Edward Arnold brings his pet crooked lawyer, Robert Preston, to serve as auctioneer as lots are sold off by the railroad. Arnold wants all the riverfront lots, so he can control the water rights. In an excess of gentility Preston sells one such lot to schoolmarm Loretta Young. Soon Arnold has control of the entire town except for Miss Young's lot and newspaper editor Frank Craven, who is badly wounded and his press wrecked. Everyone knows who did it, but there's no way to bring Arnold to justice, since only those who hold the franchise can serve on juries, and women can't vote. So Miss Young heads to the territory capital. With the advice of Willie Best and the aid of various mildly disreputable ladies like Gladys George, she attempts to secure the franchise.
The lack of historical reality in this movie doesn't disturb me as much as it does in other movies that supposedly recount major and minor events. There are songs that won't be written for as many as forty years; there are railroad robberies before the first one by the Reno Brothers. It's presented instead as a humorous fable, with lots of able comic performers filling the supporting roles, because according to some modern historians, the reason the women got the vote in Wyoming more than half a century before the rest of the country is that much of the territory's wealth was controlled by women of ill repute who used their wealth to advance women's rights generally. Frank Lloyd's handling of the story is about as close to that viewpoint as you could manage under the Code. With Jessie Ralph, Stanley Fields, Samuel S. Hinds, and Al Bridge.
