An Eastern Westerner

Harold Lloyd plays an aimless New York playboy. He's supposed to be studying at the YMCA but instead, he's dancing at the nightclubs. In frustration, his father sends him to his uncle's ranch in the wild, wild west. In the town of Piute Pass, he is taken with a local gal. Her father is being held prisoner by local thug "Tiger Lip" Tompkins. Tompkins owns half the town and leads the Masked Angels.

This early Hal Roach short has his best act Lloyd doing his every man. It's not quite a nice innocent guy but he's plenty likeable. The plot is simple. It's a weak easterner trying to make it in the tough old west. There are some simple action stunt sequences. It has good slapstick fun. It is a short which limits any complexity. This is a simple physical comedy.

I found all the sequences in this film to be very funny. It is one of the earlier examples of the chase sequences Harold was developing that would really come into an art form last in GIRL SHY & SPEEDY. It is fine fun, & has some examples of gags LLoyd did not use in later films that are pretty funny. Nice thing is the pacing, which is not quite as frantic as earlier BUMPING INTO Broadway even though the films are about the same length. In a way, this reminds me some of BILLY BLAZES, ESQ. in the western sequences, but the ones in this film show an improvement over the Tom Mix parody of 1919. Some of the sequences in this are laugh out loud funny. If you get a chance to, enjoy this one.

As can be deduced from its title, this short puts Harold Lloyd into a favorite environment with star comedians; still its opening moments largely take place inside a club, where rich-kid Lloyd falls foul of the proprietor because of his over-energetic dancing!

Sent out West by his disapproving family, he meets and falls for poor girl Mildred Davis - who is coveted by the tyrannical town boss, for whom she's forced to work; the latter is a truly hissable villain, a bully whom even the townsfolk would like to get rid of (as evidenced by the number of attempts made on his life throughout) but who literally holds the town in the palm of his hand (demonstrated in a wonderful optical effect) with the aid of a KKK-type gang!

Lloyd, of course, summons enough courage to protect the girl and with a good deal of ingenuity is able to teach the villain a lesson, and finally to flee the town with his new-found lover in tow. Ultimately, though certainly funny and enjoyable, this isn't up to the level of an equivalent Keaton short or the films Chaplin made for the Mutual company.

For all that it's unrefined much of the time, this short Harold Lloyd comedy is funny and entertaining. After a slightly slow start, it has some very good material and some entertaining scenes. It also gives Lloyd a chance to perform the kinds of material that played to his strengths and that pleased his audiences.

The first part shows Lloyd as a lackadaisical young man whose family sends him out west to live with his uncle. The early sequences are a bit routine, but they have some good gags in them. Things really get moving once Lloyd arrives in the west, has to adjust to western ways, and then has to contend with the town bully (Noah Young, in a role well suited to him).

The story contains some good gags, and it builds up to a manic chase scene that has some very good moments. It's not as polished as Lloyd's later features, but it's pretty amusing.

Anyone who wants to know why Harold Lloyd was so popular during the 1920s should take a look at this film: it's one of the most satisfying short comedies he ever made. An Eastern Westerner is consistently clever and amusing, well-paced and packed with gags from the opening scene to the final fade-out. What's more, Harold himself is charming, displaying just the right blend of self-assurance, exuberance and humility. I must confess I find Harold a little hard to take in some of his early comedies -- sometimes he's so aggressive he borders on obnoxiousness -- but here he's an appealing figure throughout, ever more sympathetic as the story rolls along.

An Eastern Westerner offers exactly what the title promises, a displaced dude forced to deal with life in the wild & woolly West. There's a girl (of course) and a bully (ditto), and it all culminates in a chase. Harold follows in the footsteps of Douglas Fairbanks, who played a boyish character in a similar situation in a 1917 feature appropriately titled Wild and Woolly. But although Harold is a fish out of water in this instance he's no bonehead, and it's refreshing to see that, like Doug before him, he quickly adapts to the difficulties he faces, uses his brains, and manages to come out on top. At the same time, he has a sense of humor and isn't arrogant. When his attempts to impress leading lady Mildred Davis backfire and she laughs at him, Harold is big enough to join in and laugh at himself, and we like him for it. This likability wasn't always present in Lloyd's earlier films, where gags were all-important and his behavior was sometimes callous. In An Eastern Westerner Harold has graduated from clown to hero.

Beyond its value as a laugh-provoker this movie should also be of interest to fans of early Westerns, for the filmmakers evidently took care with production details to a degree that is surprising in a two-reel comedy. This really looks like a Western! The town of Piute Pass (where, we're told, "it's considered bad form to shoot the same man twice in the same day") is as dusty and rough-looking as the town of Hell's Hinges, and the bully of Piute Pass could appear in a William S. Hart epic without having to change costume. Sequences in the saloon involving fighting, card-playing and dancing could be excerpted and passed off as clips from serious Westerns of the era. While these production details are gratifying, this engaging comedy is already well worth seeing as a fine example of what made Harold Lloyd a top star.