Stars of Slapstick #93: Harold Lloyd

Today is the birthday of Harold Lloyd (1893-1971).  Lloyd did not start out to become a comedian, but an actor. After a few years doing theatre with amateur and stock companies, he broke into pictures as an extra before teaming up with Hal Roach to make their own comedies. Lloyd eventually became one of the funniest men in silents (indeed, the movies of his maturity make me laugh more frequently and harder than the more cerebral Chaplin or Keaton. The latter two of course have pathos, beauty and awe to their additional credit, however). But Lloyd took several years of research and development to arrive at  his famous bespectacled “go-getter” character (discarding two previous characters, Willie Work and  Lonesome Luke, along the way), and then employing a company of gag-writers and other cinema professionals to make his machine hum, anticipating the Hollywood studio system in way that both Chaplin and Keaton took great pains to avoid.

After scores and scores of popular comedy shorts , he moved up to features in 1922 with Grandma’s Boy and proceeded to star in another 14 terrific features (with only a couple of clinkers) over the next 16 years (I include his talkies among the tally, because for the most part I consider them as good, or nearly so, as his silents). His best known pictures are Safety Last (1923) with its iconic shot of Harold hanging precariously from a giant clock; and The Freshman (1925) in which Harold wins the big college football game.

In 1947, Preston Sturges coaxed Lloyd out of retirement to star in a sequel to The Freshman, the under-rated and too-little-known The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (renamed Mad Wednesday for its re-release in 1950). You should watch it! Here it is:

For much, much, MUCH more on Harold Lloyd and silent comedy please check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

O’Brien the Tailor

Today is the birthday of the great Julius Tannen. For more on his vaudeville career go here. That’s him as O’Brien the Tailor in this clip from Preston Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours (1948). As an added bonus, you also get Edgar Kennedy! (Uh, and Rex Harrison).

To find out more about  these variety artists and the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.