Wild and Woolly

A young Douglas Fairbanks realises his dream of visiting the Wild West when his banker father asks him to check out a loan request in Arizona. In 1917, though, the West wasn't quite as wild as it used to be, so the townsfolk who are after the loan decide to recreate the past in order to keep him happy. The enormous energy that Fairbanks brings to his role just about manages to keep this one afloat until its rousing, action-packed finale.

Movies about urbanites who long to escape the stifling city life for the wide open wild spaces are extremely popular for those theater goers fantasizing such thoughts. Films such as 1991's "City Slickers" reflect that urge to go West, Young Man. The first film in cinema introducing the theme was Douglas Fairbanks' June 1917 "Wild And Woolly." Anita Loos' brilliant comedy script has the Easterner Fairbanks dreaming about the Wild West, a time period in the 1880's where the local Natives were still free to enjoy their land and bank and train robberies abounded. Fairbanks is sent to a small Arizona town by his rail owner father to scout out the feasibility of running a spur off his main line. Fairbanks' character is an avid Old West fan, caught up in the hype of movie westerns he sees on a regular basis. The townspeople, knowing his passion, rig a false front before his arrival, complete with role players acting as bad guys.

"Wild and Woolly" pays homage to Edwin Porter's 1903 "The Great Train Robbery," complete with the gunshot dancing and the enactment of a money theft on a train.

Fairbanks had left the flailing Triangle Pictures a year before and was enticed by Paramount Pictures to set up his own production company, Douglas Fairbanks Pictures. He brought over from Triangle scriptwriter Loos and director John Emerson, who were instrumental in providing this western comedy the zip it delivers.

"Wild and Woolly" became Fairbanks' personal favorite. One of Fairbanks' biographers, Jeffrey Vance, in 2008 wrote the movie "is the finest of the surviving Fairbanks-Emerson-Loos collaborations and perhaps the best of the thirteen films he made for Artcraft," a distribution company set up for Mary Pickford films that Fairbanks had dovetailed on.

This is one of the comedies Douglas Fairbanks made in his early, pre-swashbuckling days, and for the most part it's quite enjoyable. The premise is perfect for the sort of character Doug usually played at this point in his career: he's Jeff Hillington, son of a prosperous businessman, based in New York and shackled to a hated desk job, but restless with office routine, and obsessed with all things Western. Jeff reads cowboy adventure tales and believes every word of them: this is a guy who has set up an Old West campsite in his bedroom. He dresses like Tom Mix, calls everyone "Pard," rolls his own cigarettes and even lassos the butler, just to keep in practice. (My favorite touch is the six-shooter that serves as a door-knocker at the entrance to Jeff's room.) Some of his associates obviously consider Jeff a nut case, and with sufficient cause, but the famous Fairbanks charisma makes the character far more endearing than he would be in reality. When Jeff's father gets involved in a business deal with investors from the town of Bitter Creek, Arizona, it seems a perfect opportunity to send the boy out West, ostensibly to investigate the situation, but also to discover what life is really like out there. Jeff's father plainly hopes to rid the boy's system of this cowboy obsession once and for all. Instead, however, the Arizona investors decide to win over the unworldly son -- and thus influence his father -- by hoaxing Jeff with an elaborate show of Old West playacting, designed to indulge his delusion that Arizona is still the lawless frontier of his fantasies, where nothing has changed since the days of Billy the Kid.

It's essential to the plot that Jeff believes the Old West he's read so much about is absolutely genuine, and thus the premise raises a credibility problem: why hasn't this prosperous young man visited the West on his own by now? Clearly, viewers aren't supposed to ponder such questions, just as we must accept 35 year-old Douglas Fairbanks playing a young buck of 22 or so -- and not a mature 22, either, but a big kid who never grew up. We accept the premise because it's a clever idea. Certainly, the movie's most enjoyable scenes involve the efforts of Bitter Creek's citizenry to turn back the clock and transform their quiet village into the rootin' tootin' town Jeff expects, and they appear to be having a high old time in the process. Everyone dresses in cowboy gear while cars and other modern machines are hidden, and the hotel is transformed into a rude hostelry with saloon and dance floor. Blank cartridges are loaded into everyone's guns, and because Jeff accepts everything he sees as real the townsmen find it prudent to discreetly load his gun with blanks, too, so that no one gets hurt. Complications arise, however, when a villainous official decides to take advantage of the situation and pull off an actual train robbery, using the corrupt Indians under his command (whose guns are loaded with real ammo) to terrorize the town. Jeff attempts to save the day but finds that his guns are useless, and only learns the truth as Bitter Creek erupts into pandemonium. Ultimately, however, he manages to use his wits and energy -- and some real ammo -- to save the girl, the town, and the day, and prove himself a genuine Western hero.

Jeff Hillington is an ideal Douglas Fairbanks character: he's essentially a good guy, exuberant if naive, but he does learn a few valuable lessons along the way. While watching Fairbanks in this film I was reminded of the public persona of Teddy Roosevelt, an early 20th century President who was in a sense this country's last 19th century leader, a man who represented a frontier ethos that was quickly becoming a thing of the past in the 1910s. Indeed, Wild and Woolly, which was released a few months after the U.S. entered the Great War, is full of nostalgia for an America that was already slipping away fast. This tone is established in a brief prologue in which the covered wagons and stage coaches of yesteryear are contrasted with the trains and automobiles of the modern world. The early scenes in New York offer a view of the main concourse at Grand Central Station (only four years after it opened), as well as glimpses of the clothes, cars, furniture, and office equipment of 1917, but while the NYC Jeff Hillington inhabits looks impossibly quaint to our eyes, these trapping then represented the latest in fresh, sophisticated urbanity. Similarly, when we first see the "modern" town of Bitter Creek, Arizona, with Model-T Fords chugging down its wide dusty streets, to our 21st century eyes the place already looks primitive. It's only after the citizens make over the town as it was in "the Eighties" (i.e. the 1880s) that we see just how profoundly life in this country changed in a comparatively brief time.

Some viewers will be uncomfortable with scenes in the latter portion of the film, when evil Injuns go on a drunken rampage and deliver stereotypical dialog about "heap big pow-wows," etc. (Ironically, Fairbanks himself poked fun at such hokey depictions in his later comedy The Mollycoddle.) While a number of silent Western dramas were surprisingly sympathetic to Native Americans, that isn't the case here, and these scenes undercut the good humor of the film's first half. Still, there is much to enjoy in Wild and Woolly, especially for the historically minded viewer. (Then again, I suppose anyone interested in watching a silent comedy starring Douglas Fairbanks is by definition historically minded.) It's clever and generally amusing, and also offers something of an inside joke, as the satirical playacting can be viewed as a parody of some of the genuine Western adventure films being made at the time.

Before redirecting his career to swashbuckling adventure flicks with "The Mark of Zorro" in 1920, Douglas Fairbanks starred in modern comedies. He repeated the role of a modern mollycoddle or discontent yearning for adventure; in this film, "Wild and Woolly", he returns comically to his Western roots. He teamed with screenwriter Anita Loos, who pioneered the craft working for D.W. Griffith, and her husband director John Emerson to cement the first of Fairbanks's two popular incarnations. According to the print I saw, Victor Fleming ("The Wizard of Oz", "Gone with the Wind") is credited with photography here, and he worked on other Fairbanks vehicles, beginning his directorial career making them.

The presence of Loos is readily noticeable in the quantity of intertitles, which contributed much of the humor to Fairbanks vehicles, and thus redefined the role of title cards in silent films. In "Wild and Woolly", as elsewhere, they help to undercut the film by poking fun at itself and movies in general, such as in the scene where Fairbanks goes to a picture-play to have his dreams of the wild West come true--even in New York. The entire film plays around with the fact that movies romanticize bygone eras. The ending, too, jests at itself with the insertion of one intertitle.

The pacing is also a nice compliment to Fairbanks's restless, exuberant performance; the editing is as energetic and frantic as he is. It's congruity is also similar to Mack Sennett's Keystone comedies and, as William K. Everson ("American Silent Film") pointed out, is indicative of the fast pace of pictures post "The Birth of a Nation" (1915). Everson claimed that some shots in "Wild and Woolly" lasted no more than five frames. Additionally, Faribanks's acrobatics are perfectly suited to the genre, which he'd carry into his adventure spectacles. Today, Fairbanks remains one of the better-known silent film stars, but mostly for his swashbucklers. Yet, he should be recognized as an early American screen comedian alongside Sennett, Arbuckle, Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, as well, even though his films aren't slapstick and he couldn't be considered a clown of the same order. Like some of the films of Sennett, Chaplin and Keaton especially, "Wild and Woolly" is, however, a comedy that in reflecting itself finds much of its humor.

The wonderful opening scene of "Wild and Woolly" already tells us just about EVERYTHING about our hero: like a little boy, he's sitting in his room on the floor in front of a tipi, with a camp-fire burning next to him, and devouring a Western novel; then he gets up to admire the picture of his cowboy heroes and his collection of guns, and to jump onto a real saddle and practice shooting, and then play with his lasso - but then... his father's butler enters to inform him that he's got to leave for the office... Oh, but HOW much does Jeff, the son of a New York railroad magnate (JUST the kind of businessmen who have 'tamed' the West with their 'fire horses') long to be a TRUE Westerner!

But one day, he finally DOES get the chance to see the West: his father sends him to the little town of Bitter Creek, Arizona, to see if it's worth connecting it to the railway line! There's only one problem: the West of 1917, of course, isn't the 'good old Wild West' of the 80s anymore that Jeff dreams of... But, knowing of Jeff's big foible, the inhabitants of the sleepy hollow make their preparations for his arrival: they turn the hotel into an old-fashioned saloon, dress up like cowboys and Western girls, and even stage some 'tough' incidents for him to intervene and 'save' pretty young Nell from drunken 'baddies', and (after having replaced all the bullets with fake ones) later on even plan a fake 'hold-up' - and Jeff sure gets the thrill of his life! But since, unknown to the peaceful townsfolk, there also are REAL baddies in town, the plot suddenly takes a QUITE different turn...

Before achieving his world-wide fame with his great swashbucklers, Douglas Fairbanks had already become a much-loved star of comedies and westerns (a fact which, regrettably, is very often being overlooked today, and many of his early films have almost sunken into oblivion) - but he certainly was at his VERY best in a combination of both; just the kind of movies like "Wild and Woolly"! Here, our handsome young hero, romantic, bubbly, temperamental and athletic, is most DEFINITELY in his element when he can finally prove that he's a real 'Westerner' (in fact, Doug WAS a real Westerner, of course: he was born in Denver, Colorado, and in the days when the West still WAS somewhat wild; but he'd also spent quite some years in New York, playing on Broadway), and as always show us his marvelous acrobatic tricks - note HIS way of getting into his room on the second floor, with all the stairs being blocked by the gangsters...

The cast is wonderful, with lovely Eileen Percy (who was quite a star in those days, but today unfortunately is one of those many 'forgotten' names...), and the two 'usual suspects', Sam De Grasse and Charles Stevens (Doug's friend, a Native American and great-grandson of the famous Chief Geronimo) as the baddies; storyline and direction are superb, the pace is fast and keeps us entertained, amused and in suspense for EVERY single moment - in short: "Wild and Woolly" is one of those films that NEVER lose their freshness! And it'll thrill even 'newbies' to the silent cinema, it's great entertainment for the whole family; and besides that, it might be VERY interesting for fans of the Western genre to have a look for once at the way Westerns were long BEFORE the 'classic' Western era...