Speedy

A SPEEDY young fellow races against time to save an unscrupulous syndicate from destroying the horse car line belonging to his girlfriend's grandfather.

Harold Lloyd made his final silent screen appearance in this very funny movie, which solidifies his reputation as one of the greatest film stars of the era. His impeccable timing and elaborate stunts are abundantly on display and his athletic abilities, despite the severe accident suffered to his right hand some years earlier, are still honed to a razor sharpness. He makes comic mincemeat out of his stints as soda jerk & taxi driver, and whether rallying the neighborhood Civil War veterans to fight off a gang of hoodlums, or ending the film with another of his marvelous trademark chase scenes, Harold is never less than utterly hilarious.

His new leading lady is played by spunky Ann Christy; they share a glorious, extended Coney Island Sunday sequence full of sight gags, high jinks & sweet romance. Elderly Bert Woodruff plays her beloved grandfather, a grumpy old coot with a heart of gold. And, for a few splendid moments, the immortal Babe Ruth finds himself uncomfortably ensconced in the back seat of Harold's taxi for a madcap dash to Yankee Stadium.

Movie mavens will recognize an uncredited Josephine Crowell as the very nervous lady in a limousine who has a close encounter with Harold's runaway trolley.

Rear screen projection was thankfully very rare during the silent era. What was filmed was really happening. However, it's use can be seen encroaching on the sublime reality of Harold's final chase sequence in SPEEDY. Safety factors, among other considerations, had to be accommodated.

Carl Davis has composed an excellent film score which perfectly complements Harold's antics on the screen.

SPEEDY might not be as tight as his other masterpieces- it's a bit episodic, yet those scenes on Coney Island are lovely all the same, and the way they set up a little home inside the truck is poetic. This is the last silent of Lloyd, and it reflects the helplessness towards progression and the nostalgia of the good old past, which is the essence of what makes this film so wonderfully rich and graceful. That attempt of saving the last horse-drawn tram as goal(instead of personal achievement), and especially the help from the civil war veterans and on-lookers(instead of himself as an all-able hero) is atypical of Lloyd, but makes this film warmer, special, and very lovely.

The last Harold Lloyd silent comedy, "Speedy" is a yuk-filled feature boasting some impressive thrill scenes and Jazz Age Manhattan ambiance. If not as satisfying as some earlier Lloyd silents, it manages to showcase just why Lloyd was the most popular of the big three silent clowns.

Harold plays the title character, who may have gotten his name from undiagnosed ADD. Speedy flits from job to job while he dreams of baseball and his girl Jane (Ann Christy). Jane wants to marry Speedy, but first there's the business of her grandfather's horse-drawn trolley, which a greedy railway magnate wants to put out of business any way he can.

As other commenters here point out, this is less a unified film than a sequence of four shorts stitched together as follows: 1. Harold the soda jerk. 2. Harold and Jane at Coney Island. 3. Harold the taxi driver. 4. Harold saves Pop's trolley. The only serious concession to "Speedy's" feature length is that some business of short #4 is introduced between shorts #1 and #2.

Add to that the hit-or-miss gagginess of much of the film, and what you wind up with is less satisfying than Lloyd classics like "The Freshman" or "The Kid Brother." Even early Lloyd features like "Grandma's Boy" or "Dr. Jack" had loftier goals than the laugh-driven "Speedy". Yet "Speedy" is funny most of the time, and does work in some other ways, too.

Though I'm not a Yankees fan, I'm a sucker with any movie that features Babe Ruth. Here, in a cameo, he does excellent work as a passenger afraid for his life getting a mad cab ride from the star-struck Speedy.

"Even when you strike out, you miss 'em close," Speedy enthuses, eyes on Babe and not the road.

"I don't miss 'em half as close as you do!" Babe yells back.

It's cool just seeing these two icons share the screen, and if you watch just before the 53rd minute, you'll see a third icon, Lou Gehrig, slip into the background during a Harold-Babe two-shot and proceed to stick his tongue out at the camera!

As fun as moments like that are, "Speedy" doesn't add up to the sum of its parts until the final third, when we resume the story of Pop's horse-drawn trolley. There we get a fitting capper to Lloyd's silent-clown career, with a hilarious street battle between young toughs and old coots fought with flypaper, horseshoes, and a pegleg, among other implements. Then there's the final trolley ride, which employs a horrific-looking real accident to create some tension over the question of whether Harold will save the day.

Like many note, "Speedy" is as captivating for what you see in the background. So much of it was shot for real in Manhattan, and even when there's no comically rude Hall-of-Fame first basemen in sight, there's a lot of energy and activity on view, whether its tugboats on the Hudson, taxis on Times Square, or street urchins ingenuously looking at the camera wondering what's up. The Coney Island sequence is the most labored part of the film for me, but it's still not only inventively played out but especially edifying for those of us who wonder what amusement parks were like before the age of the steel roller-coaster or more stringent safety regulations.

Lloyd and director Ted Wilde knew what the audience wanted, and deliver it here with a cherry on top. If not quite as on the money after more than 80 years, "Speedy" is still well worth watching for fans of Lloyd and silent comedy.

Harold Lloyd's last Silent effort is also one of his best vehicles: as ever, production values transcend its simple, comedic nature - the film is particularly relevant as a time-capsule for its view of 1920s New York City - while the narrative itself is filled with enough engaging subplots to please just about everybody - Harold's failure to keep a job for long (we see him, hilariously, as a soda-jerk and a cab driver), his passion for baseball (replacing the game of football celebrated in Lloyd's earlier THE FRESHMAN [1925] and even featuring a cameo by one of its legendary exponents, Babe Ruth, as himself), not to mention an outing with his girl (Ann Christy - okay, if not quite in the same league as regulars Bebe Daniels, Mildred Davis and Jobyna Ralston) at Coney Island.

The main plot, however, concerns a gang of big-city crooks intent on buying out Christy's grandfather (who owns the last operating horse-drawn cart in town); this eventually results in two wonderful set-pieces: the lengthy brawl between the villains and the team Lloyd rallies to resist them, a bunch of mangled but enthusiastic Civil War veterans, and the exhilarating final chase in which Harold ultimately makes good by bringing in the horse-cart on time against all odds - a tour-de-force in the style of Lloyd's climaxes for both GIRL SHY (1924) and FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE (1926). Incidentally, the ousting of an old-fashioned means of transport was also the theme of one of Ealing Studios' classic British comedies, THE TITFIELD THUNDERBOLT (1953), not to mention one of Luis Bunuel's Mexican films, ILLUSION TRAVELS BY STREETCAR (1954).

Tragically, director Ted Wilde - who had also guided Lloyd through his finest movie ever, THE KID BROTHER (1927) - died of a stroke at the young age of 36 the year after he made SPEEDY but not before receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Direction of a Comedy Picture, the only time an award of this sort was handed out by the Academy.

A delightful Harold Lloyd piece in which, in a nice change of pace, his character is a self-assured, confident young man living in New York during the roaring twenties, who loves baseball as much as he loves his girlfriend. Trouble is afoot however, when business tycoons try to buyout his father-in-law's lone horse and buggy track for their development. Things turn unlawful when goons are hired to try and thwart the buggy's run, which must be made at least once every 24 hours, or Pop can lose his license.

Everything plays out in the traditional Lloyd way, with wonderful gags and set pieces, but the biggest treat of all is the roughly twenty minute escape Lloyd takes with his girl to Coney Island. Wonderfully shot, it is truly a pleasure to see Coney Island in it's hey day. As well, Babe Ruth does a nice turn playing himself.

A must see.