Wild and Woolly

Wild and Woolly is a 1917 silent film which tells the story of one man's personal odyssey from sophisticated Easterner to Western tough guy. Douglas Fairbanks stars as Jeff Hillington, a man obsessed with the Wild West. The problem is Jeff believes the West is still infested with train robbers, stagecoaches and gunfights every hour. The boy's father sends him to Bitter Creek, Arizona, to investigate a railroad proposition, and the natives, anxious to show him a good time, transform their ordinarily peaceful little village into a lawless community, loading the youth's guns with blank cartridges and permitting him to fire away at any and everything. The movie was adapted by Anita Loos from a story by Horace B. Carpenter. It was directed by John Emerson and was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2002.