Kid Speed

Although 'The Great Race' is one of my favourite movies (and, in my opinion, the funniest comedy ever made), in general I dislike movies about auto races ... and especially movies such as 'The Four-Wheeled Terror' in which the autos are racing through open countryside rather than a purpose-built race track. Those roads are meant for regular vehicles and pedestrians, not for a few juiced-up idiots who get their joys from breaking the speed limit and endangering public safety.

However, 'The Four-Wheeled Terror' does offer a few pleasures: more than usual for a Larry Semon film. We get a brief performance by heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries, well-cast as a blacksmith. Semon has an interesting and atypical gag near the beginning of this comedy short: he sees his reflection in a mirror with a horizontal crack, and in the broken glass the middle of his reflection's face is missing.

Semon plays a racecar driver here. For implausible reasons, some gangsters decide to nobble his car ... using bombs if necessary. There are some semi-amusing title cards parodying the poetry of Robert W Service, so (in the service of parodying Service) Oliver Hardy's villain is cried Dangerous Dan McGraw, while Dorothy Dwan is the lady that's known as Lou. In real life, Dwan was Semon's wife as well as his leading lady in some of his films.

There are two pleasant surprises here. Semon's race car prominently displays the number 14, rather than the more obvious 13. Also, although many Larry Semon films feature gratuitous and unfunny racist gags about cowardly black men, here Semon's co-driver is played by a black man who actually portrays a fairly realistic human being. The black man is Spencer Bell, who appeared in some other Semon films under the unfortunate monicker G. Howe Black.

This time round, Semon seems to be trying more for thrills than for comedy ... taking a leaf from Harold Lloyd? So, I'll forgive 'The Four-Wheeled Terror' for its lack of humour. Unfortunately, I didn't find it very thrilling either ... and (as usual in a Semon flick) most of the stunt work is unconvincing. The final gag was unpleasant to look at. This one rates just 3 out of 10.

Having seen Larry Semon a now forgotten silent screen comedian in a couple of films it seems like he was searching for an individual style that all the greats had that set them apart. In Kid Speed which Semon also produced he looked to be imitating Harold Lloyd. The film sure could have used Lloyd as Lloyd and it's just the kind of part that Lloyd would have taken to easily.

Semon is an automobile mechanic with dreams of being another Barney Oldfield and also hoping to win the girl. But perennial villain in the Semon shorts Oliver Hardy is his rival.

Having seen Ollie now in a few silent shorts before he teamed up with Stan Laurel, it's a good thing that Hal Roach created the team. Hardy was a good player in these various shorts, but truly developed his individual persona with Stan.

Larry Semon apparently never did, though the film does hold up well.

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…

We all know what became of Oliver Hardy, but Larry Semon's early death in the 1920s robbed us of what could have been a great comedian in the sound era as well as a talented presence in the silents.

This car race-themed film is largely a number of routines on cars crashing, stunts over cliffs and the like, and Semon's worried white face popping up in manic mode as he speeds around in his car. Hardy is as good as you would expect as 'dangerous Dan', always on the thin edge of the wedge.

Best bit? Barrels and roofs and tar and everything else as the car shoots through the wooden walls en route to the end of the race. The teens and twenties had numerous examples of speed, speed, speed, and this is a good example. Fast, furious and frenetic.

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.