The down-to-earth comic genius of Harold Lloyd

Lloyd’s bespectacled, unimposing “Glasses Character” inspired the creation of Superman’s mild-mannered alter ego Clark Kent; much further down the cultural stream, Harry Potter inherited the spectacles. In Bringing Up Baby, Cary Grant not only borrowed the glasses, but based his entire performance on Lloyd. (Lloyd’s glasses, like Clark Kent’s, were a kind of disguise, but in reverse; as he once exulted, “I can stroll unrecognized down any street in the land at any time without the glasses, a boon granted no other picture actor and one which some of them would pay well for.”)

Far and away Lloyd’s greatest single moment — an iconic image that has come to epitomize the whole world of silent comedy, recognized by nearly everyone whether or not they’ve ever heard of Lloyd — is the moment in Safety Last! (1923) in which Lloyd dangles from the hands of a giant clock face on the exterior of a building at least 10 stories above the streets of Los Angeles.

This immortal stunt has been referenced and spoofed many times, most famously in the climax of Back to the Future, with Doc Brown on the clock tower hanging from the hands of the clock. The homage is foreshadowed in the film’s celebrated opening shot, with all those ticking clocks in Doc Brown’s workshop — one of which includes a tiny Harold Lloyd figure dangling from one of its hands.

The influence of the clock scene can also be seen, for instance, in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), the Coens’ The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), and Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963). Jackie Chan, whose style of physical comedy owes a great deal to Lloyd, referenced the clock scene twice, in Project A (1983) and Shanghai Knights (2003).

Linking all of Lloyd’s best work is the Glasses Character. After struggling for years with the enormous influence of Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Lloyd hit on the idea of a persona defined not by his quirks or eccentricities, but precisely by his ordinariness. The Tramp creates absurdity just by being the Tramp; the Glasses Character — also called the Boy, and usually named Harold — is a likable, optimistic everyman who somehow finds himself in absurd situations through small missteps and lapses in judgment, often involving pretensions of being something he isn’t.

In Safety Last! he lands a lowly job at a department store, but leads his girl (Mildred Davis, Lloyd’s real-life wife) to believe he’s the manager of the store. In Girl Shy (1924) he writes a Don Juan’s how-to book on wooing various types of women despite being barely able to speak to girls in real life (his ridiculous manuscript is actually accepted for publication — as a satire). In The Freshman his efforts to be a popular BMOC make him a laughingstock. (Harold also tries out the nicknamed “Speedy” in The Freshman — his real nickname, given by his father.)

What always redeems Lloyd’s hero is that he never gives up and ultimately comes through in a crisis. In my favorite Lloyd film, The Kid Brother (1927), Lloyd plays Harold Hickory, the runt of a family of rugged mountain men whose paterfamilias is the sheriff of the eponymous town of Hickoryville. Harold’s pretensions of filling his father’s shoes lead to increasingly serious trouble until Harold finally admits his pretense to the girl (regular leading lady Jobyna Ralston), who gives him the encouragement he needs to rise to the occasion. In the thrilling climax, Harold saves the day and wins his father’s approbation (“Son, you’re a real Hickory”).

The Kid Brother is my favorite Lloyd film because it’s the ideal blend not only of all the tones and elements of Lloyd’s films — comic situations and gags, touching sentiment, clever conceits and brilliant stunts, action and high excitement — but of essentially the whole world of silent comedy. I couldn’t count how many times I have shown The Kid Brother to people who had never seen a silent film before; it never fails to make converts.

Lloyd’s films, like many silent comedies, make excellent family viewing. I’ve watched any number of Lloyd’s films with my children at various ages over the years, along with the films of Chaplin, Keaton and others, and everyone enjoys them. Unlike older viewers, children are, as C.S. Lewis once noted, “so terribly catholic” — so uncritically open to everything, from trash to masterpieces. Watching silents with children is like exposing them to another culture; it broadens their horizons, expands their imagination, enriches their inner world.

The plots are generally simple enough for children to follow with minimal explanation, and the silent format permits children to ask questions and adults to clarify and explain with little pausing and rewinding. We discuss them freely as they roll, providing our own impromptu commentary track. Over the years, the kids recall and repeat comments from earlier viewings, and our shared familial experience of the films deepens over time.

Compared to the work of Chaplin and Keaton, what makes Lloyd’s films special to me is Lloyd himself: his cheerful personality, his insecurities and anxieties, his boyish enthusiasm. He has an endearing quality reminiscent of a young Jimmy Stewart or Tom Hanks (or Jackie Chan).

Keaton is as dogged and relentless in pursuing his goals, but there’s a hangdog fatalism about Keaton’s characters. As for the Tramp, however his stories turn out, a sense of a tragic universe pervades his work. I empathize with Chaplin and Keaton, but I like Lloyd. Time spent with his films is like time spent with a friend.