most lurid manner." Grace Kingsley of the Los Angeles Times gave the actors high marks. She credited Hart with doing his "usual excellent work" and found Glaum to be "a really fascinating vampire." Kingsley paid special note to Standing's performance as the reverend, calling it "one of the most subtle, but at the same time of the most sincere bits of film acting of his entire career," a performance exhibiting "intelligence and imagination ... in the very highest degree." Kingsley found the film to be "marvelously well done" but took exception to the would-be folksy western dialect in the title cards: C. Gardner Sullivan appears to have written 'Hell's Hinges' for the purpose of allowing us to look our fill on fire and fights. Certain it is the thing is marvelously well done. There is a burning dance hall with men and women entrapped, which fairly makes you gasp, and there is a 'beau-oo-tiful' free-for-all fight between the sheep and the goats of 'Hell's Hinges.' All this is lovely enough in its way to make for forgiveness of the dialect of the subtitles, a dialect which 'never was on land or sea.' The title cards includes lines such as "When women like her say there is a God, there is one, and he sure must be worth trailin' with". The publication Moving Picture World gave the film as a whole a positive review: "Brilliant in subtitle, strong in treatment with occasional notes of true pathos, the marks of creative ability and sure craftmanship are there . ... the cast is without flaw."<ref name=MPW>{{cite news|title=Review of Hell's Hinges|publisher=Moving Picture World|date=1916-02-19}}</ref> The publication further noted that Ince "is at his best when holding close to revelations of the human mind and heart." Later historical assessments In September 1994, Hell's Hinges experienced a revival following a screening at the Film Center of the School of the Chicago Art Institute. At the time, the Chicago Tribune's movie critic, Michael Wilmington, called Hell's Hinges "Hart's acknowledged masterpiece," "perhaps the finest movie Western made before John Ford's 1939 Stagecoach," and "as emotionally powerful as any American Western film of the teens, except for the masterpieces of D.W. Griffith and Erich Von Stroheim." Two months after the showing in Chicago and Wilmington's review, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically