An Eastern Westerner (1920)

Very well executed

Excellent adaptation.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

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.

Blase eastern boy (Harold Lloyd) is shipped off to a ranch in the "wild west" by his father.This film has the distinction of being made shortly after the bomb incident, resulting in Lloyd hiding his hand and using the prosthetic glove. Personally, I feel like the accident did not really take away from his talent at all. And knowing that his masterpiece ("Safety Last") was made with only eight fingers only reinforces the idea that this handicap did nothing to stop him.I call this "decent" because I would rank the short among his lower work, though even his lower work is better than the average film out there.

A great example of the comedy of Harold Lloyd is to be found in this short subject, An Eastern Westerner. After getting in trouble once too often, Harold's dad sends him out west where men are men and Harold will profit by their example.Unlike most tenderfeet our west films, Harold never drops his eastern garb and stays true to himself. Of course immediately upon arriving in Piute Pass he makes an enemy of the town boss, Noah Young, a silent screen villain in the best Snidely Whiplash tradition. As is stated in the title, he owns half the town and bullies the rest with his hired men.He's even got sweet and innocent Mildred Davis who eventually became Mrs. Harold Lloyd in real life under his thumb. He's going to marry her and she is agreeing because Young is holding her father prisoner.All that changes with Harold on the scene. He maybe an eastern dude, but street smarts are street smarts on a western or eastern street. I think you can figure where this is going.An Eastern Westerner is a great example of Harold Lloyd's everyman character who rises to the occasion in all of his films.

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.