A Sailor-Made Man

A pretty unremarkable Harold Lloyd comedy that finds our scrappy hero unwittingly signing on with the U.S. Navy in order to impress a girl. You can probably guess the physical and sight gags that go along with life on a Navy vessel, and then a large portion of the latter half of the film finds Harold in an unnamed Arabian country single-handedly fighting hordes of sword-wielding goons in order to rescue his fair love, who's been kidnapped by a wealthy sultan. There isn't a whole lot to remember about this film -- I had to look it up just to remind myself of what the plot was about -- but Harold Lloyd fans know that even his lesser films provide a good deal of entertainment.

Grade: B

This is one of many funny and entertaining Harold Lloyd comedies that have been somewhat overshadowed by his better-known masterpieces. Certainly, "A Sailor-Made Man" is not on the level of "Safety Last" or "Speedy" or a few others, but it's an enjoyable feature in its own right, with some good material.

The story has a setup that will be familiar to Lloyd fans, with Harold as one of many suitors for the hand of a society girl played by Mildred Davis. Lloyd's character ends up in the Navy, where he meets up with a roughneck played in entertaining fashion by Noah Young. There are some sequences of slapstick aboard ship, and then the main story resumes when Lloyd meets up again with Davis in an exotic port of call.

There are some interesting settings with plenty of good individual gag ideas, and there are a couple of very good sequences. There's a street fight scene, with Lloyd and Young taking on a gang of toughs, that has some clever touches, plus a fun chase sequence in a harem. It doesn't have any of the terrific set pieces that you find in Lloyd's best movies, but it has more than enough to make it entertaining and enjoyable.

At 46 minutes, it is hard to consider this a feature film, but apparently the distributors did and it launched Lloyd's career as a feature film star. It was released ten months after Chaplin released "The Kid," his first feature. However, both of these films were seven years after Marie Dressler, Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand's "Tillie's Punctured Romance," which was the first comedy feature, albeit not a very good one.

The movie is in three parts with millionaire Harold lazily announcing he is going to marry Mildred Davis in the first part. Her father demands he get a job and so he joins the Navy. The second part takes place at sea with Harold becoming friends with tough sailor Noah Young. The third part takes place in an Arabian Nights like far Eastern land, where Mildred is vacationing and Harold's ship coincidentally lands.

The first two parts are competent and amusing, but nothing special. It is the last part, where the film leaves reality that the film starts to really surprise and glow, as it foreshadows Douglas Fairbanks "Thief of Bagdad" (1924).

Everything here is well done. It is only in comparison to some of Lloyd's more brilliant sequences that the film suffers. Noah Young is excellent as the Navy tough guy who becomes Lloyd's loyal sidekick.

This film is more for Lloyd and silent film fans. As noted by another reviewer, it doesn't have the brilliant sequences that would make newbies embrace Lloyd as a genius or fall in love with silent film art.

Harold Lloyd was quite good at playing the louche man-about-town, even though he's more readily known for the good-natured all-American boy. He swaggers around in the opening scenes of this film, twirling his cane, blithely ignoring anything that bears no relevance to his privileged but cloistered world. He loves Mildred Davis (who else?) but her father tells Harold he must stop being an idle playboy and earn a living in the real world. Harold undertakes the challenge with typical laissez-faire, informing the recruiting officer at the naval office into which he has just strolled, 'I've decided to join your navy.' When he later has a change of mind, and tells the same officer that, 'I've decided *not* to join your navy,' he gets a very rude awakening.

There isn't much of a plot to this one, and you sense there's a quite a lot of padding, which means it perhaps isn't as funny as it could have been. Lloyd was a genius when he was inspired, but when he was going through the motions he could be very ordinary, despite his reputation as a perfectionist. Lloyd and Davis reunite in some middle-eastern bazaar where an evil rajah has his eye on her, and some frantic chases follow but this never comes close to measuring up to Lloyd's best material.

While this film isn't really as long as most feature films, it is longer than a short and really falls in between the two types of films in length.

This film was remade three years later as WHY WORRY? though there were some changes made in the plot--enough that I recommend you see both. However the overall themes and plot elements are interchangeable. In both he's a rich guy who needs to grow up and be more industrious, and in both he ultimately rescues his lady while in a foreign land. In WHY WORRY? the setting was a revolution on a South American island and in this film it was a Muslim nation and its leader who kidnaps the lady to put her in his harem.

The general direction of the plot is pure Lloyd formula--wimpy guy meets girl and somehow rises to the occasion to fight for and win her. This is nicely made but not exactly different from many of his other films in this sense. It's worth seeing, but other films such as THE FRESHMAN, GIRL SHY and SPEEDY are better Lloyd vehicles.