This will be one of the more enjoyable silent movies you'll come across - restored by the Danish Film Institute and of very good quality, and starring one of the greats of the silent era - Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. - as Ned Thacker, a man raised in Kansas being read the stories of D'Artagnan by his mother, and who grows up to be a modern day version of the musketeer, defending the honour of women at every step.
The movie opens with two really good fight scenes - a swashbuckling look back at D'Artagnan (also played by Fairbanks) as he fights to re-claim a woman's handkerchief, and our first look at Thatcher in a bar-room brawl as he defends the honour of a woman he thought was being treated poorly by her male companion. These were both fun scenes, and I enjoyed the unexpected humour as we got a glimpse of how Ned started his career as a chivalrous man by being arrested on a streetcar as he demands that a man give up his seat for two women, only to discover that the man was the chief of police! So the story had a good start.
If it lost its way a bit, it was in the decision to then focus exclusively on Ned's pursuit of Elsie Dodge (Marjorie Daw) - a young woman being forced by her mother into a relationship with a rich man in order to help pay bills. I thought the story might have been more effective if it had continued to be a series of vignettes of Thacker defending women in various circumstances. The move into the Grand Canyon, and the introduction of the bad Indian Chin-de-dah (Frank Campeau) - who fancies himself a king and decides he's going to kidnap and marry Elsie - struck me as an unnecessary diversion, which ended up as far more than a diversion - it becomes the story.
Still, if that goes a little too far, this was still a fun movie. There's no doubt about that. I enjoyed Fairbanks. Overall I thought both the movie and Fairbanks had the feel of something you might have seen remade by Bob Hope in the 1940's - a light, silly, Western-oriented comedy. A typical line, for example, that I could easily have seen put on Hope's mouth (which, of course, in this is simply a caption) comes as Ned and Elsie look at the splendour of the Grand Canyon and Ned says "Golly. A gully." That's the sort of light comedy I hear coming from Hope's mouth. This has a lot of that, and some good action scenes, and those opening fight scenes that really do draw you in. (7/10)
