If the combined swan song from erstwhile silent clown Harold Lloyd and director Preston Sturges compares poorly to their individual, earlier masterpieces, it nevertheless remains an engaging minor work from two mismatched comic talents. The funniest sequence is, perhaps not surprisingly, the silent prologue, lifted intact from the last reel of Lloyd's 1923 classic 'The Freshman'. What happens after graduation to college gridiron hero Harold Diddlebock (Harold Lamb, in the earlier film) should have inspired a typically madcap satire of the American work ethic, but after a promising start the ideas disappear in a hurry (everything in the film happens in a hurry). The first twenty minutes, up to where Harold loses his job and boldly takes his first drink, is classic Sturges: witty, sophisticated, and quite daring for the way it gently mocks the optimistic ambitions of its hero. But in a desperate attempt to earn his laughs the easy way Sturges later enlists the help of a tame lion and fakes a thrill sequence a la 'Safety Last', for a less-than-hilarious climax more exhausting than it is exhilarating. Lloyd, ironically, caps his long career with an atypically rich (and thus, for him, all the more effective) performance, at least until all the shouting takes over.
Review of The Sin of Harold Diddlebock
