Oh! La belle voiture

This is a good Harold Lloyd comedy that gets plenty of mileage out of the material, and it has quite a few amusing moments. It is one of many silent comedies that take one situation and then stretch it out as far as possible.

The top silent comedians such as Lloyd could often find quite a variety of possibilities in a simple premise.

In this case, most of the story has Harold in a desperate rush to get where he is going. The number of obstacles he encounters is pretty creative, from the expected, such as an uncooperative automobile, to unexpected obstacles such as a friendly little boy and a cute dog. There is some decent slapstick, and there are also some good sight gags, a couple of which might be the movie's best moments. It works pretty well overall.

I have a production still in which Harold Lloyd and producer/director Hal Roach are obviously having an enjoyable time embellishing a shooting script with gag after gag. Employing a cast as long as the memo Hal is holding, "An Eastern Westerner" incorporated more production values than the average feature.

What's more, Hal Roach's smoothly expansive direction certainly gives the lie to the often-repeated claim that as a director, he was second-rate.

If another proof of the absurdity of this claim was needed, you have only to look at another of Lloyd's 1920 two-reelers, namely this "Get Out and Get Under". This short is a superbly orchestrated and timed little comedy in which no expense seems to have been spared.

The camera really moves when appropriate and all the action is brilliantly staged.

Indeed, one of Lloyd's favorite props, a streetcar, figures in the action and the cast includes wonderful Sunshine Sammy Morrison who shares some hilarious "business" with Lloyd.

This is one of Harold Lloyd's most enjoyable short comedies, but if things had turned out differently it might never have been made at all. Get Out and Get Under was one of the first films Lloyd appeared in after recovering from a freak accident that nearly claimed his life. In the fall of 1919, while Harold was posing for publicity photos, actor Nat Clifford innocently handed him what was believed to be a prop bomb; it turned out to be real, and when it exploded both men were badly injured. After a period of convalescence Harold resumed his career, but his still-healing facial scars are visible in his first close-up in this film, and if you watch his right hand carefully you can see that he's wearing a prosthetic device in place of the fingers lost in the explosion. Nat Clifford is here too, as the neighbor at work in his garden.

Despite the circumstances under which it was made Get Out and Get Under is a surprisingly cheerful comedy, though much of the humor relies on anxiety and frustration. Harold plays an actor in an amateur theater production trying to get to his show on time, but auto troubles and other problems hinder him every step of the way. After a somewhat measured opening the story builds in momentum and suspense, becoming funnier, loonier, and more surreal as it goes along. One bit involving the creative use of a pup tent is especially memorable. Some of the gags suggest routines identified with Buster Keaton, as when Harold makes a wrong turn and crashes a parade (as Buster would do in Cops) or is sidetracked into a railroad yard and gets doused by one of those water spouts (as Buster did several times). It all goes to show that there was a lot of borrowing and cross-fertilization in silent comedy; Lloyd certainly returned the favor and borrowed from Keaton on other occasions. In any event, our hero ultimately achieves his goal, wins the girl, and delivers a neat pay-off gag in time for the fade-out.

Modern viewers might be surprised at the sequence involving a drug addict Harold meets during his adventure; the man is actually shown injecting a substance, presumably cocaine, into his arm, leading to a routine reminiscent of Chaplin's Easy Street but with a surprise twist. (Oddly enough, prolific character actor William Gillespie played the dope fiend in both movies!) This sort of subject matter would become absolutely taboo when enforcement of the Production Code kicked in during the '30s, but jokes about illegal substances and drug addicts crop up fairly often in silent comedy. Also of note here is the presence of Ernie "Sunshine Sammy" Morrison, the first African- American kid in the Our Gang series, who plays the boy who insists on participating while Harold is trying to fix his engine. Sammy has an easygoing charm and naturalness before the cameras that is striking in this sequence.

Being after his accident, Harold wears gloves for pretty much this entire film. This is still under the Hal Roach studios in 1920 & it is less refined slapstick style & not as complex as Harold would develop in later films. Think Harold is self-conscious about his hands in this, not only because of the gloves, but his stunts in this one are no where near the ones he would do later. Mildred Pierce is the girl in this love story but her major work is in Harold (the boy) dream sequence in the film beginning where he dream Mildred went & married someone else & he found out while trying to pose for a photo portrait & arrives too late to do anything about it. This is a theme Lloyd would develop more thoroughly in later films. Some of the chase sequence with the police pursuit has some inventive sequencing & the pace is fast & furious. While this is a couple of notches below his better films, this one is pleasant. The version I saw from the TCM set is only just over 25 minutes, though it doesn't seem to be missing anything. Watch for the sequence where Harold disappears inside his car. It looks impossible & clever, & is the most intriguing stunt by Harold in the film.

Two of Harold Lloyd's favourite props are in use here. The first is the car, driven recklessly at speed, the second is the joke of remaining crouched down without realising your hiding place has been removed. You expect something terrible to happen to his car given the fuss he makes over it, but nothing that horrendous befalls it – unless you count being driven by Lloyd as something to be dreaded. He encounters all manner of mishaps as he races to the play being staged by the local amateur dramatics troupe, of which he is a starring member. On a number of occasions he has to jump out of the motor and run back to fetch something that has fallen out of the back. There's nothing unusual about this other than the fact that he doesn't bother stopping the car when he does so…

This is one of those early shorts of Harold's that has a boundless energy to match His character's single-mindedness of purpose, and it contains plenty of laughs. One surreal moment occurs however when the car breaks down and Harold is struggling to revive it. Spotting a junkie injecting himself in a doorway, Harold deftly picks the junkie's pocket and uses the contents of his syringe to get the motor running again.