User Reviews

Ignore the score on this one--I only included it because IMDb forces reviews to give a score. That's because this film is considered lost and only a fragment exists today. It is included as an extra on Disk 1 of the DVD set "Harry Langdon: Lost and Found" and many of the films have recently been reassembled after years of being in fragments.

Sadly, only about 2 1/2 minutes of HORACE GREELEY, JR. remains. What I saw was missing its context and I'll just describe what I saw. Harry's riding along when a black robed guy attacks him. This man and others who soon join in look like Klansmen but are garbed in black. Harry responds to the attack, not with comedy but by becoming an action hero of sorts and manages to capture the entire gang and the movie ends.

So it seems like the stirring conclusion is there but all the laughs are missing as is the reason for all this action. If the rest of this film is ever discovered, drop me a line--I'm dying to know exactly what happened.

We have a little more information about this film than the comments so far preparing suggest. The clip tnat the reviewer has seen (on youtube as Horace Greely Jr.) comes from a very slightly longer abbreviated Pathé-Baby (Pathex)version of the film called The Capture of Cactus Cal (available in its entirety on youtube under that title).

As the title implies Langdon plays a tenderfoot who has followed the famous advice to "go west" in a covered wagon (in fact a covered automobile). He becomes involved rather reluctantly in a shoot-out in town with the "king of the cattle thieves", Cactus Cal and falls in love with a rancher's daughter but, despite her allure, opts for the better part of valour and decides to return East. But en route he discovers that Cactus Cal and his hooded gang have hidden out in his caramobile. He gets away on a donkey, pursued by the bandits in the car. To impress the girl, who is watching, he summons up the courage to capture the hooded band with a lasso.

Although the girl is grateful and calls him her hero, she rejects his advances but, at this point, where the Pathex version ends, Cactus Cal himself (who had earlier lost his hood) seems not himself to have been captured. So one can fairly reliably assume that in the final part of the film, Cal kidnaps the beautiful rancher's daughter leading to a chase and final showdown between hero and bandit, the rescue of the girl and the prospect of wedding bells.

It is an entirely conventional and rather uninteresting little comedy by Langdon's standards and would seem to have been made earlier in his career (apparently in 1923 for Sol Lesser) before Langdon's Sennett shorts brought him fame and rereleased by Pathé (at least in this Pathex version) to capitalise on his subsequent fame.