It is one of the great weaknesses of the US comic tradition during the silent period that it so frequently tended towards the same slapstick devices and plot-tropes, used in film after film, until they became tiresome clichés. That typical conformism still bedevils modern attitudes towards the films, as though a film cannot be amusing unless it contains its fair share of custard pies, comic boxing, bombs and the rest of it. I cannot count the times that US reviewers emit the same puzzled question - "Where are the larfs, then?"
This film is a western parody treated with surprising seriousness (one of the best ways to approach parody) and its theme is too close to John Ford's 3 Bad Men to be a coincidence even if the Ford film did not actually appear until later in the year. Here a tenderfoot and two fellow-tramps come to the rescue of a lone woman just as Ford's three baddies/goodies do in his entertaining epic. The characters are not really developed here as the might have been which is in fact the main weakness of the film. If a film chooses drama (even absurd drama) over laughs, then it also needs characterisation.
There is knockabout comedy here but it is to the director's credit that it is not allowed to destroy the mock-seriousness of tone as the film relates how the innovations made by Jimmie on the farm - a Keaton-like delight in gadgets that features in other Adams comedies - enable him to outwit and capture the outlaws. There's not much too it and it falls between two stools in being neither especially dramatic nor especially funny, but it is an interesting attempt, makes a pleasant change and remains a mildly enjoyable film.
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