Haunted Spooks

Harold Lloyd desperately wants to get married. After being rejected for the hundredth time, he repeatedly attempts to kill himself until he runs into a lawyer whose client (Mildred Davis) has to get married in order to inherit money. The other requirement before she can get the inheritance: she and her husband have to spend a year in her uncle's mansion. The twist: it's haunted! Not really, but I wonder how far this basic plot goes back. It would be wrong of me not to mention that the film can come off as pretty racist, and that title means pretty much what you think it means. Black people, it turns out, are especially afraid of ghosts. But, hey, it was 1920, and, honestly, Lloyd and Davis are almost as scared as the black people (though their eyes don't bug out quite as much), and the second half of the film, with all the characters running around the mansion being scared by people covered in bedsheets, is hilariously madcap.

This plot-packed and enjoyable but, ultimately, minor Harold Lloyd short gained some unexpected notoriety when the great comedian was seriously injured in an explosion during a publicity stunt for the film which cost him the loss of two fingers and necessitated the installation of prosthetics.

It starts off with frequent Lloyd co-star (and future wife) Mildred Davis inheriting an estate - on the condition that she's married and that she stays on the premises for a whole year. Soon, her greedy relatives begin to scheme how to drive her out - but, first, her lawyer determines to find her a husband opting, naturally, on Harold (once again suicidal over a failed romance). This first half provides the film with many of its best moments, as the latter section - relocating to Mississippi - mainly resorts to some crude racist humor and overly familiar ghostly 'manifestations'.

This was my third time viewing the film - the first as an extra on Image's DVD of the Silent version of THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927) and the second on TCM, as part of a Harold Lloyd marathon in anticipation of the release of this same 7-Disc collection, when I was in Hollywood late last year; actually, I liked it better this time around, hence I upped the rating from **1/2 (besides, back then, I wasn't as familiar with the star's short films as I am now)!

This short demonstrates all of Harold Lloyd's irreverence, his charm and his comic ability. Unfortunately, compared to others of his films, it does downplay his physical agility and he never finds the opportunity to climb a skyscraper.

The familiar setup is Harold's determination to meet the girl of his dreams and get married, coupled with the cliche of the heiress who must live up to the conditions of a will and visit a "haunted" mansion. Count on Lloyd to make the most of every opportunity for a laugh that comes his way.

Having seen this with a modern audience, I know that people today are distressed by the portrayals of African Americans in the film. That's really too bad, because the little black kid in this film proves himself a comedian easily on a par with Lloyd himself.

People say Lloyd is not as profound as Chaplin - maybe so, but wasn't the goal of a comic to make people laugh? That was something Lloyd could do that Chaplin couldn't - and it was, after all, the name of the game.

One unfortunate thing: I think you have to accept the jokes at african-americans expense as a (bad) product of the time and laugh at the other things in this film - and there are some really great gags in it, like the sequence where Lloyd's Boy tries to kill himself.

I can't see why Lloyd doesn't get greater distribution, and its a shame he isn't as well known as Chaplin, not to mention the brilliance of Buster Keaton, virtually unknown to the present generation of movie-goers, when Charlie Chaplin is a household name, even if many people never would have seen his (apparently - have not seen yet) great features. Certainly, when comparing only shorts of the three comics, I would rank them in order of humour: Keaton, Lloyd, Chaplin; and cleverness: Keaton, Lloyd, Chaplin. Even the plots of the former two are more advanced and interesting than those of Chaplin.

I found this 25-minute Harold Lloyd short to be better and better as it went on. As with a number of silent film comedy shorts, it starts slow and finishes fantastically. This was great not just in the end from the halfway point on, filled with numerous nonsense. It reminded of many Three Stooges films in which the boys wind up in some hotel or house or castle where guys are trying to scare them off with skeleton outfits, gorillas, etc. Those are always funny, and so is this movie. Maybe it inspired some of that Stooges lunacy in the next decade.

Here, Harold - to get the girl, naturally - has to do something: in this case, visit a haunted mansion, where a few people are waiting to scare him away. Hey, that was better than trying to kill himself, which he unsuccessfully did in some humorous scenes in the first half of the movie.

Overall: good laughs.