Faut pas s'en faire

A rich, young hypochondriac figures WHY WORRY? As long as he's got his nurse & valet to look after him absolutely nothing could happen, right?

Harold Lloyd, one of America's preeminent comedians of the Silent Era, uses his remarkable comic skills and tremendous athletic abilities to score another solid hit in this tale full of adventurous hilarity. With remarkable nonchalance, he calmly proceeds to thwart a Latin American revolution which threatens to shatter the tranquility of his restful vacation. But once his temper is aroused--at the sight of a distraught female--he really becomes a two-fisted hero eager to take on any number of bad guys.

Special mention should be made of Minnesota-born Norwegian-American John Aasen (1887-1938), who in his film debut plays Harold's gigantic companion. Nearly nine feet tall & rather fearsome, he nonetheless almost immediately grabs the viewer's complete sympathy while suffering mightily from a raging toothache. Gentle with Harold, he becomes an unstoppable one-man army in dealing with their enemies.

This film marked a milestone of sorts for Harold. It was his last produced in collaboration with Hal Roach; their friendly parting allowed Harold to gain virtually complete control over his films. WHY WORRY? was also his first movie to feature his new costar, beautiful Jobyna Ralston, who delivers a feisty, compelling performance as Harold's nurse; his previous leading lady, Mildred Davis, was now very busy in her new life as Mrs. Harold Lloyd.

Robert Israel has composed an excellent film score which perfectly complements Harold's antics on the screen.

This is one of Harold Lloyd's most entertaining comedies, with Lloyd, Jobyna Ralston and John Aasen making good use of a variety of material, especially a lot of Absurdist-style gags and routines. It starts just a little slowly in setting things up, but once it gets going, there are a lot of good laughs without a slow stretch.

Lloyd plays a good-natured but completely oblivious upper-class hypochondriac who travels to the tropics for a rest, and finds himself in the middle of a chaotic revolution. His naive initial reactions to the situation are quite amusing, and few screen comics could have pulled them off as well as Lloyd does.

As things get hotter for Lloyd and Ralston, the hilarious giant Colosso (Aasen's character) joins the madness, and that leads to some even more humorous gags. The lengthy sequence resulting from the first meeting between Harold and Colosso is very cleverly done, squeezing more than you would ever have guessed possible out of a simple situation. Afterward, Colosso's size and strength are used in many imaginative ways, with a lot of rather elaborate sight gags that are set up nicely.

The whole thing works very well. Once everything is set up, it flies by so quickly that it seems only to have taken a fraction of its running time.

Heavily medicated millionaire hypochondriac Harold Van Pelham (Harold Lloyd) is sent to Paradiso, a tropical island nation off South America, for his health. He brings along his adoring nurse and his valet Mr. Pipps. American Jim Blake leads a band of renegades against the sleepy government. Upon arrival, Harold is mistaken for an expected government representative. He escapes the firing squad with the help of wild giant fellow prisoner Colosso.

It's a cute little comedy. The first laugh comes as Harold tries to pull Colosso's tooth. It's extended slapstick fun for a simple premise. The giant is great visual contrast and a fun comedy partner. I don't know if he ever worked with Harold after this. They're certainly good together here although Harold is a little mean sometimes. There's a difference between cluelessness and callousness. As a rich self-obsessed character, he often drifts into the later. There is plenty of great physical comedy although it's missing a final one big stunt.

Take a hypochondriac & place him in the middle of a Latin American country with a revolution going on & what do you get? In this movie, you get great comedy. There are some sequences in this film that almost reach the classics of Safety Last or Girl Shy for Lloyd. Granted, there are a few spots early which are slow, but the uniqueness of how Lloyd plays off in the revolution & with the Giant are so classic that you almost forget the slow start the film has.

Actually, considering the film Lloyd did after this was Girl Shy, the split with Roach really did not slow him down, he sped up even faster. Still, this was the finish for the producer who discovered Harold & had taken him this far. It is so sad that thanks to the split, Harold owned all his films & a wholegeneration of American movie goers forgot he existed. I am so glad in recent years that we have been allowed to rediscover this talent. When you watch his films, you realize how much others who came much later actually were copying pieces of Harolds work in their own films. Remember The Bank Dick chase sequence? Harold did it first in Girl Shy. Remember the race to the church at the end of The Graduate? Lloyd did it first in Girl Shy & then consulted with Mike Nichols to do it again in the successful 1960's film. Forgotten genius describes Lloyd aptly & even though this is a notch below Safety Last & Girl Shy, it is well worth viewing.

The zaniest, most cartoonlike of all Harold Lloyd features recaptures the energetic anarchy of his wilder short subjects while at the same time drawing from the sort of satirical innocent-ugly-American-abroad adventures that Douglas Fairbanks and Anita Loos had popularized in the teens.

Lloyd plays an obtuse millionaire hypochondriac who "has taken so many pills he rattles when he walks." He blunders into a banana republic's revolution and must defeat a dictatorial regime backed by an unscrupulous Yankee. Along the way, he faces up to his imaginary ills and falls for his spunky, long-suffering nurse -- ably played by the quietly sexy Jobyna Ralston in her first feature as Lloyd's love interest. But the real star is John Aase n -- all eight feet, nine and a half inches of him -- who makes an excellent 503 pound mad hermit, buddying up with Lloyd for some of the most improbable and unrelenting sight gag sequences ever put on film -- among them, an extended effort to pull the giant's aching tooth.

The setting is obviously Latin America (and, in fact, the whole film functions nicely as propaganda, artfully fudging the United States' imperial subjugation of the region by focusing on a single American villain) but when real-life Mexicans earnestly protested the film's stereotypes, Lloyd responded by changing the intertitles to suggest that the whole thing takes place on a mythical island. I can't imagine anyone was fooled by this since the Latino stereotypes still dominate the film: lazy peasants, greasy strongmen, etc.

Why Worry? grossed slightly less at the box office than Lloyd's previous film, Safety Last (almost $1.5 million vs. almost $1.6 million), and cost about a hundred thousand dollars more to make (almost $221,000 vs. almost $121,000). It was his last film for producer Hal Roach. Lloyd went on to make his next ten films independently for release through distributors like Pathe, Paramount and Fox -- but despite a few wild sequences in films like Hot Water and For Heaven's Sake, he never again made a picture quite as snappy and offbeat as Why Worry?

If the film looks back to Fairbanks, it looks ahead to the hypochondriac heroes of Broadway's The Nervous Wreck and its film versions, including Eddie Cantor's Whoopee! and Danny Kaye's Up in Arms, not to mention the mythical political intrigue of W. C. Fields' Million Dollar Legs, the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup, Woody Allen's Bananas, and much else in the realm of American low comedy.