Harold Lloyd: the lost tapes

I swear, I never thought I would get to see three seconds of the lost Harold Lloyd film, Professor Beware (1938). It was a movie that was shown maybe once on American TV, and then, for reasons unknown, buried.

Harold plays an Egyptologist who gets into all sorts of wacky situations, and the word is that he didn't like the movie very much and felt the gags were overly silly. Harold had a lot of pull with Howard Hughes in those days, not to mention William Randolph Hearst, the man who buried Citizen Kane, so if he wanted the movie pulled, it would be pulled.

That means that, in spite of a lot of promotional hoop-la, it was probably barely seen.

I have no idea where this snippet of video came from, and it seems to be part of a tribute to Sterling Holloway rather than Harold. It's a minute long, and doesn't tell me very much.

I've heard through the Rich Correll grapevine that Paramount owns Professor Beware now, but keeps it in a vault. Or maybe they destroyed it. I doubt I will ever get to see it, but then, a couple of years ago I came up completely dry, and now I have one minute of it!

The stills are magnificent, however. They are all I have.

(Nobody does dismay better than Harold Lloyd, and I notice in the stills that he's often slapping himself on the forehead, gasping and ducking his head. God, how I'd love to see this!)

It takes a train to cry

Inexplicably, after nearly giving up my Harold Lloyd Facebook page (in fact, after nearly giving up, period: ever feel kinda suicidal?), I find myself back in a Harold phase. This IS a blog about Harold Lloyd, after all. Which is why it is called The Glass Character: Harold's eccentric name for his bespectacled alter ego. If it branches in a few other directions (old ads, old cars, weird videos, masses of gifs, and MANY handmade animations), it always homes back in on him eventually.

Harold's specialty was panic. Barely-controlled panic, or not controlled at all. Here he panics with a train. The movie is called Now or Never, and I haven't seen it in a while, but it's funny. I had only three frames to work with here, so the action isn't too smooth. I seldom have more than two photos with the same background. He runs away from trains, he runs on top of trains, he hangs on to the sides of trains. All very good stuff.

I find this insanely beautiful!

Full Frontal Harold Lloyd!

Hair-raising!

All day, all night, Harold Lloyd

I think it started with this one. There didn't seem to be much scope for animation (if you can call it that), but that never stopped me before. The idea is that someone thinks this is a still picture, then. . . OOPS!

Similarly, this thing flips into reverse at the strangest times. This little doll was something you could win as a prize at theatres (I think) where Harold's movies were showing. There are lots of them on Pinterest and eBay, collectibles, though whether they're authentic or not is anybody's guess. The original doll was maybe 10" high and was made of oilcloth. The paper doll version, above, is likely a reconstruction.

I take no credit for these incredible Harold dolls, the likes of which I never saw while researching his life. They are on a site called Red Cap Art Dolls, links below. I might have been tempted then to buy one, and maybe stick pins in it when the novel ultimately failed. Oh well! There's something quite beautiful and something more than a little creepy about this Harold doll, not to mention effeminate. Dolls are innately creepy anyway, as I've covered in many a post. A human in miniature, they invite the best and worst kind of treatment from their owners. Come to that, it sounds like we're talking about children.

I found a total of four photos of the doll: two with hat, and two without. From the four, I made eight frames (reversing each of them to give me that added dimension of creepiness). Then, combining them every-which-way, Harold began to move, rigidly at first, clunkily, and then - as I sped up the frame speed and mixed it up a little - to dance.

http://lilliamslasher.deviantart.com/art/Harold-Lloyd-art-doll-651254316

https://www.facebook.com/redcapartdolls/

http://bluecat-neoguri.deviantart.com/art/Harold-Lloyd-1919-593856316

I am forever being blown away by the calibre of artwork on DeviantArt.com. I'm not trying to steal it! Really, not. Borrow it for a few seconds, maybe, to make hokey animations out of. Then give it back. But I want you to see this. This artist is called BlueCatNeoguri. He captures something essential about Harold, especially the hairline which is really difficult to "get". It's not a 21st century hairline, because it is combed straight back with a lot of pomade. That's what they did then, but because Harold had thick, black, unruly hair, it was forever falling out of that configuration. It was even curly when wet. That, and his blue-blue Welsh eyes (not apparent here) added to his sexiness.

I didn't make this at all - only made a gif out of an old YouTube video. In those days, meaning the 1920s, this was as good as you could get. There are still a few of these around, rocking back and forth spastically and wincing.  I hate to do this, but here is a closer shot:

Not a pretty sight. To get the taste of that one out of your mouth, here is one more by the brilliant BlueCatNeoguri of DeviantArt. Christ, how I wish I had talent!:

http://www.deviantart.com/

Harold Lloyd in 12 takes

 

 

 

 

 

Harold Lloyd: cropped and chopped

The experiment: cropping some of my thousand or so Harold Lloyd gifs (most of which I made myself over the thousand or so years I've been in love with him). It was an interesting experiment to remove all the extraneous material from these tiny little ten-second movies, and some worked out better than others. I didn't even think I could crop gifs, in fact I probably couldn't, until the apps or programs or whatever-they-are became more versatile/easier to use. Things that aren't dead-easy aren't in my internet vocabulary.

I ended up with gifs that are extremely tiny, 1/4 the size of most of them. If you blow them up very much, they're too blurry to bother with. In some cases the effect is startling: Harold's face is zoomed in a little too close for comfort. We're not used to seeing him on a screen the size of a postage stamp, but neither are we accustomed to looking so deeply into those expressive and slightly haunted eyes.

Harold's director Hal Roach famously said, "Harold Lloyd was not a comedian. But he was the best actor playing a comedian the world has ever seen." It's true that Harold's was the humour of humiliation, social awkwardness, rejection and pain. How he made humour out of that is anybody's guess. But the other "big two", Chaplin and Keaton, also used pathos and struggle to good effect, and turned it all into laughs. I think it was Jerry Lewis - whom I hate - who said, "Comedy is a man in trouble." About that, I think he had a point.