The Girl Who Ran Wild
1922 film directed by Rupert Julian

The Girl Who Ran Wild is a 1922 American comedy-drama film directed by Rupert Julian. It is a black and white silent film released by Universal which is based on the 1863 novella M’liss: An Idyll of Red Mountain by Bret Harte. It is a remake of the 1918 film M’Liss. The film was written by George C. Hull and features cast such as Gladys Walton (as M’liss), Marc Robbins (“Bummer” Smith), and Vernon Steele (The Schoolmaster). It is a western melodrama which was released on October 9, 1922. It was filmed in Seven Oaks, California.
Plot
As described in a film magazine, Melissa Bummer, whom everyone called "Old Man Bummer's Wildcat," told the world that she could take care of herself after her Dad died and left her alone in a shack in the hills. Shabbily clad, barefoot, her hair knotted and uncombed, M'Liss scorned the girls from the city who had Mamas and always had ribbons in their hair. But this was before the new Schoolmaster came, and she began to realize how sadly ignorant she was. Of course, he was handsome and well groomed.
“The Girl Who Ran Wild” enters the record as 1922 film directed by Rupert Julian. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Girl, Wild and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“The Girl Who Ran Wild” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Girl, Wild and film provides the most credible route into that argument.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q40889266. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1922, 1863 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Girl Who Ran Wild” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.