Now or Never

Dolly is a poor little rich girl ignored by her parents and cared for by her nanny Mary. Mary is going home on vacation and takes along Dolly. She expects to reunite with childhood friend (Harold Lloyd). Meanwhile, he's struggling every which way to get to her. The group meets and boards a train but Mary is surprised to find Dolly's father on the train whom she has not informed about taking Dolly.

This is Harold Lloyd before he becomes the famous Harold Lloyd but he's that character already. There's also a tramp who looks like the famous tramp. Lloyd's entry is a lot of action and hilarious stunts. He's going full out on the big action scenes. Once the gang boards the train, they do get stymied by the interior comedy work. I would say that it's a half step below the great tramp. There is a comparison with Chaplin's The Kid. This one lacks the emotional connection compared to The Kid. It limits its full potential until he gets on top of the train for the grande finale. I can do without the black-face but that's comedy of its time. This is Lloyd growing into one of the greats of his era.

(2021) Now or Never SILENT COMEDY

Some of the gags also includes the child asking Lloyd for a drink of water before she asks him for a cup of milk to which he would onto the chord of the train so that he would get milk from a cow from a nearby farm. There's another scene where Lloyd is trying to wash, and he manages to have step out of the train since he thought the train made it's stop where he wanted to go. One of the most daring scenes happen when Lloyd was on top a train, and their were some moments where it looked as if he was hanging that high! The sequence with Lloyd and a bridge looked kind of dangerous as well!

Being a three-reeler, this Harold Lloyd vehicle commands more attention than his typical short - though it's not quite as rounded as his feature-length films either!

Train-set for a good part of the duration, it provides plenty of gags characteristic to such a situation: being a stowaway with a small girl in tow, Lloyd has to devise several ways in which to avoid detection; there's a lengthy scene in the berths (at one point, Lloyd causes the train to make an emergency stop in the middle of the country-side simply because his spoilt ward wants a glass of milk!); and the star even contrives to find himself on top of the train as it's speeding towards a tunnel.

As with many of his other shorts I've watched, a good enough comedy but these, somehow, aren't as highly regarded as the equivalent work of a Keaton or even Laurel & Hardy!

Sometimes all you need to do is to have a good laugh and who is better to ask for it than Mr Harold Lloyd himself? His short and feature length comedies were all suspenseful, fast-paced and full of sharp, witty humor and highly dangerous stunts that keep the viewer on the edge of the seat even a century later.

One of those high octane movies was a short feature called "Now or never" that came out on this day exactly a hundred years ago. This 35-minute picture, accompanied by fantastic new musical score by maestro Robert Israel, tells a story of a boy racing against time to get to his childhood sweetheart; when he finally does - she has a child of her employer's with her and the boy reluctantly agrees to babysit her which leads to more comedic situations.

This picture, although being per se the quietest in Harold Lloyd's filmography, has nevertheless a lot of memorable scenes and chase sequences, with tons of deus ex machina moments along the way. I believe by choosing to go in this direction Harold wanted to show the deeper side of his already established frequent character, not just a dopey loving little boy but also caring, generous and literally giving all he's got to a complete stranger. That side of people's nature is obscenely rare to find nowadays because between "now" and "never" people usually choose the latter but it's something that still is out there in the world and racing through time just like we are.

Harold's on his way to reclaim his childhood sweetheart as promised on the occasion of her eighteenth birthday. She is a nanny and brings her cute little charge along with her even though she isn't really supposed to. Harold, driving like a maniac – Lloyd certainly saw speed (and heights) as an infallible ingredient in his thrill comedies – ends up driving through a farmers barn and ends up riding under a train with the bum who cheated him out of his bankroll.

The second part of the film takes place on board the train, where Harold has been lumbered with the little girl because his sweetheart has spotted her boss on the same train. Although the kid is cute, some of the humour is strained here, with some gags lasting too long, and things feel a little flat after the breakneck pace of the film's first half. At 40 minutes, this film was longer than Lloyd's usual two-reelers and it's likely that he deliberately made the film this way so that it could be split into two short films if the longer running time failed to please his fans.

This isn't one of Lloyd's best film but it probably has just about enough highlights to keep most fans happy.