Bud Ross

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.

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

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

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.

A boat race rivalry erupts into comical danger.

In this silent comedy, a pretty department store cashier is charged with a robbery that occurred overnight at the store. However, circumstantial evidence points to the store's soda clerk having committed both the $10,000 robbery and the assumed murder of the store's nightwatchman, who is missing.

Donald Drake, a deep sea gondolier ex soda jerk, arrives at the All Nation Cafe in Shanghai. The proprietor believes he's a penniless ne'er-do-well - which he is - but he unexpectedly comes into a small windfall. So the proprietor orders slightly rough around the edges Maud and Mollie, two of his American good time girls working their way around the world, to get him to spend all his money while there. As Donald ends up telling the two good time girls his life story - most specifically about the blonde he let slip through his fingers, she who was the love of his life - a few revelations and the errant coin he left at the roulette wheel betting table change his life.

Two romantic rivals play a game of pool for the hand of their lady love. W.C. Field's debut film.