Back to the Woods

The story is that Harold Lloyd abandoned his moderately successful 'Lonesome Luke' character and started up his familiar 'Glasses' character in order to do something different than the Chaplin-derived baggy-pants slapstick of the era. Well, if so, he still hadn't found his way yet to his classic comedies of the following decade.

In this one, he and Snub going camping up in the wilds, where they run into bears, mountain lions, a skunk, and Bebe Daniels and her gun, who falls for Harold's City Slicker ways. There isn't much beyond a few mechanically executed gags and Snub shaking in terror at the mountain lion. One of the bears gives the most amusing performance in the movie. For completists only.

Until the early 1920s, Harold Lloyd was a prolific but very forgettable film comedian. He made a ton of short films from 1913-1920 but most are only fair to middling in quality...and you'd probably never suspect he'd go on to be the most popular comedian of the 1920s based on these early films. "Back to the Woods" is a bit better than average for Lloyd during this period...but that doesn't mean it's exactly a must-see film.

Like other films of the era, his co-star is Snub Pollard and Bebe Daniels is along for the ride...a familiar trio in a not so familiar setting. Here, the setting is the American West and Snub and Harold are city boys in an unfamiliar surrounding. Most of the laughs concern wild bears but these and the rest of the laughs are only mildly funny. Instead, I see it more as a training ground for the later Lloyd....and so I recommend this film mostly to huge Lloyd fans...of which I've been one for many years.

If it wasn't for the commentary of this short film in 'Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy' I wouldn't have enjoyed it. Harold Lloyd short films meant absolutely nothing to an 80's generation audience in the UK because he was a silent comedian. With the commentary he was transported into a talking era.