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Being freshly released from prison, Frisco Kid (Richard Talmadge)
decides to rob the bank of a small village, but then gets mixed up with
three orphans - lovely teen Sissy (Dorothy Burgess), fresh young Buddy
(Bobby Nelson) and 4 year-old Queenie (Jena Hall), who are bullied by the
two next-door lumberjacks and their boss, the local banker Perkins, who
uses an IOU they inherited from their parents to try and drive them off
their land. But Frisco knows a way out and steals the money from one of
the bullying lumberjacks to pay the banker off. When Perkins finds out he
has been tricked, he puts the blame on the lumberjacks and threatens them
- but they kill him and rob the bank, putting the blame on Frisco. Then
they try to wreck the orphans' house where he's staying at to kill him and
remove all loose ends - but they only kill little Queenie. However, in
town everybody is convinced Frisco is guilty anyways, and a lynch mob is
formed in no time at all. Frisco makes a couple of attempts to escape but
to no avail. Meanwhile the two lumberjacks though have gotten into a fight
over the loot, and while they're still busy with each other, the local
Sheriff finds the money on their doorstep, which pretty much relieves
Frisco of any suspicion ... and just in time too. The finale shows the
two lumberjacks way too busy fighting with each other atop a cliff to
notice Frisco has caught up with them. He wants to throw them off the
cliff, but is stopped at the last moment by O'Hara (Dell Henderson),
exactly the cop who wanted to collect evidence against him all through the
movie ... but now he's preventing him from committing a murder and serving
a life sentence in the process. The lumberjacks though fall off the cliff
to their deaths even without Frisco's help. Richard Talmadge
was always a stuntman first and an actor only second, which is also
evidenced here, wehre the daredevil stunts (like a jump from a cliff to a
treetop circa 30 feet above ground) are way more interesting than the
actual story. This of course means that Talmadge functions best in films
with very slim stories with an action-centered theme. Unfortunately this
is not the case here, instead we are presented with a tearjerker story
about three orphans that takes forever to kick into gear, and even then
the action scenes are too short to actually save the film from becoming
more boring by the minute, also caused by a serious lack in proper pacing. Not
really worth your time.
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