Chip of the Flying U (Silent)

Flying U ranch hand Chip Bennett is a notorious woman hater, and sabotages all attempts by his fellow cowpokes to set him up with a respectable female. In fact, he is prone to drawing unflattering caricatures of every woman he meets. So you can imagine his surprise when he falls for Dr. Della Whitmore, the newly-arrived sister of the ranch's owner. "The Little Doctor" is like no one Chip has ever met: Neither loud-mouthed cowgirl nor marriage-hungry old maid. He fakes an injury so the doctor can give him some…personal attention, but the deception is found out and compounded by Della's revulsion at some of Chip's nasty old caricatures. Not one for rejection, Chip scoops up Della while she's square dancing with another man and carries her off to the church to be married - but is this really a recipe for happily ever after?

This uproarious silent western comedy stars Hoot Gibson, one of the most popular cowboy actors of the era. An accomplished rider and rodeo champ before he ever set foot before a camera, Hoot started out as a stuntman. By the mid-twenties he was a bona fide Western star at Universal, starring in their big-budget "Jewel" productions. Later, Gibson appeared in countless westerns for smaller studios such as Allied and Republic after his contract with Universal came to an end. Sadly, by the end of his life, Hoot was reduced to working as a greeter at casinos in Las Vegas, the money from his film career long since depleted by bad investments and reckless living. His leading lady in Chip of the Flying U, the luminous Virginia Brown Faire, was the first actress to play Tinkerbell on screen in the original silent version of Peter Pan (1924). Tragically, director Lynn Reynolds killed himself in 1927 after a heated squabble with his wife, actress Kathleen O'Connor, over infidelity. He was 37 years old. Surprisingly considering its uniquely sexist storyline, Chip of the Flying U was based on a then-popular book written by a woman: B.M. Bower (real name Bertha Muzzy Sinclair) an author of Western novels more concerned with the realities of life on the frontier than two-fisted action. It was remade in 1939 with Johnny Mack Brown as a more straightforward oater eschewing Bower's idiosyncratic sexual politics.