Review of Never Weaken

This quite interesting Harold Lloyd 3 reel comedy offers thrills, lots of gags, a bit of slapstick, and , thankfully, only a little chasing. It's what we might call a thrill-comedy, and thankfully not one involving ghosts or a creepy man. It's clearly divided into 3 segments, all involving him doing something he shouldn't be doing. These 3 segments are reflected in my review title This was the last of his many comedy shorts, before turning to the more profitable feature-length comedies. It was also quite possibly the best of the shorts.......The film commences with Lloyd and his girl, played by his real sweetheart: Mildred Davis, socializing via the high rise windows of their adjacent suites. Unfortunately, Mildred has had nothing to do lately, as her boss, Osteopathic Dr.. Cary hasn't had any patients in a while(why?). Thus, he will have to lay her off unless he gets some patients soon. When Lloyd hears about this, he's determined to drum up some patients by advertising on the street with the Dr.'s business cards, stage some fake injuries which he(pretending to be Dr. Cary) fixes right on the street, using chiropractor techniques. He has an acrobat stage the falls. This works the first time, as many onlookers are present. But, the second, he picks a bad spot, and nobody paid attention to the acrobat, who left. Thus, Lloyd has to resort to trying to help people on the street who have actual problems. He tries his technique on a man who fell and became unconscious. But , it wasn't very convincing. So, he decided he needs to promote skeletal injuries . While watching a water truck wetting down the street, he got an idea. He bought some soap boxes and tore a hole in them. He walked around an intersection before the water truck arrived, spilling his soap flakes. When they were wetted, pedestrians, including him and a policeman, slipped and fell. He dropped his soap boxes and went to check on Dr. Cary. He sees many people going into his office, hobbling, etc.. Then a giant of a man enters , greets Mildred, lifts her up, and kisses her, telling that he will soon be ready to marry her. This makes Lloyd very depressed, and he stays out in the hall. It was a clear(to me) BLUNDER to put up a title that tells that this man is Mildred's brother, and he hopes to marry her to Lloyd when he gets ordained, soon. This should have been left as a 'surprise', at the finale, when Mildred does clarify things to Lloyd...........Now, we come to the section where Lloyd tries to figure out how to kill himself. From his hesitations when confronted with a possibility, I'm not convinced he believes this is what he should do. Furthermore, in the last section, when he's dangling from 100ft high moving and stationary beams, he has plenty of opportunity to jump to his probable death. However, clearly, he's desperate to hang on and somehow get down. I won't detail the several methods of suicide he toyed with, except the last one, which involves setting up a gun so that it would fire at him when someone walked in the door. He put a blindfold on. He never got a chance to see if this would work, as the end of a steal beam came in the window, then whisked him on his chair out the window. He heard harp music and imagined he was in heaven(presumably having been shot, because he heard a light bulb fall off a counter and explode). Well, he took his blindfold off and found that he was in a hell of a situation. For the next 5 min. or so, he moves all around on mobile and stationary beams, as the building is being constructed. Pretty spectacular! Finally,he falls onto a crude elevator that takes him down to ground level, where, initially, he wants to crawl along a beam laying on the ground. Mildred arrives, with her brother, and she introduces him to Lloyd, who is now thankful that he didn't manage to kill himself........For an even funnier and longer incident of walking on naked beams at a construction site, see Laurel and Hardy's silent classic "Liberty",1929.