High and Dizzy

Dr. Hale (Harold Lloyd) is a bumbling new doctor out of medical school. Work is rare. A man and his daughter walk into his practice. Hale works hard to pretend to be busy. It's love at first sight for him and the sleepwalking beauty. The father is not impressed and quickly takes his daughter away. Hale ends up getting high and dizzy on his office neighbor's secret stash of moonshine. The two drunks go to the hotel where Hale encounters the sleepwalking girl on the ledge.

This has Lloyd's brand of physical comedy. It has his highrise stunts still at its primitive stage. This Hal Roach short film is a precursor to his masterpieces later on. There is a bit of bite to his character in this one. It's a fun introduction.

For much of the running time of this Harold Lloyd comedy, the quality of the story and the gags is somewhat uneven, but the last several minutes more than make up for any weaknesses. The whole movie is worth seeing, although for much of the time it alternates some very funny moments with more routine material. Later on, though, everything comes together in a finale that is funny, clever, and exciting.

Lloyd plays an inexperienced young doctor who falls in love with a patient played by Mildred Davis, and who then goes on a drinking binge with a friend played by Roy Brooks. There are some very funny gags in the 'drunk' sequence, and in particular the confrontation with the policeman features some very good timing and slapstick. The drunk act is slightly unusual material for Lloyd, and while most of the same things had already been done by screen comics like Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle who were particularly adept at it, much of it works here.

But it's the climactic sequence at the hotel that really makes "High and Dizzy" worthwhile. It's set up well, and it anticipates the more elaborate, brilliant sequence in "Safety Last". It also ties things together cleverly, and by saving the best for last, it turns a solid slapstick comedy into a very entertaining movie.

A tipsy doctor encounters his patient (Mildred Davis) sleepwalking on a building ledge, high above the street. A subplot has Lloyd and his friend (Roy Brooks) getting inebriated on homemade liquor and then trying to avoid a prohibition-era policeman who pursues them for being drunk.

Certain aspects of this film are clearly anticipating Lloyd's more famous skyscraper-scaling scenes in "Safety Last!" and this short would make a good pairing with that film. (Criterion matches it with "The Freshman", which is fine, too.) Another reviewer commented, "It's obvious Lloyd is talented, but was still learning what roles were going to work best for him down the road." The film is further described as "uneven". I suppose I can relate. While I like this one, I will easily agree it does not rank among Lloyd's best work.

Harold does his balancing act off the side of a building trick in this short, joined this time by wife-to-be Mildred Davis (or her stunt double). I didn't realise he performed this stunt in so many movies – this is the fourth I've seen – but it still leaves you with your heart in your mouth when you see him waving his arms wildly as he's perched on the very edge above a multi-storey fall. No doubt it was largely done with clever camera angles, but it still looks good, especially when Harold's drunken character doesn't realise the danger he's in.

He plays a doctor in this one, and given his propensity for binge drinking and chain-smoking he could have stepped straight out of the pages of a red-top tabloid. He's not the most ethical of doctors either, declaring his undying love for his patient (the aforementioned Davis) within moments of meeting her. For some reason he feels it's important to pretend he has lots of patients and adopts a number of disguises to do so, even though his real patient is already sitting in the waiting room.

After a while the action shifts to his friend's office down the hall. He's a home-brewing enthusiast, and when the corks start popping off the bottles he's got stashed in a filing cabinet, he and Harold decide its best to drink them all rather than let them go to waste. Lloyd makes a pretty funny drunk: not as funny as Chaplin maybe, but then he's not as spiteful either, even though he does do some distinctly un-Lloyd-like things while under the influence. In fact at times he's quite removed from the boyish, straw-hat sporting Lloyd we usually see. There's no real plot to speak of, but, given the strength of the material, Lloyd probably didn't feel he needed one…

I watched and taped all of TCM's tribute to Harold Lloyd last year, and have recently been working my way through the last few items I taped but hadn't watched. Wanting to turn my girlfriend on to Lloyd, I asked her to watch this short, made after he had established his "glasses character" but before he made the move to longer, feature-length films. HIGH AND DIZZY is the perfect introduction to Harold Lloyd's brand of comedy. As a doctor with few patients (he has cobwebs on his office phone), Lloyd shows great personal charm and the gags are brilliantly devised to move fast yet work a routine in every possible way before moving on from it. For instance, one scene where Lloyd helps his friend (they are both inebriated) put on a coat, and there is a telephone pole between the man's back and his coat, occurs naturally in the plot sequence, is milked every possible way for about thirty or forty seconds, and then leads to another ridiculous situation. The whole film is that well-constructed. Lloyd's great physical skills are in evidence throughout. Of course, there has to be a "danger" element in a Lloyd film, so here he (and his sleepwalking female patient) are put on a ledge. A drunken man AND a sleepwalker on a ledge about twenty stories high! Now THAT is a brilliant set-up for comedy. The clarity of the copy of the film provided to TCM by the Lloyd estate is sparkling, and Robert Israel's musical score, which subtly works sound effects (pratfalls, ringing telephones) into the musical compositions, helps to move the film along and also helps people not used to watching silent films to appreciate what is happening. It's sometimes hard to get an average person to watch a feature-length silent film, so HIGH AND DIZZY might be the perfect short to show someone as an example of Harold Lloyd's dazzling comedy genius. I heard a rumor that SAFETY LAST may be shown theatrically in 2005--let's hope that's true. Imagine how wonderful it will be to see Harold Lloyd's most famous "thrill comedy" on the big screen!