Cinemaníaco

Harold Hall is a man who desperately wants to be an actor.Soon he is off to Hollywood.They are expecting somebody who doesn't look anything like Harold, because he accidentally sent a wrong photo.In Hollywood Harold causes lots of trouble and falls in love to an actress named Mary Sears.Movie Crazy is a hilarious comedy from 1932.Harold Lloyd shows that he wasn't the master of silent movies only, he could handle talkies too.He runs from a funny situation to another.Constance Cummings is brilliant as Mary.She does her job just as good as Harold does.This movie made me laugh many times.If a comedy movie does that, then that's a good comedy.

MOVIE CRAZY certainly is one of the best Lloyd's Talkies. From the opening gag on there are so many enjoyable moments only Lloyd knows how to provide. The screen test scenes are among the highlights. As always gags are very tightly built. Lloyd also handles the dialogue and timing pretty well; but Constance Cummings portrays a dominating, intelligent female lead that is rare in Lloyd's movies. Only complaint: if the high rise sequence in Feet First is recycled from Safety Last, the fighting-in-the-water scene here certainly looks familiar as well-from The Kid Brother. It's also a bit long and excessive.

In Littleton, Kansas, accident prone Harold Hall (Harold Lloyd) is desperate to be in the movies but is lacking in acting skills. He sends in a photo but accidentally sends in the picture of a heartthrob. The movie studio offers him a screen test. He arrives and causes havoc on set. He befriends actress Margie after a bumbling attempt at fixing her convertible in the rain. He stumbles his way through his screen test. Studio head O'Brien is angered at getting fooled with the wrong photo but Harold mistakenly thinks the screen test went well. He gets involved in the life of movie star Mary Sears.

This is Harold Lloyd in one of his early talkies. He made the transition well and continued his stardom. He has his physical comedy. He makes a sympathetic leading man. I think it could have done better to spend time with Harold and Margie together. There's a bit of romance but I would like more. I love the whole slapstick in the rain and I want more with the pairing. Overall, this has plenty of good physical comedy from Harold Lloyd and his appealing manner makes him a great leading man.

MOVIE CRAZY is one of Harold Lloyd's very best films, and that includes his silents. Sound complements his visual gags and adds depth to the story's characters without slowing down the humor.

What really makes this film singular is his relationship with the femme lead. Constance Cummings, one of the great, forgotten thirties performers, provides a complexity of character unique in this kind of comedy, certainly for the time. She's not a tacked-on "love interest;" her relation to Lloyd is integral to the story and essential to the success of the film. Her character is cosmopolitan, and an interesting aspect of it is her relationship to her slim, attractive and cultured black maid (NOT your usual thirties movie maid!) who seems more of a companion than a maid. At first Cummings finds Lloyd ridiculous, then irritating, but after a while she finds his natural affinity for disaster strangely interesting and she becomes fond of him. She's amused by him, and toys with him in an affectionate way.

Laughter is a mysterious, fragile thing. Among other things, it can be injured by too big an advance expectation. And some comedy needs an audience for fullest effect: Lloyd's comedy is that type. (Keaton, on the other hand, works as well in solitude.) Seeing this film with a large audience, I was helpless with laughter at numerous points in the film. The effect may not be the same if you see it on television, alone.

This is not a perfect film (but then really great films are rarely perfect). The sequence where he accidentally dons a magician's coat is funny, but too long and a bit too mechanically calculated. His battle with the villain on a waterlogged movie set meets the requirements for an action-filled finale, but is not the film's most inventive sequence. But the best sequences are terrific.

Partly because of the long-time unavailability of his films until recent years, Harold Lloyd has received critical short shrift from the silent comedy mavens. Keaton and Chaplin are demi-gods, and Laurel & Hardy and Langdon have been fully rehabilitated (if ever they were in disrepute), but Lloyd is still in the shadow, and that's unfair. Whatever else he is, Lloyd was consistently the FUNNIEST of them all, and his gags are always fresh, inventive and original. (I say this having seen nearly all the films of all these great performers.) The Lloyd character, too, though it varied from film to film, was never just a cipher, but a real, fully developed persona.

Seen in the right circumstances, MOVIE CRAZY can hold its own with filmdom's greatest classic comedies.

... and seems to get blamed for all of them. Sure, he's clumsy, but he isn't the cause of half the bad things that happen to his character.

Lloyd plays Harold Hall, a guy who is "movie crazy" - he wants to be an actor in Hollywood. First unfortunate event - He writes a letter to a movie producer stating his desire to become an actor and has a photograph of himself he plans to mail with the letter. His father looks at the letter and mixes up a photo of a much more handsome fellow with Harold's photo, and the handsome fellow's photo is what gets mailed, unknown to Harold. So when he gets a letter back saying to come to Hollywood for a film test he has no idea what has happened.

Once in Hollywood, there are more mix-ups, the main one being that he doesn't realize that the beautiful Spanish girl he meets on a film set is actually actress Mary Sears (Constance Cummings) in make-up with a fake accent. He can't figure out how Mary knows everything he says to the Spanish girl. The dark side of things is that Mary has an actor boyfriend who has made it clear to Harold that he'd kill Mary before he'd see somebody else have her.

Lloyd was always the optimistic young man of the roaring 20s during the silent era, and by keeping things in the rather make believe land of Hollywood he manages to avoid setting this film in the depths of the Great Depression.

Lloyd was very successful monetarily - a very good businessman. As a result he could afford to outright retire from filmmaking after 1938 and never worry about money. This made his films - and in particular his sound films - become rather obscure and hard to find. Ironically, Buster Keaton stayed much better known because he was bad at the business end of filmmaking and had to keep working.

This film is very funny and I highly recommend it.