“It is difficult to think of a single instance in the Fairbanks’ Westerns when the hero herds cattle, wires, fences, traps animals, blazes trails, etc. Fairbanks’ cowboy might be continually associated with the community, but he manages to be absent when the time for chores comes around! Instead, like our friend Buck Taylor, Buffalo Bill’s protégé, he rights wrongs to homesteaders, infiltrates bands of robbers, and, in general, performs the deeds of the dime-novel heroes with all the requisite bravado and gallantry. Never really a part of the waking West, he is essential of the dreaming one. He stands lightly on two feet, one planted in Eastern experience, the other on rugged and romantic Western space”.

(John C. Tibbetts e James M. Welsh, His Majesty the American. The films of Douglas Fairbanks, sr., cit.)