On a recent business trip, I took my team out to dinner and had some fun telling them some of the absurdly implausible anecdotes from my peripatetic life (I was bit by a giraffe! Picasso’s lover bought my daughter a toy! I accidentally imprinted myself on a pair of doves and they followed me around for months! I was almost arrested by Homeland Security! I hung up on Hollywood mega-producer Roy Lee because I thought he was a telemarketer!) Eventually I got around to one of my favorite anecdotes:
After completing work on American Slapstick Volume 2, I wanted to donate the Harold Lloyd materials to the Harold Lloyd Trust. I called them up, explained what I had, and offered to give them the film elements and the digital transfers. The Trust representative thanked me, and said that someone would be by later that afternoon to pick them up.
Come again? I live in the Chicago suburbs—the Harold Lloyd Trust is based in Los Angeles. How were they gonna have someone swing by in a few hours of the same day I called them? Did Lloyd’s heirs operate some freaky black ops helicopters, ready to deploy anywhere at anytime? Actually, it turned out that one of Lloyd’s heirs happened to live nearby, and it was just a convenient coincidence.
My colleagues listened to this story and then hit me with a punchline I hadn’t been expecting: “Who’s Harold Lloyd?”
Oh, poor Harold Lloyd. Once the “Third Genius,” one of the most popular and successful comedians of old Hollywood, author of probably the most famous image to emerge out of the silent era. Who he?
Coming up this week is one of Harold Lloyd’s best short comedies. It’s not even a half hour long, but please set your alarms or DVRs for Get Out and Get Under, because Harold needs you.
Now, maybe y’all don’t need me to explain Harold Lloyd. You’re veteran film buffs who frequent a classic movie blog. You’ve read my rants about the ephemeral margins of Lloyd’s career—his little-seen early one-reelers, the screwball comedy he produced for Lucille Ball, his underrated work with Preston Sturges.
But here’s the deal: it’s not enough for us to know Harold Lloyd. We gotta spread the word. Each one teach one, as the saying goes. If you ever find yourself answering the question, “Who’s Harold Lloyd,” here are some talking points:
HE WAS THE EVERYMAN COMEDIAN
Silent slapstick was overrun by the Funny Moustache Brigade. But in a field crowded by buffoons in awkward costumes and silly facial hair, Harold Lloyd skipped the grotesqueries to focus on playing an ordinary, boyishly-handsome fellow. His one nod to the prevailing style was a set of tortoise-shell glasses—to brand his image and create a recognizable silhouette, but one that was real-looking.
And his persona followed the image—an ordinary young man of recognizable ambitions.
Consider this scene from Speedy. He (temporarily) has a (fake) house with a wife and a dog. A comfortable middle-class idyll. In reality, the kid is dirt-poor ex-soda-jerk, hitching a ride on the back of a passing furniture van with his sweetie after a day at Coney Island. But for a moment his dreams are tangible, and we connect—his dreams are our dreams.
In the 1960s, a new generation of slapstick fans found Lloyd’s middle-class aspirations to be troublingly conservative, and downgraded him in favor of the vagabond hero Charlie Chaplin or the Kafka-esque existentialism of Buster Keaton—better suited to the countercultural sensitivities of the day. But time marches on, and maybe today’s audiences are ready to sympathize with Harold’s ambitions.
HE GAVE GOOD CHASE
In the 1915 Mack Sennett short Court House Crooks, Harold got a rare breakout moment long before the world knew his name. For an extended sequence in this film, Harold gets the command the frame and lead the police on a frantic chase—a portend of things to come.
Lloyd’s films often revolve around chases, and as his canvas expanded from one reel to two, from two to five, from five to ten, his chases grew more ambitious.
Consider this scene from Girl Shy. The clock is ticking and our hero has to get to the church in time to stop his sweetie from marrying a bigamist. The massive, sprawling, epic chase includes a terrific moment when Harold’s car is stopped on a winding mountain road by a junker running the opposite direction. Unable to get around the blocking vehicle, and unable to convince the other driver to back up, Lloyd simply trades cars (!) and drives off (in reverse) in the junk car as the flummoxed other driver realizes how much he has traded up. Problem solved.
THRILL COMEDY
A fair bit of Harold’s comedy isn’t jokes per se, but in absurd, farcical situations contrived to provoke death-defying stunts. These stunts tend to elicit gasps, or shrieks, more than laughs.
South California is full of steep hills—some of them can produce optical illusions of you frame them just right. Lloyd started playing with this effect, setting up perfectly safe situations framed against the hills in such a way as to suggest that a distant street in the valley below was actually the street below a skyscraper, turning safe heights into impossibly dangerous ones. He experimented with different ways of exploiting this illusion, with various contrived reasons to get him out onto the ledge of a “skyscraper” in various short films.
In Safety Last! he hit upon the prefect formula to exploit the effect. It took patient plotting—spending several reels doing nothing but establishing a series of premises, assumptions, and conflicts that in the finale all lock into place to force Harold to climb a tall building with his bare hands. The soul of the movie is the climb itself, but it works because of the skillful way in which Lloyd and his gagwriters made sure the absurdity was grounded in logic (and the logic grounded in absurdity).
There are other things to celebrate about Lloyd, of course—he pioneered preview screenings! He was the first silent comedian to make a talkie feature! He shot 3-D nudes in color! But if you need to indoctrinate a newbie, just grab any of the features I mentioned here (Speedy, Girl Shy, Safety Last!) and you can’t go wrong.
