The Tiger Man

Hawk Parsons is an outlaw whose reputation for robberies has made him a marked man in a New Mexico town of the 1850s. When the local sheriff catches him he uses wit to slip his bonds and vanish into the wide desert. Exhausted and low on options, Parsons encounters a small band of missionaries led by a reverend and his wife, who are trying to establish a church among settlers. After a tense clash with a hostile tribe, Parsons proposes a harsh bargain: he will protect the missionaries if he can claim the reverend's wife for himself. The film follows how pride, faith, and frontier law shape choices and tests the characters' moral codes without revealing how those tests end.

Directed and headlined by William S. Hart, The Tiger Man premiered in 1918 with a scenario by J. G. Hawks for the silent screen, reinforcing Hart's rugged persona and the moralized Western storytelling he was known for among general audiences.

Reliable box office data for The Tiger Man doesn't survive, as is common with many silent-era pictures. Contemporary grosses weren't consistently recorded, so the film's commercial performance and wider market reception cannot be accurately quantified today or contemporary trade reports.

As one of William S. Hart's vehicles, The Tiger Man helped cement the stoic, morally mixed cowboy archetype that influenced silent and early sound Westerns. Its combination of frontier violence, religious rhetoric, and character testing reflected popular tastes of the time and left a trace on later genre conventions broadly.

Few contemporary reviews survive, so modern assessments rely on surviving prints and accounts. Critics and scholars revisit The Tiger Man emphasize themes of pride, redemption, duty, and the role of Christian morality in shaping action. The film's portrayal of missionaries and indigenous people mirrors period attitudes more than present-day sensibilities.