Wild and Woolly

WILD AND WOOLLY, Fairbanks' second independent production, is the finest of the Douglas Fairbanks/John Emerson/Anita Loos collaborations and perhaps the best of the thirteen films he made for Artcraft. From his first appearance (in which his character is enthusiastically enjoying a campfire repast) to the final frantic roundup in Arizona, Fairbanks has such a rollicking, rowdy good time that it is difficult not to get caught up in the sheer delight of his performance. Based on an original story by Horace B. Carpenter, the film's humorous theme, as Emerson and Loos wrote, was that "sometimes the practical joker finds his own jokes turned against himself with dire results... we also satirized the more or less common idea of the eastern regarding the west."