Bud Ross

An eccentric American billionaire travels to Paris and Monte Carlo, where his lavish spending and impulsive adventures draw him into a series of comic misunderstandings, duels, and romantic entanglements.

The Hero is a 1917 silent comedy film featuring Billy West & Oliver Hardy.

In The Villain, Billy attempted something a little different. He's still imitating Chaplin, but this time he's playing the wicked, top-hatted Charlie found in some of his earliest Keystone appearances (e.g. Mabel at the Wheel), the ones where Charlie himself seemed to be imitating the studio's recently departed Ford Sterling. Throughout this short there is much spoofing of old-time melodramas, a frequent motif of Sterling's comedies.

All the qualified men line up to be chosen, as an heiress advertises that she will marry the man with the most interesting mustache, that marriage which comes with a mansion. John Syrup Soother wins the marriage to who he believes is the heiress, Olive Palmer, a tank of a woman who has lost her beauty with age. But he learns that he his betrothed is not the heiress, Diana Palmer, but her mother. Howson Lotts, a shyster and one of Diana's other suitors, sells John a beach-front house for his new life, that house which is not all that it seems on the surface. In the meantime, others still will do anything to be Diana's betrothed, that choice in which John now has a different but still vested interest.

Short King Bee Studios slapstick comedy featuring Billy West and Oliver Hardy

The Pest (aka The Freeloader) is a 1917 silent comedy film featuring Oliver Hardy and starring Billy West in one of his "Charlie Chaplin" rip-off roles.

A Scottish immigrant on board ship becomes a pawn in a jewel heist aboard the S.S. Cognac, a three-star liner. Blackie Dawson, the uncrowned king of jewel thieves, and his accomplice Pearl Blackstone, have stolen a huge ruby. A detective is searching every cabin, so Blackie forces our young Scot to swallow the gem and, under threat of being shot, to stay mum. The detective is assisted by Flora Danube, a blue-eyed Bulgarian daisy who keeps those eyes open. To escape death, the young Scot disguises himself as a woman, but that draws a lot of attention; when his disguise is discovered, he must climb for his life. Is a European union in the offing?

An oil heir and the daughter of a social climbing family are set to marry.