The actor: Harold Lloyd's reaction shots

A memorable Harold Lloyd reaction shot from Girl Shy. Harold plays a yokel whose book "How to Make Love" has just been rejected by a publisher as ridiculous and worthless. But his expression isn't a reaction to that humiliation. This was his one chance to win a very wealthy girl he has fallen in love with, and that dream has just turned to dust.  

This scene proves what Hal Roach famously said: "Harold Lloyd was not a comedian. But he was the best actor playing a comedian who ever lived." Any dramatic actor would be hard-pressed to sustain scenes of emotional distress with such skill. 

He himself didn't think he was very funny, but he could "do" funny superbly. His pathos never turned to bathos, as sometimes happened with Chaplin (whose films are much more dated than Harold's). And as Roach said, Harold was a plausible leading man whose romantic quests weren't vaguely creepy or driven by pity.

Harold didn't wear a clown suit or pull faces or do any of the things silent comics did to get a laugh. He was an ordinary person caught up in extraordinary circumstances, and his complete inability to cope brought the audience on-side like nothing else. But when he triumphed in the end, all of our own failed fantasies were brilliantly realized. 

And one more thing - he always got the girl.

Screenshots: Harold in stop motion

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This may not look like much to you (and, in fact, it isn't), but for me it represents something big: my first attempt to capture stills from video. I never even tried this for years, because every time I went on a site to find out how to do it, the instructions seemed more and more complex and full of bafflegab (not to mention contradictory, with everyone describing a different method). Then, bingo, I found a page today where you only have to highlight, copy, paste, and click. 

Et voila! You have a screenshot.

The thing of it is, though, that taking a series of screenshots and then putting them back together into an animation is kind of - well, it's a little redundant. An exercise, at best. I tell myself: honest to God, I can't help but learn something about REAL animation this way. But a gif would do just as well, wouldn't it? Or better.

But perhaps not. This way I can edit scenes, add characters, use title cards, include surreal images, and all manner of other stuff, once I know what I'm doing.

This is a kind of stop motion Harold cartoon. Claymation, if you will. His middle name was Clayton, after all. I have fantasies of manipulating this little clay figure, making him do things, even things he doesn't want to do. . . time to go to bed, Margaret.

Makeagif is NOT working again!

While I didn't exactly lie, I was premature in saying Makeagif was working again.

It still don't work worth shit.

So I am stuck with Imgur, which is quite a bit trickier to use and makes HUGE gifs that are harder to download/manage. But on the plus side, the resolution is much better. It seems to crop the gifs rather oddly however. I have no control over that. And the maximum you get is 15 seconds, which means my favorite Lloyd reaction from this movie (Never Weaken) is shortened. The entire reaction shot lasts nearly half a minute, one of the longest I've seen in any comedy, and yet more proof that Harold had the best acting chops of any of them.

But no more 20-second gifs. Makeagif appears to be permanently fucked.

I've made this gif over and over again, and never quite get it right. This one has a bit of the street below in it, which I both like and don't like. This one was actually probably made with Gifsforum (do I hear taps playing? I used to love them, then they disappeared.) It's hard to tell the difference, though the Imgur one is, like, 700 pixels wide or something. Oh, who gives a fuck!

One of the best reaction shots in film history

 

Farewell cruel world: Harold Lloyd's suicide gags

The way I feel today

 

Harold Lloyd, Freemason: just a dull men's club?

I keep thinking I've gotten to the bottom of the barrel of craziness that surrounds Harold Lloyd. Not a bit of it. Here is a piece almost as strange as the "psychic bridging" site I found years ago while still writing the novel, then couldn't find again, ever. It disappeared in the night. The psychic bridging was some sort of time travel or remote viewing, where supposedly you could see into any era or period of time while remaining in the present. Harold Lloyd's name was mentioned in the piece in a most alarming way. The writer said he "became self-detached during filming" in the 1940s (he did make his last film in that time) and had to be hospitalized. But why, how - wtf?? 

Anyway, it all disappeared, and I never did find out if Harold worked for the CIA during the Cold War or what. Being as he was Imperial Potentate of the Shrine, Shriners being  Freemasons on steroids, there is much to indicate that he had more than a passing relationship with mysticism. That doesn't mean he appears in my living room at night (oh dang, I wasn't going to tell anybody).

I swear I didn't write the following piece, but it interests me, because with all his Masonic orientation (from his late 20s until the end of his life), there might be some sort of subconscious symbolism working its way out in this brilliant, but admittedly very strange movie with the oh-so-Lloydian title, Never Weaken.

Anyway, Just Wondering, whoever you are, I am lifting a piece of this article (which I have since realized has been reblogged all over the place, so who knows where it really came from) because I like it. I will offer my own interpretation shortly.

The Hanged Man Of Tarot In Popular Culture

What do Harold Lloyd, Ringo Starr, and Eddie Van Halen all have in common?

They've all appeared in movies or videos as "a man hanging upside-down from a rope by one leg and crossing the other leg".

That would be quite a coincidence if they were not all mimicking the same thing, The Hanged Man, which is the twelfth card in the Tarot deck.

Harold Lloyd is hoodwinked but then "enlightened" in the short film "Never Weaken" (1921).

 
Harold Lloyd's "Never Weaken" (1921) is full of masonic imagery.  He sits in a chair and blindfolds himself to commit suicide, but is lifted up through the air by a construction girder.  He hears harp music and takes off his blindfold to see a beautiful angel.  Only when he hears jazz does he realize that the angel is not real and he is not in heaven but high above the street and about to fall to his death.  He makes it back to safety.

In masonic terms, he is initiated by sitting in a throne, being hoodwinked, facing death, and being deceived.  He is a "hanged man", suspended on a steel beam between life and death.  He is then enlightened to a higher plane of understanding when the veil is lifted from his eyes and he perceives reality.

There is also a ring-on-a-string marriage ritual, a blood ritual, and a lot of focus on men's rear ends.

Everyone remembers Harold Lloyd hanging from a clock in Safety Last (1923) but nobody seems to remember the next scene where he swings upside-down from a rope by one leg:

Not bad stunts for a man who lost his thumb and forefinger four years earlier.

Harold Lloyd swinging from a rope with one leg bent in "Safety Last".

There are bank and stock exchange signs in the background, six years prior to the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Get it?  It's predictive programming:  Safety Last-taking huge risks-bank-stock exchange-patriotic flag-nobody gets hurt-happy ending.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. I think all that blindfold/shooting-yourself-in-the-heart-for-love stuff is darkly erotic, as is the long, funny but rather disturbing chain of suicide gags (in which he goes to the dictionary to check the spelling of a word - sepulchre - in his suicide note). The helplessness of the blindfold, his chair being suspended in mid-air, the stone angel and harp music, the ecstatic and almost orgasmic facial expression as he unmasks himself and reaches out for Eternity. . . well, it's all pretty sexy as far as I am concerned. Then that immortal scene of realization that he. Isn't. In. Heaven. At. All. 

There is blood in this, yes, actual blood, when he pricks his finger trying to impale himself on one of those spikes they used to stick notes on. Is this an unconscious (pun intended) reference to Sleeping Beauty fatally pricking her finger on a spindle? He does swoon in another scene, losing consciousness, almost falling out of his chair. If you want to look for Freudian flying/falling/bleeding/dying/surrealistic/Masonic/angelic/phallic symbols in this thing, you'll find them. It's chock-a-block.

As for being blindfolded,  Harold Lloyd was blind for a while, after the legendary accident which shaped the rest of his career/life. No one knew if he would ever see again, and one can imagine the terror, the helplessness of having to lie there, burned and maimed and blind. . . The joy and even ecstasy with which he reaches out for the Angel of Death in the movie might even reflect his profound desire to die and be done with this agony. Perhaps he even considered suicide himself: it's not a funny topic, but it somehow found its way into two of his movies. 

Well, why not a hanged man? He was into all that Masonic stuff, wasn't he? Magic shows, Tarot cards, deals with the devil? Haitian voodoo (no, that's me). God knows what else I'll find, that he was a polygamist or something, or worse than that, a Rotarian.

(Weird, weird stuff. . . I've been trying to post a gif of Harold suspended on the chair, and it keeps. . . disappearing. First it half-disappeared. This has never happened to me before, ever, in my entire career of fooling around with/making gifs. Then it just vanished, though a ghostly outline allows me to make it small, medium or large. BUT IT ISN'T THERE! I tried to put it back, and I can't put it back because, in fact, it is already there. . . I just can't see it.)

Further revelations on the Freemason Connection.  I decided to re-run this post because the subject is so fascinating, and I'm beginning to think it even has some truth in it. Harold was so deeply saturated in the ritual of the Shrine that they actually struck a coin with his likeness on it (don't worry, I'm not going to buy it, though it's tempting, only $35 on eBay). I also found, weirdness of weirdnesses, a whole lot of photos of an even stranger item, a Shriner scimitar - all part of that ritualistic stuff, and though it doesn't tell us what exactly the connection is, Harold Lloyd's name is associated with it. And it has a very strange handle. 

The flip side. We saw a picture of one of these on the bumper of a car recently, and I said, "oh look, a Freemason symbol," and my husband said, "no, that's an engineer's compass." So who knows. Who stole it from whom?

Kind of hard to believe all that evil conspiracy stuff when you see something like this.

I don't know what this is for sure, something painted on ivory or a plate or something? I forgot to keep the reference, and now I don't want to look it up again.

Harold having a whale of a time with Roy Rogers, Red Skelton and someone else famous, can't quite recognize him but he looks familiar. Harold Lloyd and Red Skelton. Skelton. Hmmmm. Or is it Red SKELETON? (You decide.)

Harold as Imperial Potentate, the chief honcho/Grand Poo-Bah of the Shrine. Not too shabby. I can't quite figure out if that's his Dad, the beloved Foxy, pointing to something. 

The boot-handled scimitar. Now THIS is weird. Sado-masochism, a foot fetish, jackboots, what? Did anyone ever USE the scimitar, and for what? Did this really belong to Harold, and why did it have a foot on the end of it? The questions never end.

Yikes!

Hmmmm. This looks a little bit like a prosthetic leg. Harold had a prosthetic hand. Just a coincidence? 

I. . . DON'T. . . THINK. . . SO!