Follow the Crowd

The 26 year old Harold Lloyd is presented as a powerless, helpless character in this film. He appears as someone who is totally useless to society, bordering on being a menace. His pursuit of happiness via a regular job and procuring comfort from a romantic relationship is denied him. This affords us entry into his humanity, allowing the audience to connect with him and join him on his journey. He is a continuity of the Lonesome Luke character, as well as drawing on the authenticity of Chaplin's pathos. The world around him attempts to strip him away of all of life's luxuries so that he is reduced to poverty. This is his antagonist, and we get behind him as the protagonist to restore balance to his situation.

This Harold Lloyd short is one that he did after he thankfully abandoned the Lonesome Luke character in favor of the same look that made him famous in the 1920s. However, despite sporting the same glasses and look of this character, he didn't exactly act like the sweet and naive guy....so he's still in transition to a more mature sort of character.

The film itself appears to be truncated and I have no idea if a full version is out there. This one was about 8 minutes long.

It begins with some folks finding a stereotypical bomb on the streets. Soon, Harold is able to find the hideout where the strange cult-like terrorist group operates. Oddly, Bebe Daniels and Snub Pollard are there...though they really don't seem to fit with the rest of the bizarre characters living in this weird place...all of which Harold has to fight during the course of this film.

This is a not particularly funny short. It features a guy in black-face (uggh!) and very few laughs. Worth seeing for Lloyd lovers...otherwise, beware that he was capable of so much more.

Harold Lloyd finds a sputtering Infernal Device -- you recall the black-ball-with-a-fuse sort of bomb that anarchists used to throw in the editorial cartoons? -- and then follows Bebe Daniels to a combination bootleg beer parlor/anarchist-death-cult cub set in a funhouse.Typical high-speed antics ensue under the direction of Alf Goulding.

Lloyd dropped Lonesome Luke and came up with the Glasses character so he wouldn't be limited to hard-knock slapstick... and then continued to do hard-knock slapstick for a while. Sometimes it didn't work, but here it does, since Harold gets to be a marginally sane character in this insane, cartoony world. It's almost as if he is performing a burlesque of the form and the result, while utterly heartless, gets carried along by its high-speed mania.

The copy I saw had French and Spanish titles.