À la hauteur!

This is one of Lloyd's first talkies and might have played better as a silent, since most of the action revolves around a whole bunch of amusing sight gags.

He's a hapless shoe salesman who tells a wealthy girl that he's a tycoon and spends the rest of the film trying to impress her after unable to leave a cruise ship before it takes off. All of the shipboard scenes are amusing but become repetitious after the first twenty minutes. Highlight of the humor is Lloyd's interaction with sailor Noah Young, adept at playing a dummy.

Silly plot manipulations end up with Lloyd getting stuck inside a mailbag and somehow hoisted up the side of a building on a flimsy scaffold. It's here that the film reminds one of the silent success he had with his skyscraper routine. Although the gags are inventive and foolish enough, it's an extended sequence that plays out over too much running time. WILLIE BEST is seen as a black maintenance man who's no help at all to Lloyd when he becomes aware of his plight. It's the kind of stereotyped role that makes today's politically correct audiences squirm.

Summing up: Funny in spots, but certainly not one of Lloyd's best efforts. The scaffolding gags look painfully real.

I first saw the finale of this film in the compilation, HAROLD LLOYD'S WORLD OF COMEDY, in 1962, in a jam-packed 800-seat theatre. The audience roared and ROARED with laughter and excitement. It was the funniest, most thrilling thing I had ever seen in movies (I was 21) and I never forgot it.

What surprised me when I finally saw the whole of FEET FIRST recently, after seeing nearly all of Lloyd's silents (including SAFETY LAST) in the intervening period, is not only how well the final building-climbing sequence still holds up, but how inventive and funny the entire film is. There's a long sequence of Harold as a shoe salesman that's as hilarious and creative as anything in his silents, and there are just no dull spots at all.

The final long sequence on the side of a building is in NO WAY just a rehash of the SAFETY LAST sequence. I doubt if there's a single gag in it that repeats anything in the earlier film. It's every bit as imaginative and hair-raising as SAFETY LAST, a real tour de force. The bumbling Willie Best is a bothersome racial caricature, certainly, yet in terms of comedy, his "unflappable" casual unconcern is a perfect foil for Lloyd's kinetic, action-filled, dangerous gags, and he has one of the funniest lines in the picture.

Keaton and Laurel & Hardy (in their features) lost creative control of their work in the sound era, Langdon never made a starring-vehicle sound film, and Chaplin didn't make a talking film until 1940. Lloyd's sound films were not so successful at the box office, and a reasonable assumption would be that they, too, lacked whatever mysterious element had made the silent comedians great. In the case of Lloyd, at least as regards to his three pre-Code era films designed for sound, this is dead wrong! FEET FIRST, MOVIE CRAZY, and THE CAT'S PAW are all top-notch comedies (and his three films that came after them aren't bad either).

As with all of Lloyd, this is best seen with an audience, but even on TV it's a funny, funny film.

A stock clerk falls FEET FIRST in love with a shoe tycoon's pretty secretary.

Silent comedian Harold Lloyd made his second foray into talking films in this very enjoyable slapstick movie. Consisting in large part of a series of often hilarious sight gags, it proves Lloyd's mastery of the new medium. Quickly learning how to make sound work for him, Harold firmly embraced the technology which ruined the careers of many other stars. He also benefited from using the same writers, directors, gag men & character actors who had made his silent films such a success. Appreciating their skills & loyalty, Lloyd's production company kept these individuals on the payroll even when making only one picture every other year, a routine he would begin starting with FEET FIRST.

Ever generous, Harold took his cast & crew to Hawaii, thus allowing for the filming of some very funny sequences on board the ship at sea. Interestingly, while the opening scenes of the film are presumably set in Honolulu, absolutely nothing is done to create an Hawaiian ambiance with the sets or characters in any way.

The movie's climactic moments involve forcing Harold to dangle from the side of a very tall Los Angeles building. This will invite invariable comparisons with his classic human fly sequence in SAFETY LAST (1923). This is somewhat unfair, as the scenes in FEET FIRST are wonderfully funny and vertiginous all on their own. Even with the assist in the long shots from master stuntman Harvey Parry, there was real danger involved for Lloyd (notice that there's only a couple of seconds of rear projection used and that's during Harold's final fall) who once again gets to display his remarkable athletic agility.

Pretty Barbara Kent plays the object of Harold's affections. Robert McWade is her grumpy boss, with plump Lillian Leighton playing his suspicious wife. Noah Young, a welcome face from Lloyd's silent days, portrays a hapless sailor. Arthur Housman gets to play (what else?) a humorous inebriate and slow-moving Willie Best is marvelously adept in hindering Harold's progress up the side of the building.

Movie mavens will recognize an unbilled James Finlayson, long the nemesis of Laurel & Hardy, as one of the painters on top of the skyscraper.

Harold Lloyd's second talkie, after Welcome Danger (which, if I recall correctly, was only part talkie). It's okay, but a step down from Welcome Danger. As far as I'm concerned, Lloyd's The Milky Way from 1933 is among his best films, so I certainly don't think he lost his talent after the silent era. Feet First comes across as desperate at times, mostly during the final act, which re-creates the climax of Safety Last!, with Lloyd dangling off the side of a skyscraper. In this film, Lloyd is a lowly shoe salesman who is mistaken for a leather baron by his employer, for whose daughter (Barbara Kent, star of Pal Fejos' Lonesome) he has fallen. There are some amusing sketches, but nothing particularly great.

While he lacks the same name recognition among general audiences as some of his contemporaries, Harold Lloyd was a shining star of the silent era, a comedian handily matching Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin with his funny antics. With stunts and effects aplenty, his pictures earned big laughs with abundant gags and situational humor, not to mention some witty dialogue (imparted through intertitles), fun character dynamics, and even some physical comedy adjoining the lighthearted silliness. Lloyd's first foray into sound films was less successful, however, for reasons that had nothing to do with audio; the writing in 1929's 'Welcome danger' felt too much like a mishmash, stepping away from the man's strengths, and it came off as the least Harold Lloyd of any Harold Lloyd vehicle up to that point. What then of his second sound film, which further reunites Lloyd with returning director Clyde Bruckman, and co-stars including Barbara Kent and Noah Young? For as much as I've loved all of Lloyd's silent works, after this title's immediate predecessor I sat to watch with expectations that had been substantially lowered. The good news is that 'Feet first' is pleasant and charming, and certainly earns some laughs, with no small amount of cleverness. Happily, it's also surely more consistent than the last effort.

The bad news is that the humor in this feature is too often very extra light - albeit also punctuated with instances of a somewhat off-putting mean streak. In a runtime of ninety-some minutes, much of the first third doesn't make much of an impression, and thereafter the writing continues to be highly variable; too many bits feel tired, as if the writers were really stretching and straining to whip up good ideas. This applies equally to the narrative, scene writing, characters, and dialogue: clever at many points, yes, but meager at others, and too often lacking the vitality that would help a moment to really stick and have the desired impact. In the same measure that 'Welcome danger' felt too much unlike a Harold Lloyd movie in its amalgamation of crime, drama, and adventure with the comedy, 'Feet first' feels at times too much like a softer, lesser creation, failing to achieve the same vibrancy as its silent predecessors no matter how boisterous the actors are, or how much they run around. This is enjoyable, but in a way that more tends to more closely resemble a warm, gentle spring breeze, sometimes blowing hotter more like the middle of summer, than an invigorating shot in the arm. Case in point: the picture's biggest stunt, recalling Lloyd's most famous scene in 1923's 'Safety last!', is also the only significant one here.

I do actually like this. It's entertaining, and it's well made, with fine contributions from most everyone on hand, including the cast. The sad fact of the matter is that this flick struggles to capture the imagination in the same way as anything the star made preceding the advent of talkies - 'Why worry?', 'Dr. Jack,' 'Hot water,' and so on. It holds up better than the man's first sound feature, but I only wish that it were more robust, with the same energy and wit that defined the best of Lloyd's oeuvre, for even the last act has a had time matching up despite the obvious kinship. (Please also note a single, casually racist line that hasn't aged well. Lloyd himself accordingly dubbed over that line for a subsequent re-release, which speaks well to him sensibilities, but it's there nonetheless.) While this is worth watching on its own merits, with swell ideas through to the end, I would strongly suggest prioritizing Lloyd's silent offerings. Those are must-see classics; this is something less remarkable to be saved for a lazy day. 'Feet first' deserves your viewership, but ironically, it shouldn't be first.