dir. by Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
Overall: Well, this was sweet.
So given that this film was done by the same creative team as Safety Last!, I think it's a little bit obvious to compare the two. The two films, despite sharing the same directors and the same lead actor are very different in their tone and approach to comedy. Safety Last! feels more like it comes out of the Chaplin school of slapstick comedy, whereas this seems much more within the framework of standard trope comedy. The plot is very much a "young student wants to become the popular person on campus" story. I imagine it may've actually launched a number of these tropes which still crop up in American pop culture today.
Harold Lloyd again plays a young man named Harold, this time an aspiring young student who wants to become a popular student at the fictional Tate University. He's planning to model himself after one of his favorite movies, "The College Hero," and begins preparing his shtick, including dancing a jig before he introduces himself to everyone and coming up with the nickname "Speedy." It's really kind of awkward humor, which I usually don't like, but I guess the fact that the movie knows it's awkward humor and it's so far removed by time that I don't have much problem with it.
As was also the case in Safety Last!, this creative team has a really colorful way of giving a characterization by presenting anecdotes about the characters who show up. Tate University is described as "a football stadium with a college attached" which... wow if that's not still the case in a lot of places. There's also the football coach, who is "so manly he shaves with a blowtorch" and the dean who is so prim that "never married because he was afraid a wife might call him by his first name." Harold accidentally slapsticks his way into being on bad terms with the dean, and is unknowingly made the butt of a joke by an older student who continuously sets him into situations that make him appear foolish. Eventually, Harold develops something of a reputation as a clown in the school.
The only person who's not boarding that train is Peggy, a young woman who Harold met on the train to Tate and who turns out to be the daughter of his landlady. Peggy tries to tell off Harold's bullies, and several times comes close to telling Harold that his "friends" just see him as the butt of a joke, but she can never bring herself to do it because he just seems so darn happy. Eventually, Harold finds out about this and is dejected, but determines to win the student body over by playing a role in The Big Game against Tate's rival university.
I feel like the plot of The Freshman is a bit of a formality in retrospect. It almost certainly cemented a number of these tropes in the pop cultural consciousness but that's just the issue! These tropes are so embedded that going back it's kind of easy to predict where a scene will go. That isn't to say it's not fun. I don't need things to be new or innovative all the time, but there's a certain desire to just ignore the plot in describing this. Yeah, Harold Lloyd's acting is great (honestly the best parallel I can think of is probably Mickey Mouse from some of the early Disney cartoons. There's an earnestness to the character that carries them through the various scrapes they find themselves a part of. However, Harold's also got a bit of a Daffy Duck component to him where it's notable that he only ever barely scrapes by).
Even still, fun movie and I'm glad it didn't have any of the weird racial components that were there in Safety Last! The Freshman is a fun movie overall and worth the watch.
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