Runtime:
76 minutes
Directed
by: Fred C. Newmayer/Sam Taylor
Starring:
Harold Lloyd, Jobyna Ralston, Brooks Benedict, James H. Anderson,
Hazel Keener
From:
The Harold Lloyd Corporation
We were merely freshmen...
Recently I realized I had seen my last silent way back in late April;
this needed to be rectified and I went with this famous film from
Harold Lloyd, which was a wise selection on my part.
The plot is straightforward: Lloyd plays Harold Lamb, an incoming freshman at Tate University, “a large football stadium with a college attached,” which is a statement incredibly true in 2018, at least for those that follow major college (American) football. Lamb is a dork so he desperately wants to fit in; he models himself after a popular film at the time but that only makes him look like a fool and because of various upperclassmen, they make him think he's becoming the big man on campus when in actuality he's being made into the big buffoon on campus.
In a quick 76 minutes, the forever underrated Lloyd experiences many setpieces, from unwittingly giving an awkward speech in front of the entire school to a party he hosts where his suit literally falls apart, to all the antics involving him joining the football team as another method to try and curry favor with the college crowd. Alongside the expected sight gags and physical humor were intertitles that often were amusing, including the line that is prescient today about colleges & universities being far more focused on sports than actual academics, or how athletes and even coaches do something bad like allowing an assistant to stay on their staff when he knows said assistant beats his wife... and the schools barely punish them just because they happen to be great at sportsball... but this is not the sort of place for such a rant.
Of course the movie ends with a big football game and water boy Harold wishes to actually get on the field. And of course Lamb starts a romantic relationship with a nice, comely gal named Peggy. For me there were many laughs along the way and even though this isn't as great as Safety Last, this has to be among the best movies that Lloyd ever did.
The plot is straightforward: Lloyd plays Harold Lamb, an incoming freshman at Tate University, “a large football stadium with a college attached,” which is a statement incredibly true in 2018, at least for those that follow major college (American) football. Lamb is a dork so he desperately wants to fit in; he models himself after a popular film at the time but that only makes him look like a fool and because of various upperclassmen, they make him think he's becoming the big man on campus when in actuality he's being made into the big buffoon on campus.
In a quick 76 minutes, the forever underrated Lloyd experiences many setpieces, from unwittingly giving an awkward speech in front of the entire school to a party he hosts where his suit literally falls apart, to all the antics involving him joining the football team as another method to try and curry favor with the college crowd. Alongside the expected sight gags and physical humor were intertitles that often were amusing, including the line that is prescient today about colleges & universities being far more focused on sports than actual academics, or how athletes and even coaches do something bad like allowing an assistant to stay on their staff when he knows said assistant beats his wife... and the schools barely punish them just because they happen to be great at sportsball... but this is not the sort of place for such a rant.
Of course the movie ends with a big football game and water boy Harold wishes to actually get on the field. And of course Lamb starts a romantic relationship with a nice, comely gal named Peggy. For me there were many laughs along the way and even though this isn't as great as Safety Last, this has to be among the best movies that Lloyd ever did.
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