Movie Crazy

MOVIE CRAZY certainly is one of the best Lloyd's Talkies. From the opening gag on there are so many enjoyable moments only Lloyd knows how to provide. The screen test scenes are among the highlights. As always gags are very tightly built. Lloyd also handles the dialogue and timing pretty well; but Constance Cummings portrays a dominating, intelligent female lead that is rare in Lloyd's movies. Only complaint: if the high rise sequence in Feet First is recycled from Safety Last, the fighting-in-the-water scene here certainly looks familiar as well-from The Kid Brother. It's also a bit long and excessive.

In Littleton, Kansas, accident prone Harold Hall (Harold Lloyd) is desperate to be in the movies but is lacking in acting skills. He sends in a photo but accidentally sends in the picture of a heartthrob. The movie studio offers him a screen test. He arrives and causes havoc on set. He befriends actress Margie after a bumbling attempt at fixing her convertible in the rain. He stumbles his way through his screen test. Studio head O'Brien is angered at getting fooled with the wrong photo but Harold mistakenly thinks the screen test went well. He gets involved in the life of movie star Mary Sears.

This is Harold Lloyd in one of his early talkies. He made the transition well and continued his stardom. He has his physical comedy. He makes a sympathetic leading man. I think it could have done better to spend time with Harold and Margie together. There's a bit of romance but I would like more. I love the whole slapstick in the rain and I want more with the pairing. Overall, this has plenty of good physical comedy from Harold Lloyd and his appealing manner makes him a great leading man.

This is a good comedy, possibly Harold Lloyd's best sound movie, and it features a very nice pairing of Lloyd with Constance Cummings. It's also interesting and entertaining as a light commentary on the movie industry of its day, and the ways that it was perceived. The extreme eagerness of Lloyd's character to break into the movies is interwoven with the main romantic plot in some clever ways.

The story has Lloyd's character leaving his Kansas home and heading to Hollywood, where he winds up having a chaotic and very funny romance with a star actress played by Cummings. There are a lot of funny gag ideas, some very nice scenes between the two stars, and quite a bit more, capped off by the kind of funny, exciting set piece that you always hope for as the finale in one of Lloyd's movies.

Cummings is very appealing and enjoyable, and she has a lot of good material to work with, as the script sets up a good contrast between her screen character and her real personality. This contrast is used very creatively in the plot, and the effect is aided considerably by how well Cummings and Lloyd work together in all of their scenes. The actress's affectionate nickname of 'Trouble' for Lloyd's character works well, too. Their interplay is the best part of a good comedy that also has a lot of other things working for it.

Harold Hall (Harold Lloyd) is movie crazy, so much so that he sends a photo of himself (or so he thinks) to a movie executive hoping for a chance to get his foot in the door. With a photo of a different man, the executive encourages to come to Hollywood for a screen test, but Hall's anxiousness does not translate well to the people there. He ruins films in which he is simply an extra, destroys the executive's office, and yet somehow manages to win over a budding actress (Constance Cummings).

Movie Crazy is a disappointment after hearing rave reviews and seeing several wonderful Lloyd talkies. It has its moments, but it is by no means a great film. As an early talkie, it shines. There are some silent moments, but the camera is hardly static and some of the dialogue is very funny. However, as a film from master comedian Lloyd, it lacks. Too many of the jokes seem familiar and dull, some having been used in silents. Also, the timing is completely off for most of them, making them difficult to laugh at.

Watch this film expecting to have fun, but not expecting to see a favorite. It will entertain you for the night at least.

MOVIE CRAZY is one of Harold Lloyd's very best films, and that includes his silents. Sound complements his visual gags and adds depth to the story's characters without slowing down the humor.

What really makes this film singular is his relationship with the femme lead. Constance Cummings, one of the great, forgotten thirties performers, provides a complexity of character unique in this kind of comedy, certainly for the time. She's not a tacked-on "love interest;" her relation to Lloyd is integral to the story and essential to the success of the film. Her character is cosmopolitan, and an interesting aspect of it is her relationship to her slim, attractive and cultured black maid (NOT your usual thirties movie maid!) who seems more of a companion than a maid. At first Cummings finds Lloyd ridiculous, then irritating, but after a while she finds his natural affinity for disaster strangely interesting and she becomes fond of him. She's amused by him, and toys with him in an affectionate way.

Laughter is a mysterious, fragile thing. Among other things, it can be injured by too big an advance expectation. And some comedy needs an audience for fullest effect: Lloyd's comedy is that type. (Keaton, on the other hand, works as well in solitude.) Seeing this film with a large audience, I was helpless with laughter at numerous points in the film. The effect may not be the same if you see it on television, alone.

This is not a perfect film (but then really great films are rarely perfect). The sequence where he accidentally dons a magician's coat is funny, but too long and a bit too mechanically calculated. His battle with the villain on a waterlogged movie set meets the requirements for an action-filled finale, but is not the film's most inventive sequence. But the best sequences are terrific.

Partly because of the long-time unavailability of his films until recent years, Harold Lloyd has received critical short shrift from the silent comedy mavens. Keaton and Chaplin are demi-gods, and Laurel & Hardy and Langdon have been fully rehabilitated (if ever they were in disrepute), but Lloyd is still in the shadow, and that's unfair. Whatever else he is, Lloyd was consistently the FUNNIEST of them all, and his gags are always fresh, inventive and original. (I say this having seen nearly all the films of all these great performers.) The Lloyd character, too, though it varied from film to film, was never just a cipher, but a real, fully developed persona.

Seen in the right circumstances, MOVIE CRAZY can hold its own with filmdom's greatest classic comedies.