Having just watched two of Harold Lloyd's early sound films ("Welcome Danger!" and "Feet First"), I looked into the archives of his other work and found this 1960's compilation of mostly silent masterpieces with brief looks at four of his talkies: "Feet First", "Movie Crazy", "The Milky Way" and "Professor Beware!". Harold Lloyd represented the "every man", the person who would wake up in the morning by falling out of bed, stub his toe as he made his way to his bathroom and had everything else go wrong even before he could get dressed to go on with his day. Here, he is shown struggling with the duties of a newlywed husband, picking up things his new wifey has asked him to bring her on the way home from his day, biting off more than he can chew as he tries to carry way to much and on top of that ends up winning a LIVE turkey in a raffle. He deals with the issues of trying to pay his trolley fair, trying to find a seat where the turkey causes all sorts of other issues, and then deals with all sorts of other obstacles when he finally gets home where the arrival of a new car sends the family of annoying in-laws into chaos.
Another segment has him helping out a pretty young lady on a train hide her puppy, not as funny as the sequence with the feathery future Thanksgiving dinner, and another has him in an obvious Spanish jail dealing with a giant of a cellmate who needs to have a bad tooth taken out. It seems like if there was anybody who could be accused of always being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it would be Harold Lloyd. A few brief sequences of some of his truly classic comedy films (most famously "Safety Last") are shown, but more is devoted to the obscure and the few talkies I mention, "Feet First's" famous scaffolding scene influenced by his earlier success dealing with the side of a building as he nearly falls off after grabbing onto a wobbly clock. The narration insists that everything he did was done without any sort of special effects, implying that when he was hanging off of a building, he really was hanging off of a building, and there was no instance where he let go a la Meryl Streep in "Postcards From the Edge" to show that he was simply laying down on a floor based movie screen. To say that Harold Lloyd was ahead of his time is a complete cliche, but his films stand the test of time very well, often with stereotypical views of minorities or abuse towards obnoxious matronly women, but nobody can say that they never laughed at least one moment during those films. There are several silent movie compilations of comedy classics made in the early 1960's that are all nostalgic, and this is one of the best.
Another segment has him helping out a pretty young lady on a train hide her puppy, not as funny as the sequence with the feathery future Thanksgiving dinner, and another has him in an obvious Spanish jail dealing with a giant of a cellmate who needs to have a bad tooth taken out. It seems like if there was anybody who could be accused of always being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it would be Harold Lloyd. A few brief sequences of some of his truly classic comedy films (most famously "Safety Last") are shown, but more is devoted to the obscure and the few talkies I mention, "Feet First's" famous scaffolding scene influenced by his earlier success dealing with the side of a building as he nearly falls off after grabbing onto a wobbly clock. The narration insists that everything he did was done without any sort of special effects, implying that when he was hanging off of a building, he really was hanging off of a building, and there was no instance where he let go a la Meryl Streep in "Postcards From the Edge" to show that he was simply laying down on a floor based movie screen. To say that Harold Lloyd was ahead of his time is a complete cliche, but his films stand the test of time very well, often with stereotypical views of minorities or abuse towards obnoxious matronly women, but nobody can say that they never laughed at least one moment during those films. There are several silent movie compilations of comedy classics made in the early 1960's that are all nostalgic, and this is one of the best.