This was Douglas Fairbanks’ third film after transferring to the cinema from Broadway, and was the one that really established his star image for the first part of his career: the brash American kid on the go. The plot is simple enough – Doug wants to get his picture in the newspapers (a tale for our times, really) – even if the set up is a bit convoluted: he wants to do it so his father will give him half the family business which will mean his girlfriend’s father will give permission for them to marry. Plenty of action scenes result: car chases, a boxing match, fighting gangsters on the railway. It isn’t particularly well structured (we get all these scenes with the gangsters during the film then they meet Fairbanks – this just felt odd) but some of the titles (from Anita Loos) are very witty and the location shooting around New York helps a lot. Loos and director John Emerson were big influences on Fairbanks’ image, and worked with him many times after this film.
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