Girls. . .
Girls-girls. . .
GIRLS - GIRLS - GIRLS!!
Harold always liked to up the ante. For him, more was always better. I think these shots are from one of his early talkies, The Milky Way, in which he plays a milkman who is accidentally catapulted to fame as a prizefighter. How he ends up with all these dames we'll never know, but he sure looks happy.
Harold loved women - he made no secret of it, and liked to photograph them - nude - in 3D. If I had the guts I'd post some of his nude shots of pinup girls like Bettie Page. The family isn't trying to hide any of this, as they put out a coffee-table-type book of his 3D Nudes a decade or so ago. The poses are spectacularly hokey, early Playboy with a touch of surrealism. The book comes with hokey 3D spectacles that don't work very well. Actually, MY copy, which I bought used from Amazon, didn't have the spectacles and I had to use the ones that came with the DVD boxed set, The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection.
I think I've posted this before, but I have a feeling no one reads this stuff every single day of their lives and thus MIGHT have missed it. I couldn't help but see a certain eerie similarity between these two photos.
Very early Woody Allen does bear a kind of resemblance to Lloyd, without the physical feats (though apparently Woody Allen was a talented ball player who played down his athletic prowess because it didn't fit his nerdy image). He's hapless and misunderstood, but somehow or other by the end of the picture, he always gets the girl.
By the way, Woody Allen was for some reason not interested in getting involved in the biopic which will be adapted from The Glass Character. I'll just have to go to Marty or Clint (or Ronnie or Steve).
These are Lloyd candid shots. This is what he did between takes or while waiting for his girl friend. He was a sly devil and to me, always looked a bit seductive.
Making up for The Kid Brother, a tender, lyrical movie that is in my top six Lloyd favorites. The reissued movie has a score by Carl Davis that makes me cry.
Harold was a non-drinker who ran to ice cream floats. There was something of the earnest Midwestern boy in him that was endearing, though it did include a petulant temper. Last night I watched Kevin Brownlow's documentary The Third Genius (again!) and was charmed by the way his Nebraskan accent popped out in certain places. "Forehead" came out something like "foah-hayyd". In Movie Crazy, I remember him exclaiming, "The stock market crayyshed!"
OK, so I lied - I'm going to post some of the nude shots! These are almost decorous by today's standards, and the frontal shots never show much below the waist. The women look to me like skin sculptures, or maybe a 12-year-old boy's vision of what a nude woman might look like. He liked some meat on his women, which is commendable. Today's 6-foot-tall, stick-thin models probably wouldn't interest him.
Yes, yes, I told you they were weird! Maybe all those buckles did it for him, who knows.
Uhhhhh. . .
It must have taken him quite a lot of effort to get that spider on the wall.
(POST-POST: I just had the most evil thought about The Milky Way. It sounds like the title for Milky the Clown's memoirs, or perhaps a religion where thousands of devotees in clown suits drink poisoned Twin Pines milk and die in a heap.)
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