Kid Speed

This is good film, and it is clear that Larry Semon has left no expense, while making this film. Their are huge sets, and a fleet of racing cars used in this production, in order too extract every laugh possible. Larry Semon does try to hard to make some of the gags as funny as possible, and that some times that does backfires, and the jokes does not raise laughs, by todays comedy standards anyway. Saying that, Larry does manage to produce some of the best sight gags that I have seen, and some really dramatic action sequences. The plot is slightly predictable, but that is overcome with the other elements.

We all know what became of Oliver Hardy, but Larry Semon's early death in the 1920s robbed us of what could have been a great comedian in the sound era as well as a talented presence in the silents.

This car race-themed film is largely a number of routines on cars crashing, stunts over cliffs and the like, and Semon's worried white face popping up in manic mode as he speeds around in his car. Hardy is as good as you would expect as 'dangerous Dan', always on the thin edge of the wedge.

Best bit? Barrels and roofs and tar and everything else as the car shoots through the wooden walls en route to the end of the race. The teens and twenties had numerous examples of speed, speed, speed, and this is a good example. Fast, furious and frenetic.

I remember seeing this on TV about twenty years ago and many of its images have stuck in my memory. It's great to see all these 'Laurel without Hardy' shorts and features made available on DVD, especially when they seem to have stopped being shown on TV (here in the UK anyway). One of the lesser known silent comedy greats, the final five minutes of Kid Speed features one of the best car chases ever put to film, and stunts (performed by Larry Sermon himself) that put many of today's CGI-fuelled sequences to shame. It's also always interesting to see Hardy in one of his pre-Laurel and Hardy appearances, and the underrated Larry Sermon is a pleasure to watch.

It's hard to believe that back in the early 1920s, Larry Semon was one of the top movie comics--as he is practically unheard of today. In fact, I think the only reason I found this short on DVD was because like many of Semon's films, his co-star was Oliver Hardy and this film was part of Passport Video's "The Laurel OR Hardy Collection"--films featuring one or the other before they were permanently teamed in 1927.

The plot involves a rivalry between Semon and Hardy. Both want the same girl and oddly her father says that the winner of an auto race can then have permission to date her. Since Hardy always plays the villain in these films, it's not surprising that he cheats and uses many underhanded tricks to try to win the race. The race scenes and ones leading up to it are pretty good. Like other Semon comedies, this one is full of physical humor and is very high paced--much more so than the more polished shorts of Keaton or Lloyd. When the pacing AND the jokes come together, Semon's films are wonderful and very entertaining. The problem here is that while the stunts are excellent, there just aren't all that many laughs--making this a little better than a time-passer. Good, but certainly not among Semon's best work.

"Kid Speed" is an about on-par Larry Semon short, and theoretically it is a story about two fellows who must participate in an auto race in order to see who wins the girl. Of course, the fact that it is an about on-par Larry Semon short means that in reality it is not a story at all but twenty sustained minutes of crazy gags in the manner of an acted-out cartoon and revolving around the general theme of preparing for an auto race.

It's not Semon's greatest, most spectacular, or most memorable gag comedy, but even mid-level Larry Semon, despite its complete plotlessness and characterlessness, entertains on a certain very specific level and manages to impress with its scale of wildness and destructiveness. There's a goofy, baffling quality to the sight of a race-car pulling a man in bed along or a battle of sparks from a blacksmith's iron that makes us laugh with the film and at its for its unashamed daftness.

This was later in Larry's career in shorts, and in some close-ups his face looks rather lined and weary -- arresting in contrast with his ageless whiteface clown image. This being a Larry Semon film, the forecast has a high chance of some tasteless gratuitous racist humor. It occurs in a much stronger concentration in Semon's films than almost anywhere, and is never the highlight. Here it is felt but not the centerpiece of the short, as he tries to pull laughs from multiple shots of people's faces being darkened by soot from motors.

Oliver Hardy is here, being made to look positively skinny in comparison with the accurately-nicknamed Frank "Fatty" Alexander. Hardy is cast as Larry's rival, the seemingly malicious "Dangerous Dan." As such he mainly just gets to fill his role as Larry Semon's very capable slapstick practitioner sidekick. No character comedy as usual, but he is good at the pratfalls.

This is for you if you can find enjoyment in wildly goofy, impossible visual fun and don't come in looking for much more. In other words, it's a success at being a standard Larry Semon comedy, for what it's worth.