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East and West, not a Kipling ballad but a Douglas Fairbanks shindig. "Joy-yielding qualities" first and foremost the star's bravura enjoyment as a cowboy in the city, quite the "rambunctious son of a buckaroo." Tossing about top-hatted country club members is just his first stop in New York, the comedy of contrasts puts a camera atop a double-decker bus on 5th Avenue and a stagecoach in the sagebrush. Roughnecks versus dandies, "I tell you I wouldn't give an acre of Nevada cactus for Manhattan Island." (The view back home has three wranglers huddled in the foreground while in the distance a bovine herd moves slowly across the screen.) Nothing in the urban landscape impresses him except for the smile of the gal in the café (Jewel Carmen), when next seen she's being kept against her will in the mansion of the dastardly nobleman (Eugene Ormonde). "She has what you Americans call—bats in the belfry." Cinema's physicality along with its role-playing, two sides of the burgeoning medium braided by Allan Dwan with inexhaustible ebullience. Iris-in on the outlaw's revolver aimed at the lenses, a single high-angled set-up for a sudden gunfight on a sandy street. A stolen necklace is how a Western transforms into a quasi-haunted house, for the benefit of Ford (Bucking Broadway) and Griffith (One Exciting Night). The melee builds breathlessly to a prankish gotcha, the hero has his own wink with trapped swells in rumpled tuxedos four and half decades before El Ángel exterminator. "I smell a scrap coming." With George Beranger, Ruth Darling, Macey Harlam, Warner Richmond, and Norman Kerry. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |