foreign language subtitles, chapter stops; standard DVD keepcase; unknown suggested retail price.
Release date: 1 November 2006.
Country of origin: USA

Ratings (1-10): video: 4 / audio: 0 / additional content: 6 / overall: 4.

This DVD edition adds a number of supplementary items to its collection of short Nell Shipman films, including the one-reel advertising film, The Maxwell Yank in Hell’s Half-Acre (1918), that may well have been the inspiration for Shipman’s Something New. In The Maxwell Yank, a filmmaker gears up a brand-new Maxwell automobile and takes it for an extended spin in the wilds of southern California. Viewers familiar with Something New will see several shots that are similar to those in the Shipman film: the Maxwell driving through the California desert and over large rocky formations. Jack Benny was, of course, associated for many years with the old Maxwell automobile, which was given its radio life by voice talent Mel Blanc.