{"id":2103,"date":"2009-04-16T23:46:13","date_gmt":"2009-04-17T03:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=2103"},"modified":"2011-11-20T15:09:46","modified_gmt":"2011-11-20T20:09:46","slug":"the-freshman-and-silent-shorts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/2103","title":{"rendered":"The Freshman and silent shorts"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Freshman<\/em> (1925, Newmeyer & Taylor)<\/strong>
\nThe sad truth about Harold Lloyd is that I loved him when I first saw him, but every time I rewatch a movie I like it less. So far I’ve seen Safety Last!<\/em> and The Freshman<\/em> twice, and each dropped from “great” down to around “pretty good”. I’m afraid to rewatch the ones I thought were pretty good to begin with.<\/p>\n

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Young Harold (he was actually 32) watches imaginary film The College Hero over and over to prepare himself for college, filling his head with stupid ideas about college life. I would’ve loved it if they’d done more movie-vs.-reality comparisons, but it seems the only thing he took away from the film was the hero’s nickname (“Speedy”), catchphrase (“I’m just a regular guy”) and silly jig, which everyone at college mocks until Harold manages to win the big football game, then the jig becomes the coolest thing. It’s a wonder that nobody else at school had seen this movie and figured out Harold wasn’t even an original nut, just a nerdy guy ripping off a bad movie joke. But my biggest surprise was finding that the silly hat Harold wears wasn’t an invention of his silly movie – college kids (according to this<\/em> silly movie anyway) actually wore those hats!<\/p>\n

Below: Harold and “the college cad” in silly hats. The cad, Brooks Benedict, later appeared in Leo McCarey’s not-sequel The Sophomore.<\/em>
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In the scene below, Harold’s tailor hides behind a curtain, ready to patch Harold’s unfinished suit should the need arise, but the two get their signals crossed because of a dude at a table ringing a bell. Supposedly the bell ringer is Charles Farrell, star of Street Angel<\/em>, but he sure doesn’t look like he does in my screengrabs from that movie.<\/p>\n

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The girl who likes Harold, cutie Jobyna Ralston, was in The Kid Brother<\/em> and Wings<\/em>, didn’t make it in the sound era.<\/p>\n

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The Mystery of the Leaping Fish<\/em> (1916, Christy Cabanne & John Emerson)<\/strong>
\nWritten by DW Griffith and Tod Browning, the same year they did Intolerance<\/a><\/em>, and co-produced by Keystone. Douglas Fairbanks was apparently famous enough to play himself in a framing scene – I think he plays himself, and the rest of the film (starring himself) is his rejected pitch to a producer for a film to star himself. That’d already be plenty to wrap one’s head around for a 1916 short, but that’s before we even get to the main story, which involves incompetent and extremely drug-addicted hero Coke Ennyday trying to stop criminals from smuggling contraband via one-man inflatable toy rafts, and stop the criminal mastermind from forcing the lovely Fish Blower to marry him. Coke gets the drugs and the girl, and I didn’t know I could have my mind blown by Douglas Fairbanks. Bessie Love, the Fish Blower, appeared in three major films in the early 1980’s, sixty-five years after this one. I wonder if anyone on those sets asked her about her cult druggie silent short.<\/p>\n

The Play House<\/em> (1921, Buster Keaton & Eddie Cline)<\/strong>
\nI’d seen almost all of Keaton’s solo silent shorts, but I’d missed this major one, in which he plays all the characters in a trippy dream sequence that lasts the first half of the film. Reliable heavy Joe Roberts finally wakes Buster from his funhouse-mirrored delusion and he goes to work as a stagehand, where he’s spooked by a pair of identical twins with mirrors. A sheer delight of visual invention only grudgingly held together by a plot.<\/p>\n

That’s two of Virginia Fox, daughter of William Fox:<\/em>
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Buster Keaton’s minstrels:<\/em>
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Cops<\/em> (1922, Buster Keaton & Eddie Cline)<\/strong>
\nThe Freshman<\/em> was a movie about a boy whose ideas about life have been warped by the movies, Leaping Fish<\/em> had Douglas Fairbanks the actor playing Douglas Fairbanks the aspiring screenwriter, and The Playhouse<\/em> featured Buster Keaton playing a hundred of himself in a stage performance viewed by even more of himself. Cops has no self-conscious reflection that I can think of. It’s just a damn fine heist\/love\/chase flick with great invention in props and situations. However it does fit in with the outrageousness of last two films in its ending: snubbed by his intended love, Buster effectively commits suicide by running back into the police station where he has just locked up hundreds of angry cops.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Freshman (1925, Newmeyer & Taylor) The sad truth about Harold Lloyd is that I loved him when I first saw him, but every time I rewatch a movie I like it less. So far I’ve seen Safety Last! and The Freshman twice, and each dropped from “great” down to around “pretty good”. I’m afraid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[480,526,214,857,494,136,658,528,21,64,446],"class_list":["post-2103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1910s","tag-1920s","tag-buster-keaton","tag-douglas-fairbanks","tag-dreaming","tag-drugs","tag-dw-griffith","tag-harold-lloyd","tag-shorts","tag-silent","tag-tod-browning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2103"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6956,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2103\/revisions\/6956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}