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Harold Lloyd was a master of the comic sequence. He would put together 40 or 50 rapid-fire gags, each one building on the one before and knock you out of your seat with laughter with each brilliant ten or fifteen or ten minute sequence. The only problem with most of his films is a little weakness in connecting the sequences. Leo McCarey is not a gag craftsman. He just brings on one gag after another and hardly cares if they're connected or make sense. In his masterpiece, the Marx Brother's "Duck Soup," this style passes for zaniness and fits well with the anarchistic persona of the brothers.

In this case, it sabotages Lloyd's genius. Here we have Lloyd's usual lightly connected sequences, but the weakness is compounded by McCarey's disconnection of the gags within a sequence. You can feel Lloyd fighting to connect the set of gags into a sequence and McCarey just moving on to a different set of gags. Only in the last boxing sequence does Lloyd manage to put together 15 or 20 gags for a hilarious sequence, but the five or six minutes here is still much shorter than the great gag sequences in most of his other films. There is also a wonderful sequence between Lloyd and a horse. I suspect if McCarey had allowed Lloyd to expand it for another five minutes, it would have become a classic.

Lloyd gets some serious comic help here from Adolphe Menjou and Lionel Stander. Menjou plays sleazy better than any else. Like the brilliantly scheming lawyer he played in "Roxie Hart," here he plays a brilliantly scheming boxing promoter. Stander plays the body guard/funny tough-guy type he always did so well. Lionel Stander makes every scene he's in interesting. Even when he's in a terrible movie like Roman Polansky's "Cul de Sac," (1966) his acting manages to save scene after scene. There's a little political irony here. Adolphe Menjou was a friendly conservative witness before HUAC in the 1950's, while Lionel Stander was blacklisted for his communist beliefs.

Lloyd also gets help from Menjou's beautiful wife Verree Teasdale. She delivers some sharp wisecracks that she somehow sneaks past the Hay's Office, and Helen Mack as his sweet sister. Both woman are fine, but are hamstrung by the little screen time their characters are given.

This is an interesting movie to compare to Lloyd's last masterpiece, "The Sin of Harold Diddlebock" (Preston Sturges, 1947). There is a short scene of less than one minute with a lion and Lloyd. There is just two or three gags. They're funny, but then the lion disappears from the film. In Diddlebock, Lloyd appears with "Jackie the Lion." This time he uses the lion for about 100 gags in a great classic 30 minute sequence that both sums up and ends his motion picture career.

It is sad to think that "Milky Way" was considered a success at the time of its release, while "Diddlebock" was considered a failure.

I had seen an earlier example of Harold Lloyd's work from the silent era (1924's "Girl Shy") and enjoyed it very much. When I stumbled upon this DVD for $2 in - of all places - the bargain section of a grocery store, I thought it was a small enough investment to try out. I was not disappointed.

Lloyd's performance in this was excellent. He makes use of some wonderful physical comedy (not surprisingly, given his roots in the silent era) but also shows that he can speak, and thus - unlike some silent stars - could make the jump to the "talkies." Here, he plays Burleigh "Tiger" Sullivan - a mild-mannered milkman who, through a series of blunders, finds himself a contender for the Middleweight Championship of the World! William Gargan also put on a good performance as Speed McFarlane, the "Champ." Good performances aside, I thought this was basically a "middling" comedy that probably could have been improved by making greater use of Lloyd's physical comedy, particularly by incorporating some scenes of "Tiger" in the ring - of which there was really precious little, until the title bout between Tiger and Speed at the end of the movie. And it was the end of the movie that really lifted this out of a strictly "middling" status. The last 15-20 minutes of this are really quite funny - especially as Tiger travels to the title bout in a taxi cab with a baby horse, which he has to keep hidden from the driver.

Well worth watching. 7/10.

Overall, this is entertaining even if it is very dated in a Harold Lloyd-kind of way, meaning a typical role for him where he's the wimpy-but -brave hero. In this story, Harold is "Burleigh Sullivan," the shy milkman who winds up - even though no clue about boxing - as a professional fighting for the middleweight championship of the world! Ridiculous? Yes, but that was Lloyd and his films: slapstick lunacy like Keaton, Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, etc.

Along the way to his fame and glory in the ring, Harold picks up a serious girlfriend (the very wholesome and attractive Dorothy Wilson as "Polly Pringle") and so a little romance is part of the story.

Lloyd provides a lot of laughs but he isn't the only one. Helen Mack has a lot of wisecracking lines as Burleigh's younger sister, "Mae." Also, con-man/fight manager "Honest Gabby Sloan" (Adolph Menjou) gets in his share of funny and serious lines. The three of them, plus some other mentally-deficient boxers, all contribute humor.

In all, it's a sweet-tempered film with a lot of charm. True, some of the humor is too dated and stupid but the "hits" far outnumber the "misses" in the comedy department.

This entertaining film deals with a timid milkman named Burleigh Sullivan (the name of the lead character, "Burleigh" is an inside joke since it sounds like "burly" which means 'strongly and heavily built, husky' which the character is not) . Sullivan (Harold Lloyd), somehow knocks out a boxing champ in a brawl. The newspapers get hold of the story and photographers even catch Burleigh knock out Speed again . Speed's crooked manager (Adolphe Menjou) decides to turn Burleigh into a boxer . Burleigh doesn't realize that all of his opponents have been asked to take a dive. Thinking he really is a great boxer , Burleigh develops a swelled head which puts a crimp in his relationship with pretty girl called Polly Pringle (Dorothy Wilson) . He may finally get his comeuppance when he challenges fighter Speed (William Gargan) for the title. So the sleazy manager decides to substitute him with Sullivan , who is now groomed for stardom. Naive Burleigh does everything the crook says, only to be blamed when it all explodes in their faces big time.

This light-hearted comedy and enjoyable story is basically a showcase for the many talents of Lloyd , as a frail man mistaken for a potential champion and probably to be Harold's last classic picture . The yarn is appropriate , but no equal to Lloyd previous silent productions. Amusing acting by Harold Lloyd as a shy milkman Burleigh Sullivan who accidentally knocks out drunken Speed McFarlane, a champion boxer who was flirting with Burleigh's sister . Harold plays a milque-toast weak man , a funny and totally extroverted Lloyd who thinks he really won all those fights that he was signed up by crooked manager Adolphe Menjou who shows to have a big flair for slapstick comedy . Features great support cast such as Helen Mack , William Gargan and Lionel Stander will repeat his role from this original version ten years later and film debut of Anthony Quinn. Producer Samuel Goldwyn bought the rights for the property in the mid-1940s for his remake The kid of Brooklyn (1946), as well as the original negative and almost all existing prints, and destroyed them. The ending struggle scenes for the championship is hysterically fun , an adequate material for Harold LLoyd's physical skills . Beautifully filmed in black and white cinematography as well as atmospheric musical score . It proved to be a very profitable film , being this original rendition with Lloyd and McCarey crisper and funnier than subsequent retelling . The motion picture was professionally directed by Leo McCarey ; however , when director was in the hospital, Norman Z. McLeod directed some of the scenes . The film is definitely for the lighthearted.

This flick has been adapted several times , as firstly the original play opened at the Cort Theatre in New York on 8 May 1934 and closed in July 1934 after 63 performances , titled the Milky Way (1934) , written by Lynn Root and Harry Clork , directed by William W. Schorr with a cast formed by : John Brown, Brian Donlevy (as "Speed McFarland"), Leo Donnelly (as "Gabby Sloan") , Edward Emerson, William Foran, Gladys George (as "Anne Westey"), Emily Lowry, Hugh O'Connell (as "Burleigh Sullivan") . And reworked a decade later by Samuel Goldwyn as The kid from Brooklyn (1946) , it even features some of the same supporting characters the Lloyd version . The big difference is the addition of the songs , the players are : Danny Kaye as Burleigh Sullivan, Virginia Mayo as Polly Pringle , Vera-Ellen as Susie Sullivan , Steve Cochran as Speed McFarlane , Eve Arden as Ann Westley , Walter Abel as Gabby Sloan , Lionel Stander as Spider Schultz . Furthermore , The Hedda Hopper Show - This Is Hollywood" broadcast a 30 minute radio adaptation of the movie on March 22, 1947 with Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo reprising their film roles. And finally a special version titled ¨The Calcium kid¨ (2004) starred by Orlando Bloom , Michael Lerner , Billie Pipper , David Kelly ,in which an English bachelor milkman, 'accidentally' knocks down his boxing club's champion as stand-in sparring partner.

Adolphe Menjou plays up milkman Harold accidentally knocking out the middleweight Champ into a fixed series of fights. And what strikes me is that--unlike poor Buster Keaton, or Charlie Chaplin's Tramp suddenly sounding like an English butler in "The Great Dictator"--Lloyd was perfectly cast in playing the nice likable sound version of his nebbishy Clark-Kent hero, even if he was getting a little too old to play the young twenty-something go-getter of "Safety Last" by this time.

The script was based on a then-hit play, and director Leo McCarey handles the right mix of the play's Front Page-esque late-20's rapid-fire wisecrack snark, and Lloyd's own physical comedy, as a "fighter" with an amazingly developed personal talent for ducking punches. (And, like all Lloyd characters, his embarrassingly ambitious delusions of grandeur once a few fixed fights go to his head.) I may only have a few to judge from, but if you had to see ONE Harold Lloyd talkie out of curiosity to see how the sound era treated him, this is one that will relieve the most worry. He had been making sound films for seven years by now, and although the first one , "Welcome Danger", was just awful, Lloyd improved quickly in the new medium.