Frank Baker, Ashton Dearholt, Francis Ford, and Florence Gilbert in Lash of the Whip (1924)

&quot;Hurricane&quot; Smith (Francis Ford), head of a steamship company, plots to keep the railroad from entering the city. The map of the proposed route becomes the instrument by which Blake (Frank Baker) and Florence (Florence Gilbert) ar...

Lash of the Whip

Good Mock Heroics

There&apos;s a prosperous, modern capitol city that the rail road wants to run a spur to. To do that, they must find a way through Ghost Valley, but Francis Ford&apos;s shipping company which controls all access to the city and is strangling it -- despite its evident prosperity -- sends a bunch of scalawags to stop the railroad surveyors. Only a masked bandit called Pinto Pete (Ashton Dearholt), his deadly whip, and his comic servant stand guard against the desperate villains.

It all sounds pretty unlikely, and that&apos;s the way director Francis Ford handles this comedy-adventure. Dearholt and pal are a mock heroic pair, like the Cisco Kid would become when reduced to B movie status twenty years later. There is some spectacular fight sequence in high cliffs that look a lot like the sort of thing that the serials had been doing for a while; Ford had starred in and directed them for Universal, when he and Grace Cunard were Universal&apos;s top moneymakers. Now he was working for the States Rights market instead, but he still knew how to shoot a fight scene.

There's a prosperous, modern capitol city that the rail road wants to run a spur to. To do that, they must find a way through Ghost Valley, but Francis Ford's shipping company which controls all access to the city and is strangling it -- despite its evident prosperity -- sends a bunch of scalawags to stop the railroad surveyors. Only a masked bandit called Pinto Pete (Ashton Dearholt), his deadly whip, and his comic servant stand guard against the desperate villains.

It all sounds pretty unlikely, and that's the way director Francis Ford handles this comedy-adventure. Dearholt and pal are a mock heroic pair, like the Cisco Kid would become when reduced to B movie status twenty years later. There is some spectacular fight sequence in high cliffs that look a lot like the sort of thing that the serials had been doing for a while; Ford had starred in and directed them for Universal, when he and Grace Cunard were Universal's top moneymakers. Now he was working for the States Rights market instead, but he still knew how to shoot a fight scene.

"Hurricane" Smith (Francis Ford), head of a steamship company, plots to keep the railroad from entering the city. The map of the proposed route becomes the instrument by which Blake (Frank Baker) and Florence (Florence Gilbert) are harassed by Smith's gang and repeatedly are rescued by "Pinto Pete," (Ashton Dearholt) who is adept with a whip.

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