A Sammy in Siberia

Oldga (Bebe Daniels) is the daughter of a honest peasant in Siberia. Count Pop-up-skyvitch (Snub Pollard) leads the Bolsheviks and a couple of captured women to their doorstep. Sammy Strong (Harold Lloyd) is a hopeless private in the American contingent. He gets separated from his squad and stumbles upon the small fight.

I don't know about the jazzy music at the beginning. They quickly switch to a traditional Russian song and an American score for the American soldiers. Harold has his glasses, but not his everyman getup. He does get in some action, but there is no big stunt. They also get in a jab at Chicago. This is fine.

This film came out right before Harold Lloyd's career accelerated to super-stardom. While his persona is closer to the nice "everyman" he played throughout the twenties (looking like him and acting like him at times), the style of humor is still grounded very much in the slapstick past as Lloyd ultimately resorts to standard punching, kicking and acrobatics to defeat an evil band of Cossacks--later, he might have done SOME of this but would have used him brains more to gain the upper hand.

Historically speaking, the film is also very important. Most people have forgotten about an interesting part of Russian and Western history. After WWI, Allied and Central Power armies briefly occupied parts of Russia during the Revolution and this appears to be the setting for the film. As far as I know, this is the only comedy set in this time and place--something very unusual for the era.

A Harold Lloyd short that's harmless enough but not all that sophisticated. Brr it's cold in Siberia, especially for the guy from California. Haha, look at how silly those (highly stereotypical) Bolsheviks are. Oh, be careful of that dog named Fidovitch. Maybe the best bit is when Harold lays down behind a log and kicks the Russians one by one so that they all tumble down the snowy embankment. And here I was hoping for a Samoyed doggo based on the title.

During the Allied invasion of Russia (1918-1922), Harold Lloyd is a hapless American soldier out where east meets far east, to deal with snow, wolves, Bolsheviks, and of course, Bebe Daniels.

This was produced just before Lloyd switched from making one-reel comedies to focus on two reels, and it was clearly time: the pace of gags was too fast to permit more than the barest of plot points, and Lloyd's Glasses character (whom he always called "the boy") needed a bit of time to appear to be normal; this would allow his comic gags to be seen as sharper. Once he had done so, he quickly moved up the ladder.

Here we have Harold Lloyd as an American soldier (Sammy) stationed in Russia during their revolution. The Bolsheviks take over the home of a Russian family and like all villains, they threaten the beautiful girl living there (Bebe Daniels as Olga). Sammy plays the hero, singlehandedly driving the Bolsheviks, who are really cowards, from the premises with some clever fighting and trickery.

Though Sammy is the hero, he is rather buffoonish.

Overall, this short has little to recommend it, compared to Lloyd's best work Still, it offers an unusual setting and premise.