By the Sad Sea Waves

By the Sad Sea Waves (1917)

*** (out of 4)

After seeing how many women a lifeguard can get, Harold Lloyd decides to pretend to be one and sure enough it doesn't take long for him to get thrown into the action -- with both women and people actually drowning. When not playing the Lonesome Luke character, Lloyd began to experiment with the glasses but one shouldn't expect the same type of character that he would be playing during the 1920s. What we have here isn't quite as funny but I must admit that there were several times where I was laughing extremely hard. I think the highlight of the film comes when Lloyd is being grabbed by several girls and he's called to action when a man is drowning but the only problem is that he ends up saving the wrong person. There's some gags towards the end involving people getting the shower rooms mixed up and there are some fine laughs here, although none of them are all that big. I thought Lloyd was extremely good and rather charming here. This includes the before mentioned scene but I also thought his flirting with the girls was quite charming. 'Snub' Pollard isn't given enough to do here but it's always fun seeing him and Bebe Daniels is fine as "The Doll."

Harold is by the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea, where he flirts with Bebe, pretends to be a lifeguard and roughhouses with the men in this slapstick comedy.

Although Harold Lloyd had insisted on abandoning his moderately successful Lonesome Luke series, despite -- according to Lloyd's memoirs -- protests by producer Hal Roach, in favor of the more realistic looking character that he played for the rest of his career, he did not entirely abandon the hard-knocks slapstick; through 1919, he would star in a mix of story films with gags in them and rowdy slapstick affairs set on a single location. This one, set on the sea shore, is one of the latter. Although the public would gradually come to prefer the story pieces, particularly in lengths longer than a single reel, rowdy single-reelers like this were still popular -- and funny, too.

The Beachhound (Harold Lloyd) is resting buried in sand on the beach. He is disturbed by the Life Guard ('Snub' Pollard) and his bevy of beauties. The Beachhound gets chased off the beach, but he returns after stealing a Life Guard uniform. Soon, he's called into action. Chaos ensues.

It's a Harold Lloyd silent comedy short. He's a bit of a prankster. He has his Harold Lloyd charms. It's a bit of nonsense fun. This page says it's five minutes. I saw it on TCM and it's ten minutes long. I don't know if there is an edited shorter version. Films of that era can be cut up to fit their venues. I don't know why the Sea Waves are Sad. Is that alluding to something in the culture? I would also want something before he got buried in the sand in his suit with another guy. Maybe he fell asleep after a night of drinking. There's a funny bit there and the other guy would be even funnier if he's set up better. The changing of the signs is pure chaos and fair fun. It's also nonsense and that's this short.

I should note that I haven't seen many of Harold Lloyd's movies, but I've liked the ones that I've seen. I understand that Alfred J. Goulding's "By the Sad Sea Waves" is one of the first movies in which he wore glasses.

Like most shorts from the 1910s, it has a simple plot: the protagonist pretends to be a lifeguard to attract women, but a mistake or two arises. It's not the kind of laugh-out-loud anarchic humor that you'd find in a Marx Brothers movie, but it's funny enough for the short runtime. I do hope to see more of Lloyd's movies in the future. In the meantime, you can find this one on both YouTube and Wikipedia.

In this short, Harold Lloyd becomes a lifeguard in order to avail himself to a particular girl at the beach. What I saw had splotches throughout so it was not always easy to watch but I managed to become quite amused at the goings-on that happened in this short. I saw this on the DVD collection called "American Slapstick 2". So that's a "worth a look" recommendation.