How Men Love

How Men Love is a silent movie made in 1914 by J. M. Barrie with playwright and theatre producer Harley Granville-Barker as director. It's a Western. Starring writer G. K. Chesterton, drama critic William Archer, philanthropist Lord Howard de Walden, and playwright George Bernard Shaw. Seriously.

Chesterton described the filming:"We went down to the waste land in Essex and found our Wild West equipment. But considerable indignation was felt against William Archer; who, with true Scottish foresight, arrived there first and put on the best pair of trousers … We … were rolled in barrels, roped over fake precipices and eventually turned loose in a field to lasso wild ponies, which were so tame that they ran after us instead of our running after them, and nosed in our pockets for pieces of sugar. Whatever may be the strain on credulity, it is also a fact that we all got on the same motor-bicycle; the wheels of which were spun round under us to produce the illusion of hurtling like a thunderbolt down the mountain-pass. When the rest finally vanished over the cliffs, clinging to the rope, they left me behind as a necessary weight to secure it; and Granville-Barker kept on calling out to me to Register Self-Sacrifice and Register Resignation, which I did with such wild and sweeping gestures as occurred to me; not, I am proud to say, without general applause. And all this time Barrie, with his little figure behind his large pipe, was standing about in an impenetrable manner; and nothing could extract from him the faintest indication of why we were being put through these ordeals."

The film was finally shown at a war hospital charity screening at the London Coliseum on June 10, 1916. Although there was apparently still a copy to be found in 1941, when Denis Mackail wrote Barrie: The Story of J.M.B., no copy is known to still exist.