Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

The movie runs out of plot and jokes well before the end of a two-hour running time, long for a light comedy.

Having just watched two of Harold Lloyd's early sound films ("Welcome Danger!" and "Feet First"), I looked into the archives of his other work and found this 1960's compilation of mostly silent masterpieces with brief looks at four of his talkies: "Feet First", "Movie Crazy", "The Milky Way" and "Professor Beware!". Harold Lloyd represented the "every man", the person who would wake up in the morning by falling out of bed, stub his toe as he made his way to his bathroom and had everything else go wrong even before he could get dressed to go on with his day. Here, he is shown struggling with the duties of a newlywed husband, picking up things his new wifey has asked him to bring her on the way home from his day, biting off more than he can chew as he tries to carry way to much and on top of that ends up winning a LIVE turkey in a raffle. He deals with the issues of trying to pay his trolley fair, trying to find a seat where the turkey causes all sorts of other issues, and then deals with all sorts of other obstacles when he finally gets home where the arrival of a new car sends the family of annoying in-laws into chaos. Another segment has him helping out a pretty young lady on a train hide her puppy, not as funny as the sequence with the feathery future Thanksgiving dinner, and another has him in an obvious Spanish jail dealing with a giant of a cellmate who needs to have a bad tooth taken out. It seems like if there was anybody who could be accused of always being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it would be Harold Lloyd. A few brief sequences of some of his truly classic comedy films (most famously "Safety Last") are shown, but more is devoted to the obscure and the few talkies I mention, "Feet First's" famous scaffolding scene influenced by his earlier success dealing with the side of a building as he nearly falls off after grabbing onto a wobbly clock. The narration insists that everything he did was done without any sort of special effects, implying that when he was hanging off of a building, he really was hanging off of a building, and there was no instance where he let go a la Meryl Streep in "Postcards From the Edge" to show that he was simply laying down on a floor based movie screen. To say that Harold Lloyd was ahead of his time is a complete cliche, but his films stand the test of time very well, often with stereotypical views of minorities or abuse towards obnoxious matronly women, but nobody can say that they never laughed at least one moment during those films. There are several silent movie compilations of comedy classics made in the early 1960's that are all nostalgic, and this is one of the best.

I love Harold Lloyd films...and yet I am NOT recommending you watch "Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy". This sounds contradictory, doesn't it? Well, let me explain why I love his films and why I quickly lost interest in this picture.Harold Lloyd, of all the major comedy stars of the 1920s, relied more on stories and his sweet character. Sure, he did a few films, such as "Safety Last", which were very physical. But far more often he made sweet plot-driven films like "The Kid Brother", "Grandma's Boy" and "The Freshman"...movies that didn't rely on pratfalls or stunts but lovable characters and more subtle comedy. Because of this, although you could see clips from some of these wonderful films, without the context all the sweetness and great characters are lost. And so it was as I saw this compendium--the context was missing and most of the clips, on their own, just weren't that funny.I think that non-fans would also be disappointed. They would see the clips and likely think "wow...he's really not that funny" and simply dismiss Harold Lloyd and his genius. Instead, see his films in their entirety and skis this poorly slapped together pile of clips and occasionally annoying narration.

OF ALL THE "Big Three" of the silents screen comedians, it seems that we know less about Harold Lloyd's work than about the others; being Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. This is somewhat ironic; inasmuch that our older "Big" sister, the late Joanne Ryan (1942-90), had the pleasure of meeting him. It was while doing a Summer job while in college. Joanne worked for the Shriner's Hospitals, right here in Chicago and Mr. Lloyd was then the head of the Shrine. (So much for our little bit of "bragging." OUR FAMILIARITY WITH Lloyd's work has been steadily improving, though, and with our thanx to TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES, it's expansion has recently substantially accelerated. This past week TCM ran a series of Lloyd's shorts and features both silents and talkies alike. Added to the brew was this anthology HAROLD LLOYD'S WORLD OF COMEDY, just for good measure.BEING THAT IT is a sort of overview of a career, it is done with excerpts from various titles and linked together with some helpful narration. Starting with the premise that your audience (or a substantial portion there of) have little or no knowledge about the subject matter, the resulting picture is a sort of primer. THE FORMAT THAT was followed is fundamentally the same as had been become very popular in the late 1950's with releases such as THE GOLDEN AGE OF COMEDY, WHEN COMEDY WAS KING and LAUREL & HARDY'S LAUGHING 20's. These were produced by Robert Youngson, but there were others, also.WE DID ENJOY our screening and recommend it to anyone. But e do see some deficiencies in its construction and content. While Lloyd's best moments on screen were during the mid to late 1920's silent period, there seems to be an inordinate length of time devoted to his sound features of the 1930's and '40's. Footage from PROFESSOR BEWARE and THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK (MAD Wednesday) is shown in a heavy dosage. (Perhaps it was the intent to remind us that Lloyd was also a comedian of the sound era).BUT IN STARK contrast to the above stated theory, an early sequence from PROFESSOR BEWARE (1938) is presented as if it were a silent. It is the one that features Mr. Lloyd, Raymond Walburn and Lionel Stander as hobos running on the top of a train in avoiding a burning tunnel.ANOTHER EXCERPT WHICH is exemplary as a specimen of the "Thrill Comedy" genre is also from a talking picture (title unknown to this writer). The bit in question features an older version of Lloyd "glasses" character scaling what looks like the same building used in SAFETY LAST (1923). Although the gags are easily as rigorous as those in the earlier (silent), it was somehow much less humorous.BUT THERE WAS no doubt that Lloyd was even then an outstanding gymnast as his non-doubled performance proved.LASTLY, IN MUCH the same manner as the other "Silent Clowns" voices proved to be annoying and overkill for them when their acting abilities were transposed to the talkies, so it was with Lloyd. He went the same way as Keaton and Chaplin; who apparently became quite enamored with hi own dulcet tones.

Another High Concept Movie that doesn't quite work out.Harold Lloyd made some of the funniest comedies in the 1920s, right? Right! So if we take the funniest parts of of his funniest movies and make a movie out of just them, it will be even funnier, right? Right.Well, no, actually. Yes, Harold Lloyd's movies are hilarious, but no, the gag sequences by themselves aren't as funny. Yes, they are wonderful to look at in terms of sheer invention and execution, but without the context of who Harold is this movie and why he happens to be pulling that particular gag, it isn't as funny. It's Harold Lloyd. It's comedy clips. You expect him to be doing something funny, so you're expecting it. Funny is unexpected. "I never saw that one coming". Instead of wondering how he's going to get out of this predicament, you wonder what predicament he's going to get into next.By all means, go see the Harold Lloyd movies, but see them as they were meant to be seen, not as someone decided forty years later how they should be seen. Even if it was Harold Lloyd.