To characterize Harold Lloyd as a perfectionist is to traffic in understatement. When he took up bowling, he wasn’t satisfied until he rolled a perfect “300” game. He brought that same determination to the feature-length films he made in the 1920s. He previewed them to see where the laughs were (and weren’t) and where the movie needed to breathe in order for a gag to pay off.
He was not alone in this pursuit: both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton did the same; it’s one reason the work of these three comedic giants still holds up so well today. None of them could have done this had they not been the masters of their fate. They had their own studios with permanent staffs on salary, so it was no big deal to reshoot a sequence. But Harold Lloyd’s films have a quality all their own: they are audience-proof. I’ve never seen one fail to elicit the laughs that Harold built into them one hundred years ago.
Back in the 1980s I attended a film festival where his prototypical feature, The Freshman, was screened for a group of fourth-grade students, who probably entered the theater grumbling about this particular field trip. By the end, those same kids were cheering out loud for the underdog hero as he ran down the field to earn his team a crucial touchdown. Lloyd himself brought a print of The Kid Brother to a class at UCLA in 1971 and when it received a standing ovation its creator/leading actor/owner was mildly surprised and murmured, “I always liked it.”
Lloyd had little formal education but he did possess what we would call “smarts.” Not unlike the indefatigable hero he played so often on screen, he was a real-life American success story. Born in Nebraska, he was attracted to the theater and prided himself on his ability to make himself up for a wide variety of character parts on the stage.
Moving to Los Angeles, he found work as an extra and became friendly with a fellow supernumerary named Hal Roach. When Roach inherited some money, he indulged his dream of becoming a producer and director; Lloyd would be his first leading actor. Chaplin had just hit it big so Lloyd devised a scruffy character with ill-fitting clothes he named Willie Work. Even he realized that this was just a pale imitation of the Little Tramp and he refined his alter ego and named him Lonesome Luke.
Somewhere in the 1910s he experimented with the notion of appearing on screen without a mustache or beard or outlandish clothing. This was the birth of “the glasses character” that earned him worldwide fame. People could relate to him because he looked just like the boy next door.
Lloyd also pursued an unusual specialty: the thrill comedy. In shorts like High and Dizzy and Never Weaken he provided audiences with scares and audible gasps as he dangled from buildings and girders. There was no such thing as CGI back then, and he eschewed the use of stunt doubles (for the most part) so there was good reason for moviegoers to hold their breath as he daringly dodged disaster. It was the positioning of the buildings and the angle of the camera that made these moments seem more dangerous than they actually were, but no one exposed the trick back then. Even today, Harold’s hijinks (or is that high-jinks?) in Safety Last can make an audience hold its collective breath. The picture of him dangling from a clock high above the city streets is one of the most recognizable images in all of movie history.
But Harold was loath to repeat himself, so he plotted out his 1920s films with care: in Grandma’s Boy he is a milquetoast. In Why Worry? he is a jaded millionaire. In The Freshman he’s a would-be football player with more spirit than skill.
The Kid Brother presents him as an underdog again: the runt of the litter, so to speak, a mild-mannered country boy named Harold Hickory whose father and elder siblings resemble nothing so much as cavemen. He chances to meet a winsome young lady (the virginal Jobyna Ralston) who’s traveling with a medicine show and is instantly smitten … so much so that he defies the edict of his father, the sheriff, to kick the itinerant performers out of town. Instead, he devises one ruse after another in order to court “The Girl,” even climbing an enormous tree to keep sight of her when they first part company. He winds up having to battle her menacing medicine-show strong-man Sandoni (played by the imposing Constantine Romanoff) in a battle to the finish. His only helpmate is a mischievous little monkey—the same monkey, apparently, who turns the crank on Buster Keaton’s movie camera in The Cameraman (1928) and, possibly, the same simian who bedevils Charlie Chaplin’s tightrope walk in The Circus (1928).
For The Kid Brother to work as well as it does, we must believe that Harold is really besotted by Jobyna Ralston … and we do. We also have to believe that he is in genuine danger when he is threatened by Sandoni, and again we do. This speaks to the skill of Harold’s writing team, the expert casting of key characters, and Harold’s underrated acting ability. It’s one thing to concoct a weakling who can earn our empathy, and quite another to pull off that feat. Lloyd believed in the young men he portrayed on film and never condescended to them in any way.
Lloyd owned the rights to all his significant films and made sure that they were cared for, by his granddaughter Suzanne and her film-savvy friends like Rich Correll and Richard Symington. Thanks to them, and the follow-up work performed by the UCLA Film and Television Archives, we can enjoy the Lloyd features in superior copies, whether at home or on the big screen.
I first discovered Harold Lloyd when he released a feature film called Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy in 1962. It played in my local New Jersey theater on a double-bill with Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd. I’d read about Lloyd but his movies never played on television and weren’t available on 8mm like the early shorts by Chaplin and Keaton. This was a mixed blessing: Lloyd protected his work from being chopped up and interrupted by commercials, but he also kept it out of circulation at a time when budding film buffs like me were hungry to see it. That’s why I was so grateful for that compilation feature, and excited to see the man himself promoting it on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and The Steve Allen Show. It meant staying up late, as he wound up on the last segments of both shows, but it was well worth a few yawns the next morning to see a living legend.
Now, in the 21st century, the majority of Harold Lloyd’s library is accessible on various formats of home video, which is a boon to film scholarship. But the fact remains that these pictures were carefully crafted to play to a theater audience. That’s where the San Francisco Silent Film Festival comes in. If you’ve never seen Lloyd at all, you’re in for a great discovery. If you already know him, you’re about to watch him at his very best. The Kid Brother is a great film as well as a great comedy. Enjoy!
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra