A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, October 31, 2019

The Freshman (Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, 1925)


The Freshman (Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, 1925)

Cast: Harold Lloyd, Jobyna Ralston, Brooks Benedict, James H. Anderson, Hazel Keener, Joseph Harrington, Pat Harmon. Screenplay: Sam Taylor, Ted Wilde, John Gray, Tim Whelan; titles: Thomas J. Gray. Cinematography: Walter Lundin. Art direction: Liell K. Vedder. Film editing: Allen McNeil.

Wouldn't it be great if all silent films could be as lovingly restored as Harold Lloyd's The Freshman has been? Though not as excitingly hilarious as his Safety Last! (Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1923), this is probably Lloyd's most polished feature, a good-natured take on the mythos of American college football. It was made in an era when the word "college" meant raccoon coats and hip flasks at places like "Tate University -- a large football stadium, with a college attached," as the intertitle sardonically puts it. The era came to an end with World War II and the consequent GI Bill, which democratized higher education -- and also turned college football into the pseudo-professional sport that it is today. This was an era in which the myth of the gridiron hero could still inspire a schlub like Lloyd's Harold Lamb, infatuated with the idea of becoming a big man on campus. Tellingly, it's a movie that gives Lamb the idea and the mannerisms he naively takes with him as he matriculates at Tate. The Freshman is essentially a send-up of the movie-made myth, cheerfully furthering the myth with Lamb's own unlikely heroism.