The Last Chance

With so many silent westerns having been made, and so few of those having survived, I'll watch pretty much any silent western I can find. This 1926 entry starring Bill Patton is above average, and as a footnote was directed by Horace Carpenter, of later fame as the mad doctor in Dwain Esper's 1934 sleaze classic MANIAC. The plot here involves the standard "stolen payroll", and for the first ten minutes or so things are played out in a solid but standard manner, but then when Patton decides to infiltrate the gang, he does NOT do it by pretending to be a rough and tumble criminal from some other part of the country, but does it as a greenhorn in mail-order "outlaw clothes" who comes off as a buffoon. The gang does need another member, and this guy obviously poses no threat, so why not bring him on...the gang also relishes being able to make fun of him. Patton shows a wonderful Stan Laurel-like comic presence during these scenes, and he is teamed against gang leader "Black Bart" played wonderfully by Merrill McCormick, who looks like a long-haired and bearded Robert Walker Jr. There are a lot of close-ups in the film, and Carpenter comes off as a first-rate director of low-budget indie westerns. Each character is vividly drawn and the action moves at a brisk pace, but there is a lot of entertainment value and I'm sure the children of the day would have gotten a big laugh out of many scenes. I look forward to seeing more of his work (does his sound-era directing credit THE PECOS DANDY survive? Somehow I have the feeling that IS NOT a classic, but who knows...). A nice transfer on this long out-of-print Grapevine VHS video. A fun and exciting way to kill 55 minutes for the silent western lover.

"There were only three things Bill Patton was afraid of," Yakima Canutt once remarked. "Guns, horses and the outdoors." In this movie, oddly enough, Patton uses his fears as a basis for comedy. Unfortunately, the attempt doesn't quite come off, thanks to insipid direction from Horace B. (for Boring) Carpenter and a script of little interest from the same gentleman. Condensed to two reels, the movie would still inspire a minimal involvement, but expanded to five, it's a real wash-out. All the extra characters that Carpenter so laboriously introduces in the first ten minutes or so, are given virtually nothing to do, and none of them are played with any charisma whatever, although Miss Donald is photographed far more attractively here than in Carpenter's later effort, "Just Travelin'". That movie did have the benefit of eye-catching tints, but this one labors along in dull and heavy black-and-white. But I liked the iris effects.

I won't attempt to write a synopsis of the story, because my impression is radically different from that of the Press Sheet. Maybe I fell asleep. Or maybe Mr Carpenter regarded that synopsis as merely a starting point and wrote in deviations while shooting. In any event, I found McCormick's laughably hirsute villain far more entertaining than the forever ruminating, incorrigibly white-faced hero, Bill Patton.