Kid Speed

Kid Speed is another Larry Semon short with Oliver Hardy in support that I found on a Platinum DVD Laurel and Hardy collection. This time Hardy and Semon are car race rivals for a girl's affection. Since Hardy is the heavy, he's the one who tries to keep Semon from winning with help from various friends. One of my favorite gags involves Hardy and pals washing themselves with water from a barrel when another barrel on the roof spills tar through a roof hole into the water barrel causing Hardy and friends to look pitch black! There's also plenty of laughs involving people slipping into and out of automobiles and one more involving the winner and girl with white paint on the winner's face! Larry Semon is funny throughout and Hardy once again displays mannerisms that would come full fruition when he eventually teamed with Stan Laurel. By all means, seek this one out!

"Kid Speed" is an about on-par Larry Semon short, and theoretically it is a story about two fellows who must participate in an auto race in order to see who wins the girl. Of course, the fact that it is an about on-par Larry Semon short means that in reality it is not a story at all but twenty sustained minutes of crazy gags in the manner of an acted-out cartoon and revolving around the general theme of preparing for an auto race.

It's not Semon's greatest, most spectacular, or most memorable gag comedy, but even mid-level Larry Semon, despite its complete plotlessness and characterlessness, entertains on a certain very specific level and manages to impress with its scale of wildness and destructiveness. There's a goofy, baffling quality to the sight of a race-car pulling a man in bed along or a battle of sparks from a blacksmith's iron that makes us laugh with the film and at its for its unashamed daftness.

This was later in Larry's career in shorts, and in some close-ups his face looks rather lined and weary -- arresting in contrast with his ageless whiteface clown image. This being a Larry Semon film, the forecast has a high chance of some tasteless gratuitous racist humor. It occurs in a much stronger concentration in Semon's films than almost anywhere, and is never the highlight. Here it is felt but not the centerpiece of the short, as he tries to pull laughs from multiple shots of people's faces being darkened by soot from motors.

Oliver Hardy is here, being made to look positively skinny in comparison with the accurately-nicknamed Frank "Fatty" Alexander. Hardy is cast as Larry's rival, the seemingly malicious "Dangerous Dan." As such he mainly just gets to fill his role as Larry Semon's very capable slapstick practitioner sidekick. No character comedy as usual, but he is good at the pratfalls.

This is for you if you can find enjoyment in wildly goofy, impossible visual fun and don't come in looking for much more. In other words, it's a success at being a standard Larry Semon comedy, for what it's worth.

As the only Larry Semon movie I had previously seen was the rather sorry Wizard of Oz I wasn't expecting much from this short, but I was quite impressed by it. Semon plays a dapper character – you just know what's going to happen as he approaches his car in an immaculate white suit – who loves the same woman as Oliver Hardy. We know Ollie's a bad guy here because he beats his staff whenever he can. To decide who shall have the woman once and for all they decide to race for her.

The film is one of the thrill comedies so popular in the 20s and it contains some terrific shots of racing cars tearing around a dusty Californian terrain. At one point Semon's car tows the sheriff's bed – complete with the sheriff in his nightclothes – at breakneck speed while the sheriff bounces precariously around. There's also a funny scene when Semon finds himself involved in a boxing match with former champion Jim Jeffries. He takes the opportunity to swing a few punches while the champ is still tying his laces, but Jeffries doesn't even notice…

This is good film, and it is clear that Larry Semon has left no expense, while making this film. Their are huge sets, and a fleet of racing cars used in this production, in order too extract every laugh possible. Larry Semon does try to hard to make some of the gags as funny as possible, and that some times that does backfires, and the jokes does not raise laughs, by todays comedy standards anyway. Saying that, Larry does manage to produce some of the best sight gags that I have seen, and some really dramatic action sequences. The plot is slightly predictable, but that is overcome with the other elements.

I remember seeing this on TV about twenty years ago and many of its images have stuck in my memory. It's great to see all these 'Laurel without Hardy' shorts and features made available on DVD, especially when they seem to have stopped being shown on TV (here in the UK anyway). One of the lesser known silent comedy greats, the final five minutes of Kid Speed features one of the best car chases ever put to film, and stunts (performed by Larry Sermon himself) that put many of today's CGI-fuelled sequences to shame. It's also always interesting to see Hardy in one of his pre-Laurel and Hardy appearances, and the underrated Larry Sermon is a pleasure to watch.