Taming Target Center (1917)

As the title suggests it is a Western burlesque. Polly Moran appears in the role of the fearless sheriff who marches the entire population of Target Center to church in the last scene, whereas in the first it patronized the saloon and dance hall in a body. Practically every commonplace situation in the commonplace Western has been burlesqued and there are some thrills in its short space of two reels that have never appeared in melodrama. The fearless Polly rides her horse up the stairs and round the balcony of the bar, down the other side and in one room and out the other, herding the sinners in a huddled group, then lassoing them all at once and dragging them through the dust to jail. She jumps her horse from one precipice to another, rescues a baby from drowning and in divers ways endangers life and limb. It is all thrillingly funny and there is plenty of less pretentious comedy. The subtitles, for instance, every one of them, are responsible for much merriment so easily are they discernible as burlesqued imitations of seriously written inserts. And then there is Ben Turpin, with his impossible eyes, who is good for a score or more of laughs on his own account, and pretty Gonda Durand to hold down another important angle of the comedy. Immense Tom Kennedy also appears to good advantage.