Haunted Spooks

Harold Lloyd desperately wants to get married. After being rejected for the hundredth time, he repeatedly attempts to kill himself until he runs into a lawyer whose client (Mildred Davis) has to get married in order to inherit money. The other requirement before she can get the inheritance: she and her husband have to spend a year in her uncle's mansion. The twist: it's haunted! Not really, but I wonder how far this basic plot goes back. It would be wrong of me not to mention that the film can come off as pretty racist, and that title means pretty much what you think it means. Black people, it turns out, are especially afraid of ghosts. But, hey, it was 1920, and, honestly, Lloyd and Davis are almost as scared as the black people (though their eyes don't bug out quite as much), and the second half of the film, with all the characters running around the mansion being scared by people covered in bedsheets, is hilariously madcap.

People say Lloyd is not as profound as Chaplin - maybe so, but wasn't the goal of a comic to make people laugh? That was something Lloyd could do that Chaplin couldn't - and it was, after all, the name of the game.

One unfortunate thing: I think you have to accept the jokes at african-americans expense as a (bad) product of the time and laugh at the other things in this film - and there are some really great gags in it, like the sequence where Lloyd's Boy tries to kill himself.

I can't see why Lloyd doesn't get greater distribution, and its a shame he isn't as well known as Chaplin, not to mention the brilliance of Buster Keaton, virtually unknown to the present generation of movie-goers, when Charlie Chaplin is a household name, even if many people never would have seen his (apparently - have not seen yet) great features. Certainly, when comparing only shorts of the three comics, I would rank them in order of humour: Keaton, Lloyd, Chaplin; and cleverness: Keaton, Lloyd, Chaplin. Even the plots of the former two are more advanced and interesting than those of Chaplin.

Haunted Spooks (1920)

*** (out of 4)

Harold Lloyd and his new bride move into a new house she's inherited and soon the ghosts start to show up but are the real? Here's one of the better shorts I've seen from Lloyd since there's laughs from start to finish. The various failed suicide attempts at the start are very funny but this got me remembering that all of the comedy greats of the silent era got laughs from suicide attempts. When the film moves to the haunted house more laughs follow including some politically incorrect ones.

Harold Lloyd was always an impressive performer, funny, with a vulnerable streak mixed in with a hint of the daredevil. This movie doesn't have much in the way of stunts, but has a fairly amusing theme - suicidal boy (tries to jump in the river but gets stopped by someone asking him the time, etc., when jumps lands in a boat; tries to get run over by a car ...) marries winsome girl (the real-life Mrs Lloyd, Mildred Davis) and sets up home in a 'haunted' house spooked by family members trying to oust out the newlyweds.

Some racist gags typical of the period can be left aside, what is left is extremely funny, involving people covered in sheets wandering about, boxes which move, and things which go bump. Lloyd and Davis are both delightful and the movie speeds along at a good pace. Recommended.

This short demonstrates all of Harold Lloyd's irreverence, his charm and his comic ability. Unfortunately, compared to others of his films, it does downplay his physical agility and he never finds the opportunity to climb a skyscraper.

The familiar setup is Harold's determination to meet the girl of his dreams and get married, coupled with the cliche of the heiress who must live up to the conditions of a will and visit a "haunted" mansion. Count on Lloyd to make the most of every opportunity for a laugh that comes his way.

Having seen this with a modern audience, I know that people today are distressed by the portrayals of African Americans in the film. That's really too bad, because the little black kid in this film proves himself a comedian easily on a par with Lloyd himself.