Speedy (Ted Wilde, 1928)

Ann Christy and Harold Lloyd in Speedy

Cast: Harold Lloyd, Ann Christy, Bert Woodruff, Babe Ruth, Byron Douglas, Brooks Benedict. Screenplay: John Grey, Lex Neal, Howard Emmett Rogers; titles: Albert DeMond. Cinematography: Walter Lundin. Art direction: Liell K. Vedder. Film editing: Carl Himm.

Ted Wilde, the director of Speedy, was nominated for an Academy Award in the very first year of what would come to be called the Oscars. But the category in which he was nominated, best director of a comedy picture, was short-lived: It vanished in the second year of the awards. The award went to Lewis Milestone for Two Arabian Knights (1927), which isn't nearly as funny a movie as Speedy, but the fact of having a separate award for comedy movies is suggestive of the power that comic films had in the silent era. Today, more people have seen the films of Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd than have seen the classics of "serious" silent film, largely because a pratfall doesn't need title cards to explain itself. Speedy was Lloyd's last silent feature. Chaplin persisted in making silent comedies up through Modern Times in 1936, but Keaton and Lloyd ventured into sound -- with unsatisfactory results. So Speedy can be seen as a valedictory to the era, and a good one. The "Harold" of the movie, Harold "Speedy" Swift, is a brasher persona than the more milquetoast characters also named Harold in Safety Last! (1923), The Freshman (1925), and The Kid Brother (1927). He already has a girl, the pretty Jane Dillon (Ann Christy), who lives with her grandfather, called Pop (Bert Woodruff). He's a little feckless -- he can't seem to hold a job -- but good at heart, and when Pop Dillon's livelihood is threatened, he gives it his all. Pop owns the last horse-drawn streetcar in New York, and the forces of progress want to buy him out, car, tracks, and all. They're willing to stop at nothing until Harold marshals the neighborhood into fighting back, if only to get the price Pop deserves. But the plot, such as it is, takes up only the latter part of the film. The rest is a series of set pieces -- Harold as a soda jerk, Harold as a cab driver, Harold and Jane go to Coney Island -- that are  excuses for a series of ever more elaborate gags. The one extraneous thing we know about Harold is that he's a huge fan of the New York Yankees, which has nothing to do with the streetcar plot, but is really a setup for him to wind up with Babe Ruth in the back seat of his cab, and for Ruth to get bounced around, and to mug hilariously, as Harold drives him pell-mell through the street of New York to get him to a Yankees game on time. Lou Gehrig also has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it walk-on cameo. I blinked, but I don't think I'd recognize Gehrig unless he looked like Gary Cooper. Though it lacks the tight structure of the plots for the earlier films, Speedy justifies its loosey-goosey narrative by becoming a tribute to the organized chaos that is New York City in 1928.

The Kid Brother (Ted Wilde, 1927)

Olin Francis, Leo Willis, and Harold Lloyd in The Kid Brother

Cast: Harold Lloyd, Jobyna Ralston, Walter James, Leo Willis, Olin Francis, Constantine Romanoff, Eddie Boland, Frank Lanning, Ralph Yearsley. Screenplay: John Grey, Ted Wilde, Thomas J. Criser, Lex Neal, Howard J. Green. Cinematography: Walter Lundin. Art direction: Liell K. Vedder. Film editing: Allen McNeil.

Underdog saves the day, gets the girl. It's a familiar comic formula, but that's no reason to criticize Harold Lloyd for reworking it constantly. In The Kid Brother he's Harold Hickory, the unappreciated youngest of the family, who as the title card tells us, "was born on April Fool's Day. The stork that brought him could hardly fly for laughing." His two brawny older brothers and their brawny father, the local sheriff, mock him for his weakness and never include him in their manly business, leaving him at home to do the washing and cooking. The plot has something to do with Sheriff Hickory (Walter James) raising money to build a dam. But the money gets stolen by the unscrupulous manager (Eddie Boland) and the strongman (Constantine Romanoff) in a traveling medicine show. Also with the show is "the girl," Mary (Jobyna Ralston), whose late father owned the show and who tries in vain to deal with the crooks in the company. Eventually, the sheriff gets charged with absconding with the funds and is almost lynched before Harold, who has tracked down the thieves and captured them, arrives to set things right. There's an extended battle between Harold and the strongman that takes all of the ingenuity of which the former is capable -- it's almost as much an action film as it is a comedy. It's also a romance, with the scene in which Harold and Mary meet as one of the film's sweeter highlights, almost Chaplinesque in its conception. Harold has just rescued Mary from the attentions of the lecherous strongman, scaring him off by picking up a stick that he doesn't realize has a snake twined around it. Then the snake scares Mary into jumping into Harold's arms, sparking their romance. They must part, however, and as she walks downhill out of sight, he climbs a tree to get a look at her; he calls out to ask her name and she replies, then goes farther downhill out of sight; so he climbs still higher and asks where she lives; she tells him and walks out of sight again, so he climbs higher and waves goodbye. When she is finally out of sight, he sits on a branch and sighs, and then of course falls down past his earlier perches. It's a beautifully constructed sequence -- literally, as a tower was built next to the tree for the camera to ascend. I think The Kid Brother is less well-known than other Lloyd features like Safety Last! (1923) and The Freshman (1925), but for inventiveness and variety of tone it may be the best of the three.

Safety Last! (Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, 1923)

Noah Young and Harold Lloyd in Safety Last!

Cast: Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Bill Strother, Noah Young, Westcott Clarke. Screenplay: Hal Roach, Sam Taylor, Tim Whelan; titles: H.M. Walker. Cinematography: Walter Lundin. Film editing: Thomas J. Criser.

I was sure I had seen Safety Last! but as the film progressed I began to suspect that I had seen only excerpts, including the scene in which Harold Lloyd, aka The Boy, dangles from the clock, reprised countless times in compilations of great movie moments. But this great film is more than that moment, or even the extended sequence in which The Boy climbs the façade and encounters that treacherous timepiece. Getting to that moment involves byzantine, almost Rube Goldberg plotting. Because The Boy is not even supposed to be climbing the building: It's a task meant for The Pal (Bill Strother), who instead is fleeing from The Law (Noah Young), racing through the building from floor to floor inside, intending to swap places with The Boy at some perpetually receding moment. And The Pal is in trouble with The Law because of a run-in that resulted from The Boy mistaking The Law for an old buddy of his, a different cop, and involving The Pal in a prank played by mistake on The Law. And the reason The Boy is involved in climbing the building is that he wants to win The Girl (Mildred Davis), who thinks he's actually the general manager of the department store where he's actually a lowly clerk in danger of getting fired. And the reason The Girl thinks that is ... oh, hell, watch the movie yourself. The point is that Safety Last! is an intricately worked piece of art. By contrast, even the best film of Charles Chaplin or Buster Keaton, let's say The Gold Rush (1925) or The General (1926), is a comparatively simple affair, with a story line that doesn't tax the summarizer. Which may be a clue to why Lloyd is not as highly regarded or as fondly remembered as Chaplin or Keaton. He doesn't have the former's balletic gracefulness or the latter's athletic control. The delight of Lloyd's films doesn't come from watching Lloyd himself so much as from watching the situations he gets himself into, from watching him fail upward, so to speak, in Safety Last! Chaplin or Keaton would devise clever ways to climb that façade, whereas Lloyd bumbles and flounders, beset by clocks and pigeons and badminton nets, only to recover by luck and pluck. We don't think "What will he do next?" so much as "What will happen to him next?" This, mind you, is comic genius in itself, a shrewd devising of hilarious situations, but it's comedy imposed on the character, not emerging from within. Which doesn't make it less comic or less genius, of course.

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.