Paul Merton has a longish article in the Times today about the greats of silent movie comedy. It turns out at the end to be a plug for an event in Bristol but it’s worth reading anyway. He focuses on Keaton as his own favourite and praises Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy as well. But Harold Lloyd deserves more than a passing mention.
He’s one of the funniest comic actors in movie history – at any rate I can’t offhand think of anyone demonstrably better. He didn’t just depend on dangling from skyscrapers (as in ‘Safety Last’ and ‘Feet First’), which is what he’s most remembered for today. He hit the mark, for instance, as the clueless tourist in ‘Why Worry?’ who thinks that the events of a revolution in ‘Paradiso’ are just exotic local customs displayed for his benefit. ‘Girl Shy’ has perhaps the best chase sequence I’ve ever seen, one against which any other chase should be judged. He never quite reached the same heights in the talkies, but they’re still more watchable than virtually any comedy these days. And for what it’s worth, he did his bit for anti-racism in ‘The Cat’s Paw’ in which the Chinese characters are the good guys and the villains are home-grown mobsters and corrupt politicians.
He is, as you’ll have guessed, my favourite of the silent comedians. He’s a fantasy figure, a nerdish looking guy who finds extraordinary resourcefulness under pressure and gets the girl. Movies were movies in those days.