Feet First

This is one of Lloyd's first talkies and might have played better as a silent, since most of the action revolves around a whole bunch of amusing sight gags.

He's a hapless shoe salesman who tells a wealthy girl that he's a tycoon and spends the rest of the film trying to impress her after unable to leave a cruise ship before it takes off. All of the shipboard scenes are amusing but become repetitious after the first twenty minutes. Highlight of the humor is Lloyd's interaction with sailor Noah Young, adept at playing a dummy.

Silly plot manipulations end up with Lloyd getting stuck inside a mailbag and somehow hoisted up the side of a building on a flimsy scaffold. It's here that the film reminds one of the silent success he had with his skyscraper routine. Although the gags are inventive and foolish enough, it's an extended sequence that plays out over too much running time. WILLIE BEST is seen as a black maintenance man who's no help at all to Lloyd when he becomes aware of his plight. It's the kind of stereotyped role that makes today's politically correct audiences squirm.

Summing up: Funny in spots, but certainly not one of Lloyd's best efforts. The scaffolding gags look painfully real.

A stock clerk falls FEET FIRST in love with a shoe tycoon's pretty secretary.

Silent comedian Harold Lloyd made his second foray into talking films in this very enjoyable slapstick movie. Consisting in large part of a series of often hilarious sight gags, it proves Lloyd's mastery of the new medium. Quickly learning how to make sound work for him, Harold firmly embraced the technology which ruined the careers of many other stars. He also benefited from using the same writers, directors, gag men & character actors who had made his silent films such a success. Appreciating their skills & loyalty, Lloyd's production company kept these individuals on the payroll even when making only one picture every other year, a routine he would begin starting with FEET FIRST.

Ever generous, Harold took his cast & crew to Hawaii, thus allowing for the filming of some very funny sequences on board the ship at sea. Interestingly, while the opening scenes of the film are presumably set in Honolulu, absolutely nothing is done to create an Hawaiian ambiance with the sets or characters in any way.

The movie's climactic moments involve forcing Harold to dangle from the side of a very tall Los Angeles building. This will invite invariable comparisons with his classic human fly sequence in SAFETY LAST (1923). This is somewhat unfair, as the scenes in FEET FIRST are wonderfully funny and vertiginous all on their own. Even with the assist in the long shots from master stuntman Harvey Parry, there was real danger involved for Lloyd (notice that there's only a couple of seconds of rear projection used and that's during Harold's final fall) who once again gets to display his remarkable athletic agility.

Pretty Barbara Kent plays the object of Harold's affections. Robert McWade is her grumpy boss, with plump Lillian Leighton playing his suspicious wife. Noah Young, a welcome face from Lloyd's silent days, portrays a hapless sailor. Arthur Housman gets to play (what else?) a humorous inebriate and slow-moving Willie Best is marvelously adept in hindering Harold's progress up the side of the building.

Movie mavens will recognize an unbilled James Finlayson, long the nemesis of Laurel & Hardy, as one of the painters on top of the skyscraper.

Harold Lloyd's second talkie, after Welcome Danger (which, if I recall correctly, was only part talkie). It's okay, but a step down from Welcome Danger. As far as I'm concerned, Lloyd's The Milky Way from 1933 is among his best films, so I certainly don't think he lost his talent after the silent era. Feet First comes across as desperate at times, mostly during the final act, which re-creates the climax of Safety Last!, with Lloyd dangling off the side of a skyscraper. In this film, Lloyd is a lowly shoe salesman who is mistaken for a leather baron by his employer, for whose daughter (Barbara Kent, star of Pal Fejos' Lonesome) he has fallen. There are some amusing sketches, but nothing particularly great.

While he lacks the same name recognition among general audiences as some of his contemporaries, Harold Lloyd was a shining star of the silent era, a comedian handily matching Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin with his funny antics. With stunts and effects aplenty, his pictures earned big laughs with abundant gags and situational humor, not to mention some witty dialogue (imparted through intertitles), fun character dynamics, and even some physical comedy adjoining the lighthearted silliness. Lloyd's first foray into sound films was less successful, however, for reasons that had nothing to do with audio; the writing in 1929's 'Welcome danger' felt too much like a mishmash, stepping away from the man's strengths, and it came off as the least Harold Lloyd of any Harold Lloyd vehicle up to that point. What then of his second sound film, which further reunites Lloyd with returning director Clyde Bruckman, and co-stars including Barbara Kent and Noah Young? For as much as I've loved all of Lloyd's silent works, after this title's immediate predecessor I sat to watch with expectations that had been substantially lowered. The good news is that 'Feet first' is pleasant and charming, and certainly earns some laughs, with no small amount of cleverness. Happily, it's also surely more consistent than the last effort.

The bad news is that the humor in this feature is too often very extra light - albeit also punctuated with instances of a somewhat off-putting mean streak. In a runtime of ninety-some minutes, much of the first third doesn't make much of an impression, and thereafter the writing continues to be highly variable; too many bits feel tired, as if the writers were really stretching and straining to whip up good ideas. This applies equally to the narrative, scene writing, characters, and dialogue: clever at many points, yes, but meager at others, and too often lacking the vitality that would help a moment to really stick and have the desired impact. In the same measure that 'Welcome danger' felt too much unlike a Harold Lloyd movie in its amalgamation of crime, drama, and adventure with the comedy, 'Feet first' feels at times too much like a softer, lesser creation, failing to achieve the same vibrancy as its silent predecessors no matter how boisterous the actors are, or how much they run around. This is enjoyable, but in a way that more tends to more closely resemble a warm, gentle spring breeze, sometimes blowing hotter more like the middle of summer, than an invigorating shot in the arm. Case in point: the picture's biggest stunt, recalling Lloyd's most famous scene in 1923's 'Safety last!', is also the only significant one here.

I do actually like this. It's entertaining, and it's well made, with fine contributions from most everyone on hand, including the cast. The sad fact of the matter is that this flick struggles to capture the imagination in the same way as anything the star made preceding the advent of talkies - 'Why worry?', 'Dr. Jack,' 'Hot water,' and so on. It holds up better than the man's first sound feature, but I only wish that it were more robust, with the same energy and wit that defined the best of Lloyd's oeuvre, for even the last act has a had time matching up despite the obvious kinship. (Please also note a single, casually racist line that hasn't aged well. Lloyd himself accordingly dubbed over that line for a subsequent re-release, which speaks well to him sensibilities, but it's there nonetheless.) While this is worth watching on its own merits, with swell ideas through to the end, I would strongly suggest prioritizing Lloyd's silent offerings. Those are must-see classics; this is something less remarkable to be saved for a lazy day. 'Feet first' deserves your viewership, but ironically, it shouldn't be first.

Lloyd's career, like that of Keaton's, was irreparably damaged by the advent of sound, and this film is a fairly good example of why he failed to survive the transition. While the physical comedy is as funny as it was in his silent movies, the verbal comedy is, for Lloyd, one almighty pratfall. He clearly realised he needed something to amend for this shortcoming and, with a hint of desperation, harked backed to Safety Last (1923), one of his greatest silent films, by repeating the entire scaling the outside of a skyscraper sequence.

Lloyd plays a lowly shoe salesman who falls for a woman he believes is the daughter of the wealthy owner of the shoe store he works for but who is actually his secretary. Lloyd inadvertently manages to end up as a stowaway on the boat which his beloved and her boss are travelling and attempts to pass himself off as a wealthy young businessman while trying to avoid the ship's crew.

For most of the film the laughs are pretty strained. To be fair the film isn't particularly bad, but it falls so far below Lloyd's previous standards that you end up believing that it is. The finale in this film is almost as thrilling as the one in Safety Last, but it's just a repeat (without a musical score) and it smacks of desperation on the part of both Lloyd and his studio.