Haroldo Trepa-Trepa

... his first sound film.

In this comedy from Paramount and director Clyde Bruckman, Harold stars as Harold, a lowly shoe store flunky in Honolulu, Hawaii. Harold sees the beautiful Barbara (Barbara Kent) and falls for her, but when he learns that she's the daughter of the shoe store's owner (Robert McWade), Harold pretends to be a leather-goods magnate in order to impress them. Things get complicated when Harold finds himself on a trans-Pacific cruise ship with Barbara and her family and he has to continue his charade despite being broke and a stowaway! Also featuring Lillian Leighton, Henry Hall, Noah Young, Alec Francis, and Willie Best (as Sleep 'n Eat).

This was Lloyd's most successful sound movie, and it has a lot of good gags. An extended sequence on the cruise ship as Harold tries to destroy every copy of a magazine he can find is a highlight, as is the high-rise finale. Lloyd and company were obviously trying to one-up the clock-dangling antics from his earlier Safety Last, and while repetition renders this not as noteworthy, it's still entertaining. Kent is adorable, and I always enjoy Willie Best regardless of the role.

This Harold Lloyd feature provides good low-key comedy, capped off with a lengthy finale that is very much in the style of a throwback to the finale of Lloyd's "Safety Last" and other silent classics. Lloyd has the kind of role that allows him to use most of his range of comic talents, and the story sets up plenty of predicaments for his character to try to wriggle out of.

The story has Lloyd as an ambitious but rather hapless shoe salesman, who tries to pass himself off as someone important in order to impress a young woman. It's familiar territory for Lloyd, but the story adds plenty of good material that makes the character again and again scramble for ways out of a continual series of problems.

The finale has Lloyd's character getting caught on the outside of a tall building, and desperately trying to get to safety. It contains a number of imaginative details and obstacles to add to the suspense and humor. The only drawback is the heavily stereotyped character played by Willie Best, which distracts your attention away from the good comedy material. That's nothing at all against Best, who was a talented comedic actor who simply took the roles that were available to him, and who would have succeeded if he'd been given the chance to do more.

Overall, though, it's a solid comedy, and one that allows Lloyd to do many of the things that made him so popular.

This was Harold Lloyd's second Talkie but the first one I watched, since WELCOME DANGER (1929) is currently unavailable. It's a typical star vehicle and, in fact, the plot is quite similar to that of SAFETY LAST! (1923) - from the shoe-store background replacing the department store of the earlier film (hence the title) to Lloyd's attempts at impressing his girlfriend by pretending to be a wealthy businessman and, of course, its lengthy climactic shenanigans of our hero dangling from the side of a building.

Still, it's entertaining - and inventive - enough to stand on its own (even if, being so dependent on sight gags, the dialogue scenes feel awkward in comparison); the initial shoe-store segment involves Lloyd falling foul of the boss' wife, while the middle section is set aboard a sailing ship (which Harold contrives to be on along with the boss, his wife - who says she never forgets a face - and his own girl, the boss' secretary and whom Lloyd thinks is actually his daughter!)...but the genuinely hair-raising stuntwork (which, it must be said, sees no obvious repetition of the innumerable gags from the climax of SAFETY LAST!) is what really makes the film - also because it involves a lethargic black janitor (played by Willie Best, appropriately nicknamed "Sleep 'n' Eat") who, I'm afraid, wouldn't pass muster with today's PC-brainwashed audiences (especially when dubbed "Charcoal" by Lloyd himself!) and who clearly results in being more of a hindrance than a help to Harold's singularly hazardous predicament.

This was actually the star's fifth and final 'thrill' picture, which also features regular character actor Arthur Houseman invariably - and somewhat irritatingly - playing a drunkard; as for Lloyd co-star Barbara Kent, she's adequate, having already played his leading lady in WELCOME DANGER (I was also surprised to learn that she was the heroine of Hungarian director Paul Fejos' most renowned Hollywood film, LONESOME [1928], a part-Talkie which I've only managed to catch in snippets on late-night Italian TV: I did record a recent broadcast of it, presumably shown in its entirety - as the film, curiously, still bears no opening credits or any underscoring of any kind!).

I first saw the finale of this film in the compilation, HAROLD LLOYD'S WORLD OF COMEDY, in 1962, in a jam-packed 800-seat theatre. The audience roared and ROARED with laughter and excitement. It was the funniest, most thrilling thing I had ever seen in movies (I was 21) and I never forgot it.

What surprised me when I finally saw the whole of FEET FIRST recently, after seeing nearly all of Lloyd's silents (including SAFETY LAST) in the intervening period, is not only how well the final building-climbing sequence still holds up, but how inventive and funny the entire film is. There's a long sequence of Harold as a shoe salesman that's as hilarious and creative as anything in his silents, and there are just no dull spots at all.

The final long sequence on the side of a building is in NO WAY just a rehash of the SAFETY LAST sequence. I doubt if there's a single gag in it that repeats anything in the earlier film. It's every bit as imaginative and hair-raising as SAFETY LAST, a real tour de force. The bumbling Willie Best is a bothersome racial caricature, certainly, yet in terms of comedy, his "unflappable" casual unconcern is a perfect foil for Lloyd's kinetic, action-filled, dangerous gags, and he has one of the funniest lines in the picture.

Keaton and Laurel & Hardy (in their features) lost creative control of their work in the sound era, Langdon never made a starring-vehicle sound film, and Chaplin didn't make a talking film until 1940. Lloyd's sound films were not so successful at the box office, and a reasonable assumption would be that they, too, lacked whatever mysterious element had made the silent comedians great. In the case of Lloyd, at least as regards to his three pre-Code era films designed for sound, this is dead wrong! FEET FIRST, MOVIE CRAZY, and THE CAT'S PAW are all top-notch comedies (and his three films that came after them aren't bad either).

As with all of Lloyd, this is best seen with an audience, but even on TV it's a funny, funny film.

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.