Woody Allen: Harold Lloyd's bastard son?

This one is so weird, I can hardly believe what I'm seeing in front of my gritchy little eyes.

I've been getting over some vicious bug I caught in San Francisco (where I left my heart, not to mention my wallet). It has its barbed hooks into my immune system, so that nearly four weeks later I feel almost as lousy as I did at the start.

So I haven't been blogging very much. But I stumbled on something that I think is both cool, and very very strange.

I don't know what movie this was taken from: Harold still has an intact right hand (which was blown apart in a freak accident in 1919), so it must be a very early one. Certainly not The Freshman, though that headgear doesn't look like any football helmet I ever saw.

The robot from Sleeper is wearing some sort of a colander on his head without too many holes in it, but still. The whiteface, the dark frames. . . even the tux, coz Harold was often dressed up in his movies.

Like this:

Can you imagine Woody Allen without his glasses? Ditto Harold, who called himself the Glass Character because the glasses were crucial to the development of his movie persona.

But the resemblance runs deeper than that.

If it weren't for his Gentile-ity, I'd say Harold looked like Woody's uncle or something. Who'd a thunk it?

Okayfine, let's acknowledge that from the very beginning Harold had leading-man good looks with a sort of Barrymore profile (and a chin that would later help Gregory Peck make it in Hollywood. Not to mention Jon Hamm.) But lots of girls and women have lusted after Woody, at least until the Mia Farrow debacle which kind of turned the whole thing upside-down.

               

There's something sort of disturbing about both these photos. Harold Lloyd telegraphed his emotions chiefly through his eyes, which were not obscured but magnified by those magic glasses. At times, it was as if you were looking right down into the depths of his soul, and it wasn't a very happy place. I won't even comment on Woody, who has made an industry of his existential despair.

Yes. On the set, there is a certain sense of being in charge which seems totally at odds with the nerdy characters they portray on film.

Is it such a stretch? Maybe not, though facially they aren't all that similar. I always thought Woody Allen resembled a pastrami sandwich on Russian black bread with mustard dripping out the sides. Lloyd is more like a Maserati. (It's my blog and I'll mix my metaphors if I want to.)

Speaking of hybrids. . .cross a red-headed Jew with a famous comic Gentile, and what do you get? Woody, I'm sorry to tell you this, but your Mom had a naughty little secret.

Look, everybody: it's Harold Lloyd!

It's not every day that you open a dusty old book and discover a treasure trove of sheer magic.

But the laws of the probable can take an unlikely turn, if the subject matter happens to be Harold Lloyd.

Though I finished writing my Lloyd-inspired novel The Glass Character about a year ago, my research (if you can call such an enjoyable pursuit research) continues. I just keep winkling out more books, most of them very old and long out of print. On a Harold Lloyd message board, I saw a discussion of a book called Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy by William Cahn. I had never heard of the title or the author, but I started digging on the internet, and before I knew it I was ordering a copy.

It's sad but understandable why most books about Harold Lloyd are yellowed and musty and rather out of date. For a very long time he was viewed through a pretty inferior pair of glasses (so to speak). He was always seen as a distant third to Chaplin and Keaton, which confounds me every time I watch one of his charming and wonderfully-crafted pictures. 

There's only one reason I love Harold Lloyd so much (well, two, but I'll get to the other one): he makes me laugh. He makes me laugh myself teary-eyed, and gasp as I laugh, at his subtlety and insight and tremendous gift for creating audience identification.

But for decades, it seemed that nobody knew where to place him in film history except as an "also-ran". Richard Schickel wrote an unflattering book about him several years after his death, so I guess that was considered the last word on the subject.

Someone had the gall to say he "lacked tenderness",a barb which was completely inaccurate (for obviously that critic had never seen Girl Shy or The Kid Brother). He was labelled a "go-getter", for reasons that still confound me. Go-get what? All his struggles were motivated by love, usually unrequited love, which is why critics now believe that Harold Lloyd invented the genre of romantic comedy.

I don't know why it has taken all these decades to blow the dust off this magnificent comedic legend and restore him to his rightful place. That brings me to the other reason I love him so much: he is sweet and fierce and almost supernaturally beautiful, as witness the photos in this post. And he stayed that way all his life.

Today I received a fat brown parcel in the mail, an old cloth-bound book with no cover on it and that mellow, old-papery smell that I love. It was the Cahn book, dated 1964. I began to flip through it, disappointed that the photos were so small, and most of them not even of Lloyd.

When I isolated and tinkered with a tiny, smudgy photo of his famous glasses, however, they leaped off the page and almost scared me. These are the glasses that transformed Lloyd from a so-so Chaplin imitator into a comic genius, not just for the silent era but for all time.

What a shock! They're hardly there. Though they look dark on-screen, they appear delicate, with no glass in them,  and when I lightened the exposure, I saw that they weren't black at all but tortoise-shell. It's eerie to look at these: you're seeing the essence of a unique talent, someone who knew that an everyman figure would engage audiences as never before. It's as if his antics, struggles and disappointments say to his viewers, "Has this ever happened to you?" Ah, yes - it has - and that's precisely why we laugh so hard.

I had a bonus surprise when I opened the book: a yellowed, very neatly-creased newspaper clipping fell out of the middle. It's a review that appeared in the Washington Star on Sunday, January 8, 1978, not of the Cahn book but of another Lloyd biography by Adam Reilly (which I also have). Is this a sign? Of what, I wonder? There was something a little spooky about this, and the strange little masthead stub that the reader must have used for a book mark.

Who originally owned this book, and carefully preserved that neatly-clipped, yellowed review? Obviously it was a Harold fan, perhaps long dead. I look at the clipping now and realize it's unlikely anyone has seen it for 34 years. But when I take a closer look, I see something even more bizarre. That little Evening Star "bookmark" is dated August 24, 1964, making it nearly half a century old. 

Why this enigmatic time capsule; what could it mean? Why do such strange things always seem to happen around Harold Lloyd?

Harold, you pop up in the darndest places.

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Who's The Artist here?

The Artist is a 2011 French romance film directed by Michel Hazanavicius, starring Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo. The story takes place in Hollywood between 1927 and 1932 and focuses on a declining male film star and a rising actress, as silent cinema grows out of fashion and is replaced by the talkies. Much of the film itself is silent; it is shot in black-and-white, and has received wide praise from critics and many accolades. Dujardin won the Best Actor Award at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, where the film premiered. The film has six Golden Globe nominations, the most of 2011.

Swashbuckling silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) attends the premiere of his latest film A Russian Affair. Outside the theater, Valentin is posing for pictures for the paparazzi when a woman, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), admiring Valentin while lost in a sea of adoring fans, drops her purse. She bends down to get it, but is accidentally pushed into Valentin. She ends up photographed, and the next day, she is on the front page of Variety with the headline "Who's That Girl?".

Later, Miller auditions as a dancer and is spotted by Valentin. He insists she have a bit in his new film, despite objections from the studio boss, Al Zimmer (John Goodman). Peppy slowly rises in the industry, her roles growing larger and larger.

Two years later, Zimmer announces the end of production of silent films, but Valentin insists that sound is just a fad. When Zimmer unloads all his silent stars, George decides to produce and direct his own silent film, financing it himself. It opens on the same day as Miller's new sound film, and Valentin is ruined.

His wife, Doris (Penelope Ann Miller), kicks him out, and he moves into an apartment with his valet, Clifton (James Cromwell). Miller goes on to become a major Hollywood star. Later, Valentin fires Clifton and sells off all his effects. Desperate and drunk, Valentin starts a fire in his home. His dog gets help and he awakes in a bed in Miller's house.

Clifton is now working for Miller. Miller insists that Valentin co-stars in her next film, or she will quit Zimmer's studio. After Valentin learns that Miller had purchased all of his auctioned effects, he has a nervous breakdown and returns to his burnt-out apartment. Miller arrives, panicked, as Valentin is attempting suicide.

Peppy and George reconcile, and remembering that he is a superb dancer, she convinces Zimmer to let them make a musical together, and the picture ends with the implication that Valentin will return to fame again. In the final shot, the sound finally comes in as the film starts rolling. Afterwards, Zimmer calls 'Cut! Perfect. Beautiful. Could you give me one more?'. Valentin, in his first audible line, replies in a clearly French accent, "With pleasure", revealing the reason he refused to speak on camera.

OK then. . . Wiki has spoken.


I watched this movie last night, but only because somebody I know had a copy of it. (Never mind.) The premise seemed strange, especially in light of the fact that movies have already thoroughly covered this ground (most notably, Singin' in the Rain, often called the best movie musical ever made.)

Expectations were high, because I can't seem to find a bad review of this thing anywhere.  Critics are falling all over themselves calling it a masterpiece. And it is "different", for sure: at first you think there's something wrong with the sound track, that they've left out the vocal element (and believe me, I've seen that before), creating a very frustrating scenario of mouths moving without any words.

This Valentin guy (and by the way, his obviously-French name immediately gives away the "secret" of his having an accent and thus being unable to speak in a movie, ha-ha) sort of looks like a lot of other people, including one of the best dancers in human history. The final dance sequence in The Artist reminds me of two dinosaurs lumbering around. Anyone familiar with "real" musicals of the '30s will wince at this.

Or maybe they won't! Sometimes I wonder if critics get together on this and just decide they're going to rave, no matter what the quality (or lack of it) of the movie they're reviewing. Then the public, embarrassed that they might look like they're not "getting" it, do an "emperor's new clothes" thing and pretend like mad that they love it.

This thing was pallid and uninteresting, and very predictable. The plot was maybe five minutes' worth of ground which had been covered many times before. I got tired of seeing Valentin's impressive but obviously tampered-with set of teeth as he constantly grinned and laughed, then watching his increasingly-threadbare suits as his career hit the skids.

What could be more cliched than this story, I wonder? I've been watching a lot of Harold Lloyd lately (again!), and once more I've been amazed at his versatility, at the many different Harolds he played, all convincingly: the country bumpkin, the rich hypochondriac, the girl-shy tailor's apprentice, the timid department store clerk scaling the heights of a tall building, the movie fan trying his luck in Hollywood, the Chinese missionary, the . . . but we'll stop there.

This is real movie magic. 

Ironically, not unlike Valentin, Harold Lloyd struggled to find a place for himself in sound film and made several movies that did well, but never equalled the dizzying box-office heights of The Freshman or Safety Last! His was a 1920s character, one who (in the words of his longtime director Hal Roach) "couldn't age". In Movie Crazy, he played a 40-year-old man living with his parents. His voice wasn't awful, but it was nothing special and had no resonance, sometimes making him sound a bit like Jiminy Cricket.

Obviously, The Artist is a sort of smudged photocopy of this story. You may have figured out by now that the photos in the first half of this post aren't all of the same man. Can you guess who's mixed in with Valentin? If you stirred them all together, might you have something like his character in The Artist?

(Sorry, I threw Ernie Kovacs in there because he had nice teeth and a moustache.)

This is just one of those cases where I don't get it. The thing may well get Best Picture this year, and then even more people will flock to see it and declare it a masterpiece.

But why not rent The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection and see some real silent classics? And if not Harold, get hold of some Douglas Fairbanks or (OK, I won't give the last one away, but he sure did know how to dance).

The Artist is a gimmicky thing without much substance to it. Yes, it looks good, but why not watch Top Hat and see some real choreography (by Hermes Pan!), some glorious costuming and splendid art deco sets?

Don't people know the difference any more?

And since silent film is so frickin' hot right now, when is Hollywood going to take a serious look at The Glass Character and make a real movie out of it?

I'm just sayin'.


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