Un voyage au paradis

In a city full of skyscrapers a boy and a girl fall in love between window ledges. However their romance seems to be under threat when a lack of patients for her boss's doctor's surgery sees her told she'll be laid off. In order to keep his office hours relationship alive, the boy sets out to drum up some business and thus keep her job.

I've not seen enough Harold Lloyd to say whether or not I'm a massive fan but I have certainly never had any great desire to hunt his films down in the same way as I have with Laurel and Hardy (whom I generally adore). However with BBC4's consistently impressive Silent Clown's series of documentaries, I got a rare opportunity to see one of his shorts as selected by Paul Merton. The overly jaunty new score played over the film was a bit of a pain because although it fitted the action on screen, I didn't think it worked for the period the film came from. Regardless I got into the mild humour of Lloyd drumming up injuries on the streets as the film got going until it reached the high (sorry) point of the skyscraper conclusion. This section is pretty much the whole show as it demonstrates his daredevil sense of humour.

Sure he isn't actually 50 stories above the ground but the stunts are still very impressive let me assure you. His timing is good and although I didn't find this hilarious, he is impressive in how he plays the audience for laughs and gasps at the same time. The support cast all play to form but this is all about Lloyd and, considering I'm not a real fan, I did think he was well worth seeing.

Overall an impressive and amusing silent short film. Not as out and out funny as I would have hoped but the skyscraper scrapes are well worth seeing and make the second part of the film much stronger than the rather genial first half.

This is one of Harold Lloyd's best shorts and the second of his thrill comedies (in chronological order) to be included in this collection. The film can be neatly divided into three sections: the first sees Harold ingeniously gathering patients for the despondent clinic where his beloved, Mildred Davis, works (and which probably influenced Lloyd's later feature FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE [1926]); the second, as was the case with many a Lloyd comedy, he goes through several failed attempts at suicide (when he mistakes Mildred's clergyman brother for her lover!); the last third - and the undeniable highlight - has the star up to his neck in trouble when he ends up high in the air on a construction site (featuring some of Lloyd's most incredible stuntwork, the whole idea was borrowed by Laurel & Hardy for the second half of one of their most popular Silent shorts, LIBERTY [1929]).

The title doesn't make any sense, but otherwise this is a terrific Harold Lloyd short that demonstrates why Lloyd was so beloved.

I watched this shortly after watching another Lloyd short, "Haunted Spooks" (mostly because they come together on the same DVD), and it's very similar in premise to the first half of "Spooks." Lloyd plays a young man who thinks the love of his life is in love with someone else, and he decides to commit suicide. Of course, he's Harold Lloyd, so things don't go as planned, and he instead finds himself dangling above New York city from a construction site. These scenes are real nail biters, as one thing after another threatens to send him plummeting, and Lloyd showcases the dare-devilry that was so common to silent comedy actors from that time.

Grade: A

This is comedy crafted from the material of nightmares, and Harold Lloyd (or his stunt double) displays a light-footedness and dexterity that is frankly quite astonishing. When you consider that Lloyd lost a thumb and finger when a supposedly dud prop bomb exploded in his hand just a year before this film was made it just adds to the courage he displays as he wobbles around on the narrow girders of a partially-constructed skyscraper hundreds of feet in the air. For my money, his stunts here far outshine those from Safety Last, the feature Lloyd made a couple of years later, in which he hangs from a clock on the side of a building.

The storyline isn't much to speak of, and the film is really two movies combined as the first half has little bearing on the second. Harold mistakenly believes his beloved (the future Mrs Lloyd, looking a little like Drew Barrymore in some shots) has fallen for another man and unsuccessfully tries to commit extravagant suicide with a gun and a length of string just as a stray girder from the construction project outside his office lifts the chair on which he is sat out of his office and into mid-air. The scenes in which Lloyd is perched on the chair are teeth-grindingly difficult to watch at times, and your laughter is really an hysterical release of tension rather than amusement at what is taking place on screen. I'd love to have seen this in a cinema back in 1921 – the audience reactions must have been something to see, and would have made the viewing experience all the more enjoyable.

This is one of Harold Lloyd's best short movies, with some very imaginative material and a lot of energy, making it quite entertaining and technically impressive. It was made during the period when Lloyd was more-or-less gradually transforming his screen persona, and both the tempo and the material benefit from the emergence of his upbeat, go-getter, slightly amoral character.

The story has two main sequences, both of which do very well in getting a lot of mileage out of an offbeat idea. The first part has Lloyd using his imagination to drum up business for an osteopath. This sequence has some funny gags, and it also benefits from Lloyd's ability to make a somewhat unscrupulous character seem nevertheless well-meaning and sympathetic.

The second part nicely combines humor and suspense, as Lloyd ends up in a lengthy series of predicaments high in the air. It's very well-crafted, making use of Lloyd's athleticism plus some creative ideas with the props and the setting. It's probably among the most memorable scenes in any of Lloyd's movies. (It's also interesting to note how many of his finest sequences have to do with heights.)

It's fun to watch, and in addition it's quite a display of talent. This is certainly one of the movies that any fan of Harold Lloyd's style of comedy would want to see.