Thursday, August 18, 2005

The films of Harold Lloyd

Harold Lloyd, I figure, is a distant third when you rank silent comedians by how well they're known to the mainstream audience. Everyone knows Chaplin, of course - the Little Tramp's status as an American icon is well-deserved, and Chaplin was one of the first movie stars to write and direct his own pictures; being one of the founders of United Artists gave him even more control. Buster Keaton eventually gained a reputation among contrarian cineastes, as in "sure, Chaplin was very good, but Keaton was the real genius of physical comedy in the 1920s." It's not an indefensible position; there is a lot of sheer brilliance on his résumé, even if he's only credited as the star on most of his productions. He's not as well-known (I've seen someone miss a trivia question asking who starred in The General, Steamboat Bill Jr., and Buster Keaton Rides Again), but there's a little more awareness, especially after he was often cited as an influence on the likes of Jackie Chan and Stephen Chow.

Lloyd, on the other hand, flew under the radar for many years, despite the fact that his films out-drew Chaplin's and Keaton's during their heyday. Part of that is because he seems to have had a solid head on his shoulders, not getting involved in scandal like Chaplin or going broke like Keaton. He made good money on his movies, kept the copyrights, and was thus able to quietly retire to pursue other interests when sound film reduced the demand for his style of comedy. He married his co-star Mildred Davies and they stayed together until she died forty-six years later. He (and later, the Harold Lloyd Trust) never let his films lapse into the public domain, so there hasn't been a proliferation of cheap VHS tapes or DVDs.

Now, though, the Trust has signed a deal with New Line to distribute "The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection" on DVD in November (hopefully it'll show up in the Amazon link soon), and earlier this year, some of Lloyd's films played theaters in New York and Cambridge at the very least. I wound up basically living in the Brattle for a week, after the 3-D movies, with just a short venture downtown to see Batman Begins. And I kind of fell in love this these movies.

They're not all all-time greats, but only one or two of the silents is average. Even though the talkies don't quite work, there's something fascinating about watching Lloyd and company flail about as the movie industry changes overnight, and suddenly the form they had complete mastery of was obsolete. It's amazing and more than a bit sad, although Lloyd came through it better than some of his contemporaries (Buster Keaton had to rediscovered after doing local television in L.A., for instance). Frequent love interest Jobyna Ralston, for instance, became a star in these movies, got a high-profile supporting role in the first Oscar-winning film, Wings, and then saw her career die after just a couple of talkies (one a Rin Tin Tin vehicle) because of her lisp. Reminds me of one of my favorite books in elementary school, The Secret of Terror Castle (I'd link to it on Amazon, but apparently the only versions available have all references to Alfred Hitchcock replaced with some generic name. Bah!).

I didn't find out about the bomb that blew off Lloyd's right thumb and forefinger until midway through the series, and must admit to being impressed with how well he covered it up. The glove and prosthetic becomes more obvious in later movies, as film stock improves, but he still does some daredevil stuff without two of my favorite digits.

After my detour in Montreal, there was still one more night of this to see: The Harvard Film Archive ran The Freshman and The Sin of Harold Diddlebock back-to-back at the end of July. Well, almost - The Freshman was taken from a print of one of the compilation films, and had some of the more anachronistic humor cut out (such as the "radio liar" scene), while Diddlebock was the Mad Wednesday cut - looks like I'll have to get a DVD to see the whole thing. I think the HFA program was kind of sneaky about that - it never actually said that the full version was playing, but it certainly seemed to be implied. Still, one benefit was Yakov Gubanov doing one of his nifty, improvised live scores for The Freshman, a marked improvement over the scores on the Brattle prints (which seemed to be the same three pieces, and would start and stop mid-scene without rhyme or reason).

Anyway, I'm quite looking forward to the big box set in November, which will have everything reviewed here except Diddlebock (available in a bunch of public-domain versions) and Welcome Danger (rumored for next year, with both talkie and "unplugged" versions).

The Freshman

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)

Harold Lloyd's films have, of late, languished in undeserved obscurity. Though his movies were every bit as funny and successful at the box office as the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Lloyd remains a distant third in terms of audience awareness, assuming the average modern filmmaker knows about silent comedians at all. America left the silents behind very quickly at the end of the 1920s, with only a few of the silent stars really thriving after the transition. Harold Lloyd wasn't one of them, although movie lovers would, for a time, remember him fondly. This 1925 film in particular was a favorite; good and popular enough that in the mid-1940s another cinema great, Preston Sturges, would lure Lloyd out of retirement to do a sequel.

In the film, young Harold Lamb (Lloyd) goes off to college, head full of mistaken impressions from the movies of what campus life would be like. His ignorance makes him a target for a campus troublemaker (Brooks Benedict), who seizes on the incoming freshman's naiveté to embarrass and impoverish him. The school's football star (James Anderson) and coach (Pat Harmon) also exploit Harold's desire to be popular by giving him the impression that he's a member of the school's football team, when in fact he is at best a waterboy and at worst a tackling dummy. About the only person not taking advantage of young Harold is Peggy (Jobyna Ralston), the pretty daughter of his landlady who also works in the coat-check of a local hotel.

Read the rest at HBS.

Speedy

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)

Most of Harold Lloyd films were set in California, by implication if not by explicit statement. For Speedy, Harold and company made the cross country trip to the Big Apple, which provides him with an environment frantic enough to keep up with Lloyd's brand of hyperkinetic chaos.

The title, aside from being Lloyd's own nickname (one which nobody who has seen him in a movie will dispute), is also what people call his character, Harold Swift. "Speedy" is a carefree fellow, not particularly worried when his lacksadasical ways cost him a job in this pre-Depression New York, because another is always just around the corner, and, besides, unemployment gives him more time to spend with girlfriend Jane Dillon (Ann Christy), if not more money to spend on her. His current job as a soda jerk is ideal, since the establishment has a telephone he can use to get updates on the play of his beloved Yankees.

Read the rest at HBS


Safety Last!

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)

Safety Last! is the film from which the retrospective of Harold Lloyd's films that recently played at the Brattle Theater takes its name, and is also the source of the general public's most enduring image of Lloyd: A man scaling the wall of a building, dangling from the face of a clock tower as his weight begins to pry it loose. It's a fine example of what Lloyd called a "thrill picture", a description that the audience would have a hard time disagreeing with.

It starts out innocently enough. A boy (Lloyd) from rural California sets out for the city to make his fortune so that he can marry his girlfriend (Mildred Davis). It takes a lot more work than he expects, and he winds up barely holding a job at the materials counter in a department store, quite behind his expected timetable for becoming president of the company. Despite the fact that he and his construction-worker pal (Bill Strother) are dodging the landlady, his letters home describe a grand success, so the girl decides to stop waiting for him to send for her and hops on a train. He hatches a plan to receive a bonus for staging a publicity stunt where his fearless friend climbs the wall of the building, but an angry policeman (Noah Young) is waiting for the pal at the building. Don't worry, he says, you just climb up one floor, we'll switch out at the second-floor window after I ditch this cop, and I'll climb the rest of the way.

Yeah. That'll work.

Read the rest at HBS.

Girl Shy

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)

Harold Lloyd is best known for his physical comedy and his daredevil "thrill pictures", and for good reason. Just as important a part of his appeal, though, is that there is often a genuine sweetness to his movies, and a great deal of chemistry with his leading ladies. Most slapstick comedies from this period have a girl for a love interest, but it's perfunctory. With Girl Shy, though, the Harold Lloyd Company makes a romantic comedy worthy of the title.

Harold Meadows (Lloyd) is terrified of girls, developing a terrible stutter whenever one is around. He's an apprentice in his grandfather's small-town tailor shop, but dreams of bigger things - he has written a handbook about how to make love, which he intends to bring to a publisher in Los Angeles (as the titles inform us, one studies what one fears, and the more Harold learned, the more frightened he became). Meanwhile, Mary Buckingham's car breaks down, so she and her little dog need to catch a train. Dogs aren't allowed, but Mary (Jobyna Ralston) gets help hiding him from the conductor from fellow passenger Harold (who doesn't immediately recognize that he's not stuttering around Mary) They don't expect to see each other again. But later she insists on swinging through the town when on a drive with gentleman friend Ronald De Vore (Carlton Griffin) - who is reluctant for reasons that will be clear later - and when they meet up at a picturesque riverbed, they're delighted. But when Harold finds out his book is a laughingstock at the publisher, he pretends he never loved her. A couple revelations later, though, and Harold is off to L.A. using every method of transportation short of an airplane to stop her wedding.

Read the rest at HBS.

Welcome Danger

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd) ("silent" version)

Welcome Danger is kind of a mess, as I expect many films were in 1929. The addition of sound to movies was a major change in the entertainment industry that happened almost overnight; the explosive growth of DVD and music downloads has nothing on how the talkies more or less killed silent film. A number of silent films such as Welcome Danger were reworked to include sound, and as such are not complete successes either as silents or sound films.

This was an ambitious movie to begin with; one cut screened for test audiences ran three hours. At nearly two hours, it's still one of the longest films Lloyd made, if not the longest. The plot is also relatively complex compared to the average silent comedy; while many of Lloyd's silents could be broken up into pieces and had scant few characters beyond Harold and whatever girl he was wooing, Welcome Danger thrusts young botanist Harold Bledsoe into an investigation of a series of murders and other crimes taking place in Chinatown, all masterminded by a mysterious tong leader known as "The Dragon". He's brought in because the late Bledsoe Sr. was San Francsico's police chief, and the current chief figures the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Harold turns out to be almost useless, though; he doesn't even know about fingerprints until he arrives at the police station, and then he gets on everybody's nerves by fingerprinting everybody, including (and especially) the cops. Still, he does meet a girl, Billie Lee (Barbara Kent), whose little brother Buddy has one of those mysterious movie illnesses. You know, the kind that show no obvious symptoms and can apparently only be treated by Dr. Chang Gow (James Wang), who has been targeted by The Dragon.

Read the rest at HBS.

Dr. Jack

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)

The unconventional doctor is a popular character type because, if we're honest with ourselves, most MDs scare us. We see them when we're at our worst, and even the helpful ones scare us in ways that only people smarter than us who have information we need can. It's just as natural to be suspicious is such a situation as it is necessary to trust, which is the sort of paradox that births comedy naturally.

In this movie, the epitome of the doctor who uses his daunting acumen to intimidate his patients is D.r Ludwig von Saulsbourg (Eric Mayne), who has been treating anemic "Sick Little Well Girl" Mary (Mildred Price) for years even though, alas, she shows no sign of improvement. Her wealthy father (John T. Prince) despairs, but his lawyer (C. Norman Hammond) starts to become suspicious, especially after a return to his hometown at the behest of his mother's doctor. Mother is fine; the doctor has simply noted that she's depressed from not seeing her son often enough. The lawyer notes that a lot of the patients Harold "Dr. Jack" Jackson (Harold Lloyd) sees seem to have problems that can be resolved quickly and without medication, and asks him to take a look at his client's daughter.

Read the rest at HBS.

The Kid Brother

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)

There's something almost feudal about the small town of Hickoryville, where the title character of The Kid Brother lives alongside his ox-like father and brothers. I don't know if that sort of small town, so dominated by one man or family's personality, could exist today, even if it could a century ago. Of course, it doesn't have to be real; this silent comedy is a riff on the story of the lesser prince proving his worth, and you need royalty for that.

In Hickoryville, the royalty is, of course, the Hickorys. Jim Hickory (Walter James) is the Sheriff and town leader, with sons Leo and Olin serving as deputies. Big, tough, burly men, they don't think much of youngest brother Harold (Harold Lloyd), a glasses-wearing dweeb more inclined to build a mechanical contraption to handle a task than to simply attack it with raw strength. Jim is especially annoyed when Harold tells a group of traveling performers who mistake him for the sheriff that they can set up on the town green, and sends him to get rid of them, even though it hurts Harold to break it to beautiful Mary Powers (Jobyna Ralston), daughter of the show's founder. Harold is humiliated, the show is wrecked, and soon after, the town treasury has been stolen after having been placed in the Hickorys' hands.

Read the rest at HBS.

Hot Water

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 June 2005 at the Bratle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)

Anyone who has watched movies for a while and picked up trivia likely knows about reel changes, and the "cigarette burns" that signal them. Before platter systems became popular, most theaters had two projectors per screen, which the projectionist would manually alternate between, cuing up one 10-15 minute reel of film while the other played. I often wonder, when watching silent comedies like Hot Water, whether most theaters at the time only had one projector, resulting in there being something akin to a commercial break between reels as the projectionist readied the next one. Not just because I've seen intertitle cards with "Part 3" on other features, but because some silents (such as this one) seem so modular.

By "modular", I mean that even though there's something of a through line to the entire movie, each reel really seems to be doing its own thing, and could easily be watched as an individual short or spread out over multiple showings as parts of a serial and still be relatively complete experiences. After a brief prelude where a groom's best man (Harold Lloyd) comments to his friend that he'll never get the single life - and is immediately brought down by Jobyna Ralston's "soft-boiled eyes", we flash forward to a few years later, when "Hubby" and "Wifey" get a surprise visit from her busybody mother (Josephine Crowell), layabout big brother (Charles Stevenson), and destructive little brother (Mickey McBan). What follows are a few quick vignettes, including Hubby trying to get home on a cable car with a live turkey, a disastrous first trip in the couple's new automobile, and a peculiar family dinner and its aftermath: Hubby chloroforms his mother-in-law, believes he has accidentally killed her, and that he is being haunted when she is merely sleepwalking.

Read the rest at HBS.

The Cat's-Paw

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)

Give Harold Lloyd some credit; he not only accepted the march of progress, but he did his best to embrace it and help it along. During his later years, he was fascinated by 3-D photography, and many early tests of color filmmaking took place on his "GreenAcres" estate. And he didn't shy away from sound when that was introduced to film, or stubbornly try to make the same kind of film that made him rich after the public was no longer buying them. It's just a pity that he wasn't very well-suited to talkies.

For all The Cat's-Paw's faults, being too much like Lloyd's earlier movies isn't one of them. Rather than being a California everyman who can meet any challenge with a challenge of quick thinking and surprising athleticism, his Ezekiel Cobb is a raised-in-China missionary's son with a piece of wisdom from a Confucian philosopher for every situation. Indeed, the very fact that the character is named something other than Harold indicates that Cobb is more a character than a variation on Lloyd's "glasses" persona, though the spectacles remain. There's some similarities, but Ezekiel's specific background is far more of a factor here than it is in his other films.

Read the rest at HBS.

Why Worry?

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)

Why Worry? is silent comedy distilled into a powerful, concentrated form. Every one of its sixty minutes is packed with gags and absurdity, supplying jokes fast and furious in a style only matched by animated cartoons. Minute for minute, it's one of the funniest movies ever made.

The premise is fearsomely simple: Hypochondriac millionaire Harold Van Pelham (Harold Lloyd) decides to journey to Central America for his health, valet (Wallace Howe) and nurse (Jobyna Ralston) in tow. Unbeknownst to him, the country he's visiting is about to erupt into revolution, and after he and the servants get separated, he finds himself partnered up with the immensely strong - and just plain immense - Colosso (Johan Aasen), trying to make his way back to hotel for the relaxing sabbatical he'd been expecting.

Read the rest at HBS.

For Heaven's Sake

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)

Harold Lloyd's "glasses" character would take many last names over the years, but the basics always remained the same - average-looking underdog-type, decked out in horn-rimmed spectacles and a straw hat, who succeeds through perserverence and quickness despite not looking like much. I must confess, though, that I have a fondness for the variation on this character he uses in movies like Why Worry and For Heaven's Sake: A rich man who lands in a situation outside his customary life of luxury and proves himself more capable of fending for himself than one's first impression would suggest.

The first we see of J. Harold Manners (Lloyd) certainly isn't much - he's a feckless fat cat whose response to a careless automobile accident is to cross the street and drop some cash at the nearest car dealer. His second or third wreck of the day involves a street preacher's soup table. Not really listening to the conversation, he writes the preacher (Paul Weigel) a check large enough for not just a new table, but the mission he dreams of running. When he reads about the mission - with his name attached! - in the paper, he's appalled, and dashes back downtown to at least take the sign with his name down (what millionaire wants to be associated with poor people?). There, he meets the man's daughter (Jobyna Ralston), and his decision to stick around is what must inevitably follow from meeting such a lady.

Read the rest at HBS.

Movie Crazy

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)

Harold Lloyd was one of the biggest stars of the silent era, so it's amusing to consider the central joke: That there's no way a Hollywood producer would hire Harold Lloyd (or, at least, his "glasses" character) to star in movies, despite the fact that the real thing was one of the biggest stars of the twenties. Of course, it's a false comparison, even if it's worth a chuckle - the real Lloyd was a very different animal than this film's Harold Hall.

Lloyd was, in fact, a good-looking guy; it's said that he was the inspiration for Superman's alter ego Clark Kent, for how a simple pair of glasses can, in fact, fundamentally change a person's appearance and perception. He was also quite sharp, an uncredited co-director and producer on many of his films, who not only retained ownership of his movies' copyright but preserved the negatives when many others failed to do so. His character isn't exactly a moron, but he is sort of a doofus, the kind who attracts trouble without meaning to.

Read the rest at HBS.

Feet First

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)

It says something that within a couple of weeks of seeing Feet First in Cambridge's Brattle Theater, I would notice a couple of similar gags (a shoe salesman using the same patter over and over again) re-used in a Korean romantic comedy by the name of Please Teach Me English! at Montreal's Fantasia Festival. I'm not sure what it says - that Lloyd influenced filmmakers seventy years later in far-off reaches of the globe? That certain ideas are universal? That the human mind has an astonishing ability to manufacture connections where none exist?

I don't know. I wonder if maybe, in 1930, the first act of this movie felt fresh and exciting. Seventy-five years later, it feels limp, a familiar framework without enough jokes to make up for it. Things do improve after a slow start, and the film's middle act is fitfully funny, even if it seems to draw the premise out for much too long. Still, it gets the movie to the third act, and while that last act is a pretty transparent reprise of the famous Safety Last finale, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Lots of artists go back to the same wells to do variations on a theme, and this second iteration of Harold climbing a building does offer some new thrills, if no clock faces.

Read the rest at HBS.

The Sin of Harold Diddlebock

* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2005 at the Harvard Film Archive (Summer Double Features) ("Mad Wednesday" cut)

Preston Sturges was just what Harold Lloyd needed, seventeen years earlier. Lloyd was one of the great silent comedians, but his reedy voice and failure to acclimate to the different tempos of sound pictures caused his career to peter out; Sturges was an inventor-turned-playwright-turned-screenwriter who knew how to combine witty dialog and broad slapstick into screwball comedy. By the time Sturges's star had ascended during the sound era, though, Lloyd's had faded away. Nearly a decade passed between his last film for Paramount and this screwball comedy, which Sturges created to coax one of his comedy idols out of retirement.

And yet, initially, it seems like no time at all has passed. The film opens with footage of Harold's football heroics from The Freshman, and Lloyd doesn't appear to have aged a day when we see a newly-shot scene of the team in the locker room, where E.J. Waggleberry (Raymond Walburn), an excitable Tate alumnus (shots of him cheering had replaced Jobyna Ralston's bits during the game) offers him a job after graduation. Months later, Harold accepts, only to find out that Waggleberry offers a lot of sports heroes jobs, so even though Harold has ideas for the advertising firm, he'll start at the bottom, in accounting.

Read the rest at HBS.

1 comment:

Jason said...

I have no idea what the deal with "The Final Countdown" matching an Amazon thingy being fed "Harold Lloyd" is.