directed by Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
Well this one's a little bit less thought-provoking than Nanook or Haxan. Still though, it's an interesting and at-times pretty serviceable comedy picture.
Harold Lloyd stars as a young man named Harold (called "The Boy" in the credits) who is set on making it big in the city. He leaves his family in the country and tells his fiancee that once he's made enough money they'll buy a house and get married. Unfortunately, his job does not pay as well as he'd like and he's having to pawn off his possessions and avoid paying rent in order to keep up the appearance that he is making money.... which, I mean, could just be avoided by being honest but whatever.
This early portion of the movie is probably the part that I find the funniest. It's mostly filled with slapstick as Lloyd attempts to go through his work day and must be quick-witted in order to avoid the ire of his managers. It's really reminiscent of Chaplin. However, while Chaplin seemed to almost stumble into and away from his problems, Lloyd has a little bit more thought given over to them. His ideas come across like schemes, and the humor comes from misdirection in that oftentimes the schemes appear to fail, only for Lloyd to quickly adapt and change the means by which he accomplishes his task.
After this opening bit of to-do with the daily grind, though, the movie begins to take a little bit of a downturn for me. Maybe this is just a personal thing, but I tend to dislike scenes in movies where a character has to maintain a charade, pretending to be someone they are not in order to keep another character in the dark about something. Particularly when it's a situation like this - Lloyd's fiancee comes to visit him in the city and Lloyd, afraid to have her figure out that he is only a salesman and not a manager or anything, contrives various ways to fool her into believing he is much higher on the organizational chain than he is. The whole thing reeks of class prejudice and although there's some cleverness in the way that the scene escalates, it's just not really my kind of thing in terms of comedy.
The final sequence of the movie though, and probably the most iconic, is really interesting. In order to try and make some money quickly, Lloyd proposes to his manager that he can pull in one hundred customers by staging a public stunt in which his friend/roommate Bill will climb the department store building to the roof - twelve floors. Bill is confident that he can do this, as he's demonstrated that he's pretty good at climbing buildings earlier in the film when he does this in order to escape a police officer who he and Lloyd prank. On the day of the event, however, the police officer is present and hopes to catch Bill, meaning that Harold has to take Bill's place. The plan is made that Harold will climb up a floor, go into a window and switch outfits with Bill. Bill will then climb the rest of the way up. This goes awry, however, when the police officer notices and starts chasing after Bill, meaning that with each floor Harold attempts to make the switch but can't, pressing him to climb further. I'm sure that one could look at this as some kind of hopeful symbol for American can-do-itiveness, but for me it reads more as really nice suspense... also it reminded me a lot of Bob's Burgers for some reason (Harold = Bob, Bill = Teddy). While each floor of the building becomes more difficult, with several close scrapes with death occurring, Harold eventually makes it to the top of the building where his fiancee has arrived. It's never made clear whether or not Harold comes clean, as the two walk off into the sunset, and Bill is pursued across rooftops by the officer.
While I wasn't exactly as big a fan of this movie as I was The Kid, I can see that in some ways the films are coming from different ideas about comedy. This film is very much about the misdirect, while I'd say that The Kid is more pure slapstick comedy. There are more films with both Lloyd and Chaplin on the list, though, and I look forward to seeing more.
A few other notes:
-There's a little bit of discomfort with some portrayals of racial and religious minorities in the film. While all are minor, and the two black characters don't stick around very long, there's a jeweler who I think is supposed to be Jewish, and is played in a very stereotypical, hand-wringy, greedy fashion.
-Harold's snobbish superior, the floorwalker Stubbs, is a great addition. He's all the right kinds of nose-in-the-air self-satisfied villain that works well in comedy movies featuring class dissatisfaction.
-The city in the film is Los Angeles, and Harold and Bill are able to rent an apartment there for 14 dollars a month. Converted to 2017 spending power, that's somewhere between 180 and 200 dollars a month.
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