Wild and Wooly
Dir: John Emerson
Prod: Douglas
Fairbanks
Scr: John Emerson,
Anita Loos
Phot: Victor Fleming
Premiere: June 24,
1917
72 min.
To this quadrumvirate Griffith brought artistry, Chaplin
humor, Pickford pluck and grace, and Fairbanks delivered power. On film, he was
a living embodiment of pure energy, a relentlessly cheerful and resourceful
protagonist who could not be defeated. His invigorating screen exploits gave
viewers permission to dream big.
Fairbanks’ greatest triumphs came in swashbucklers and
costume dramas in the 1920s, but he started out in comedy, and Wild and Wooly, made two years before
the birth of United Artists, is a sterling example of the brisk blend of
romance, humor, and adventure that was to become a Fairbanks trademark. It was
crafted by the team of Fairbanks, screenwriter Anita Loos, and director John
Emerson, who made seven films that established the Fairbanks persona – a peppy,
charming, optimistic go-getter; an enthusiastic super-child in a man’s body.
Loos, one of the first real screenwriters, was key to
Fairbanks’ early success. Her scripts have wit, drive. Their action is precise,
fast-paced, to the point, not showy but as motivated as possible, subordinating
itself to the telling of the story. Her movies move along leanly, stripped of
affectation, boring exposition, and other distractions. Her intertitles are
spare but pungent, used primarily for punchlines and witty observations. For
the first time you get the sense that the person writing the story can see it
from beginning to end, and can work back from the ending to tie everything together,
to enrich the script.
Fairbanks was a “personality” actor – rather than
impersonate characters he played himself, with minor variations, throughout his
career. And he was compelling – the perfect hero type, one that all the ladies
want to dally with and all the men want to buy a beer. Though capable of
extraordinary deeds, his persona was that of a regular guy, “Everybody’s Hero.”
There is an essential blankness at the center of every leading man that allows
the viewer to substitute themselves and sink into identification with the
protagonist. Fairbanks was the male template of the time.
During the period, there was a huge emphasis on “muscular
Christianity” – a robust male ideal that combined the worship of physical
health with that of chivalrous and knightly virtues. (Theodore Roosevelt was an
ardent adherent.) In America, the East was identified with weakness, cities,
addictions, and disease. The West, however, was rugged and natural, truthful
and more “real.” It was a blank slate, a proving ground where a man could be
reborn as his best idea of himself.
In the Fairbanks-Loos-Emerson films, Doug, via various plot
contrivances, is repeatedly faced with an extraordinary set of physical
challenges to overcome. His character is defined through action and
accomplishment, which moves him from being a hero in vitro to becoming the real thing. In this way, Fairbanks was a more
serious version of Harold Lloyd, the wholesome, striving adventure comic who
made The Freshman (1925) and Safety Last (1928). It’s illuminating to
find out that comics legends Siegel and Schuster modeled Clark Kent on Harold
Lloyd, and Superman on Fairbanks.
Westerns in particular were good vehicles for this
storyline. In Wild and Wooly, Doug is
a banker’s son in the citified, sissified East who dreams constantly of the
American frontier. He sleeps in a tepee, eats by a campfire (both located
conveniently inside his father’s mansion), lassoes the butler, and carries on
target practice. Hiss office is draped with works by Remington and Russell,
Mexican blankets, rifle racks, and the like. He yearns for a vanished West or,
more precisely, a mythic West that never existed. His gestures are too big for
the board rooms in which he finds himself trapped. On Sundays, he gallops
through Central Park, rolling his own cigarettes and sauntering into the movie
house for a dose of Westerns.
When his father’s bank is asked to invest in a railroad spur
to the town of Bitter Creek, Arizona, Doug leaps at the chance to examine the
prospects in person. Representatives from the town realize that Doug’s
character wants a dose of the imaginary West. Doug doesn’t want to be a cowboy,
he wants to play a dime-novel version of one. So, they decided to retrofit
their modern community as an incarnation of Doug’s imagination – at least long
enough to land the contract. It’s Westworld,
1917.
The faux experiences they stage include a faked train
robbery, followed by an Indian uprising, which gives the real villain, a grafting
Indian agent, the idea to stage a real robbery in the confusion. At film’s
climax, Doug is trapped by real Indians (broad stereotypes that chug redeye and
plug townspeople), armed only with a gun full of blanks. That Doug promptly
saves the day through miraculous striving goes without saying. His character’s
vision is validated twice in the film – first, and falsely, his fantasy of the
West; then, the fantasy brought to contingent life, rising from the beneath the
surface of dull reality.
Fairbanks was all about wish fulfillment. His character
longs for adventure, then finds he is uniquely suited to its demands. For
Fairbanks, either the world is not extraordinary at all, or else it is all the
time, and he chooses to live the latter. If wrong must be righted, then it’s
the hobbyist, the enthusiast, the dilettante, the dreamer, who is up to the
task – that is, the viewer. Somehow, under the costumes and stunts of
derring-do, Fairbanks was us.
The NFR Project is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry,
in chronological order. Next time: The Blue Bird.
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