Early reviews say you need VLC player to play this.
You don't. Opens fine in your browser. Those people must have had primitive versions of the codecs?
Other than that, yep. silent film slapstick.

Being accustomed to the Laurel and Hardy comedy duo, this was the first I watched of Stan Laurel on his own. Here, Stan needs to go to the old west town of Hot Dog to collect his inheritance at the lawyer's office. A band of outlaws led by Bad Mike try to take the money for themselves (even throwing Stan out a second story window a few times). Eventually Bad Mike and his henchmen give up and try to rob the saloon that was in the will. Stan ends up thwarting their plot, mostly by accident.
Good visual gags and performance by Stan Laurel. My only complaint really is that sometimes the film skipped sometimes and some scenes got confusing because of it.

Stan Laurel was a protege of Chaplin's. You can really see it in this short film. The prat falls, gags, and love interest are all there. Great seeing it. He was one of the masters.

If there were A-pictures and B-pictures in the silent era, this had to be an A picture.

It has an interesting plot -- Stan goes to get his inheritance and gets mixed up with some wild-west bandits who want his money. Stan's persona as a sweet innocent is in great contrast to those dirty roughnecks.

There are a lot of good sight gags -- the silents were so good at those. Even the special effects (like Stan getting thrown out a 2nd-story window) are much smoother and more believable than such things usually were in silent movies.

And, I liked the accompanying score, which is a sort of ragtime pianist playing semi-familiar hits from the era, like "Johnny get your gun" and "Over There." There was one (I think) ragtime standard which I couldn't name. (Maybe it's a piano duet -- there sure is a lot of playing going on.)

All in all, a good, classy Grade A silent movie.

Really good performance of Stan Laurel!
@munkyman:
Please(!) read first and than complain.
I'll try to do a new encoding :-)

Thanks for nothing. Why did you bother to put a movie on this site that you new was improperly encoded. I hope someone who knows how to use a video program gets a hold of a good copy and uploads a playable file. A big let down for serious Stan Laurel fans.

This film can be viewed using VLC Player, you can download this for free here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

For some reason this movie will not player properly with other players. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I am very disappointed to say that after downloading, the film it failed to play properly.