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Harold Lloyd's first talkie is a take on the always popular genre of a seemingly buffoonish, and klutzy inspector who solves the big case while acting the fool. First of all, the movie works, basically. Secondly, it fails to heed the unwritten rule of comedy "Keep them wanting more". Every gag is funny the first time, the second time but the third, fourth and fifth... NO!!! Despite this, Lloyd is funny and symphathetic. But I must comment, something was lost when Lloyd went to sound. It's like hearing him talk took away some of his movie star magic, a little star dust faded astern. He also seems to be slumming it, more interested in keeping his fans and his star status than making genuine great comedies. That said, the side kick inspector is good, and the final twenty minutes though a bit draggy is very funny. I laughed a number of times through that sequence. And the final shot and line is what the silent Harold Lloyd comedies were all about. It's a pity we don't get more of that in this movie.

How many bludgeonings can you have in a movie before it ceases to be funny? My five year old and I might disagree on this, but I think that Harold Lloyd crossed that subtle line in this movie. It started off cute and funny, but quickly became sadistic. Compared to Hot Water and Safety Last, this was a poor comedy; however, compared to the Three Stooges or The Ritz Brothers, it wasn't bad.

Maybe hitting several dozen Chinese immigrants in the head with a club was funnier back then...

As you might have read here, this movie bridges silents and sound, having been shot without sound, and reshot when sound arrived -- and it appears that little of the silent material was used. There are silent-style titles between scenes, but basically we're watching an early sound film.

Sadly, like many early sound films, it's bogged down by the clumsy technology. The camera is static and actionless... in a Harold Lloyd movie! Harold has few action scenes, or even moments, for most of the film. Meanwhile, his character, speaking for the first time, turns out to be a smart-aleck, not at all like his sympathetic silent persona. Add to that the many moments when he bops somebody on the head or kicks them in the pants, which in sound comes off as painful more than comic. And the fact that he keeps casually destroying other people's property with no motivation makes him come off as, well, kind of a jerk.

Sound quality is not bad for the primitive era, but many scenes are obviously redubbed. And the dialogue! It's inane, which is bad enough. But worse, it's painfully slow, mostly overpronounced in projected, stage-actory voices. As a result, the film drags on at an adagio pace for just short of two hours. Way too long for any comedy.

And to read, again here, that it was previewed at THREE HOURS, tells me that this must have been one of the classic ill-fated Hollywood productions.

And yet... There are some real treats here. Edgar Kennedy is great as the irascible desk sergeant. He's on screen for a long time, but unbilled. Meanwhile, prominent billing goes to Charles Middleton as the weaselly John Thorne. This pleased me because four years later, Middleton and Kennedy both appeared (not together) in one of the one or two greatest comedies ever made, Duck Soup.

In Duck Soup, Kennedy has a series of great scenes -- as the lemonade salesman with Harpo, followed by Harpo, Chico, and the hat-and-leg-swapping routine. And when Freedonia goes to war, he gets to sit on Harpo in the bath.

Meanwhile, Charles Middleton, third-billed here, has merely a bit in Duck Soup, as the prosecutor at Chicolini's trial, playing straight man to Chico and Groucho. Short, but like every moment of Duck Soup, sublime.

Out of respect to the greatness of Harold Lloyd, I can't give this less than a five. But no more, either. It's for diehards & completists only. I'm one myself, but this is a long, hard slog.

Harold Lloyd's first talkie is an uneasy transitional film between the silent and the sound era. It was originally made to be a silent, and it was re-written, and much of it was re-filmed in order to make it play. What would have been best for the movie would have been to cut out the fat. It goes on for far too long, just five minutes short of two hours, which must have been Lloyd's longest film. And I've read that the original cut was nearly three hours! I love Harold more than anybody, but two hours is a little too much. I couldn't even imagine a longer version. It is a pretty good comedy, though. There are a handful of brilliant comedy bits, and Harold Lloyd, more so than either Keaton or Chaplin, was just as good in his talkies as he was in his silents. There's also a lot of brutal slapstick. That was always a part of Lloyd's work, more than Keaton's or Chaplin's, but not even the Three Stooges are this violent! Harold must brain about thirty people. It is mostly funny – I'll give him that credit – but sometimes I had to give his enemies a sympathy `OUCH!' In the film's very funny finale, Lloyd fights a gigantic black man. To knock him out once and for all, Harold shoves his hand in one of those giant conch shells and clubs the guy on the head several times in a row. OUCH! 7/10.

Anyone who's seen `Singin' In The Rain' knows the panic engendered by the arrival of sound in Hollywood. Virtually overnight, the accepted methods and styles of filmmaking had to change to accommodate the new technology, and comedies were perhaps affected most of all. Instead of relying on wild car chases, broad gestures and sight gags, movies now had to include verbal comedy of the sort that wouldn't fit neatly onto title cards, and the dialogue had to be delivered with comic timing, since it was being heard rather than read off the screen. The most remarkable thing about this movie is how easily Harold Lloyd seemed to navigate this conversion to sound. The dialogue is clever, naturalistic, well-delivered and well-recorded, and the music has obviously been scored to support the action, and all this a matter of months after the first appearance of sound technology in Hollywood! The difference in technique is apparent when you compare the broader, overdubbed silent scenes with Clancy the cop and the somewhat more subtle, sound scenes at the police station and with Billie Lee.

As a side note, notice how the character of the Chinese doctor is treated respectfully, and even the black henchman of the Dragon, apparently invulnerable except for his glass shins, isn't the usual stereotype we expect in movies of the period. On the minus side, the movie is overlong and could have done without the opening sequence involving Lloyd and his `disguised' girlfriend. But overall, this is an enjoyable comedy and an interesting record of Hollywood's transition to sound.