Harold Lloyd was the collegiate kid to Chaplin’s underdog tramp and Keaton’s earnest social misfit, the young, modern guy full of energy and spunk taking on the world with the ambition of a go-getter and the smart-aleck attitude of a city boy. Yet for a young man who epitomized the up-and-comer in the modern urban world, he only made one film where he played a college kid: The Freshman, which became his biggest box-office hit of all time and the definitive college comedy of the 1920s.
Lloyd had tried out a number of personae over his career but when he put on those round glasses and flashed that smile, he created the incarnation that made him one of the biggest stars of the twenties. He referred to that creation as “the glasses character” but in the movies he was invariably called Harold. In The Freshman he’s Harold Lamb, a small town boy preparing to go to college by watching movies and practicing his elaborate greeting, a little jig of a dance step followed by an extended hand and a slogan of an introduction: “I’m just a regular fellow – step right up and call me ‘Speedy’.” (Fans of Yasujiro Ozu may recognize that bit from his Japanese college comedies like I Flunked, But… , an example of life imitating art; where Harold copies it from a fake movie, Ozu’s students pick it up from their love of Harold Lloyd comedies.) He’s convinced himself that the movies and the dime novels about campus heroes are an accurate portrait of college life and he studies them like textbooks. In fact, he studies them instead of textbooks. The Freshman is a college film where no one attends a class, goes to the library, or crams for a test. “Tate University – A large football stadium, with a college attached,” reads the title card for Harold’s arrival on campus, and the film makes good on the joke.
G.W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925), the Centerpiece screening on Saturday night, is a landmark drama of social commentary, a savage portrait of Germany after World War II, when rampant inflation and record unemployment plunged an entire class into poverty and widened the gulf between rich and poor into a veritable ocean. Decadence and desperation and degradation: this has it all, and with a drumbeat of social drama drawn in stark images and situations.
The image of Harold Lloyd hanging from the hands of a clock high above the Los Angeles city streets may be the single most iconic shot that says “silent movies” and “slapstick comedy” to the general public without further explanation. It is of course one of the great set pieces in Safety Last! (1923), the fourth and still most famous feature from the acrobatic silent comedy superstar.