Pour le coeur de Jenny

This charming Harold Lloyd comedy short finds city boy Harold being sent by stern parents to the wild west to work on his uncle's ranch. He never makes it to the ranch -- instead, he gets into all sorts of comedic hijinks in a frontier town, becomes the target of a killer mob of bullies, and wins the hand of a sweet country charmer, all in about 15 minutes! As usual, the visual gags come fast and furious, and the unflappable Harold carries everything off with utmost panache. Highlights include his impressive lasso routine, and his frantic escape from the gang of thugs, in which he employs just about every trick imaginable to outsmart them.

Great fun.

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.

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.

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.

Before I start, I have to complain about the person who has put up that Harold Lloyd mini-biography on all the comments about his movie. It does not attempt to review the movie, maybe the it hasn't seen it but what is so monotonous is that the bio is the same one. Frustrating by all means. Anyway to the movie which is light on its feet and uses a dramatic set-up which has few laughs to get the up-to-no-good big city boy who ends up in the country where this situational comedy takes ground. Harold always billed as "the boy" meets "the girl" as they were all billed and this comic oater takes off as Harold has to battle the bad guys which ends with a furious chase to a train as the girl tries to defend him. Not great Lloyd but you could do worse.