Get Out and Get Under

I have a production still in which Harold Lloyd and producer/director Hal Roach are obviously having an enjoyable time embellishing a shooting script with gag after gag. Employing a cast as long as the memo Hal is holding, "An Eastern Westerner" incorporated more production values than the average feature.

What's more, Hal Roach's smoothly expansive direction certainly gives the lie to the often-repeated claim that as a director, he was second-rate.

If another proof of the absurdity of this claim was needed, you have only to look at another of Lloyd's 1920 two-reelers, namely this "Get Out and Get Under". This short is a superbly orchestrated and timed little comedy in which no expense seems to have been spared.

The camera really moves when appropriate and all the action is brilliantly staged.

Indeed, one of Lloyd's favorite props, a streetcar, figures in the action and the cast includes wonderful Sunshine Sammy Morrison who shares some hilarious "business" with Lloyd.

The Boy (Harold Lloyd) is getting his picture taken and it does not go well. He is proposing to The Girl (Mildred Davis), but the photographer tells him that she is marrying The Rival (Fred McPherson) that day. He is too late. Luckily, it's all a dream, but he's late for a theatrical performance. He gets in his car, but it's an eventful drive.

I would have liked to see this story without the dream reveal. It is a 25 minutes short so I don't know if he has the time to break up the married couple. I would like to see him try. This short ends up being a lot of car gags. It's fun, but the story can be anything if all Harold wants are car gags. Diving in to fix the engine is a fun visual gag. I'm sure they removed the engine to do that one. He is just breaking the law when he runs from the cops.

Fair Harold Lloyd short which presents several gags he would re-use and improve upon in his later feature films. It opens with a scene at a photographer's studio where Harold discovers that his girl Mildred Davis is about to marry another man - but it all turns out to have been just a dream. He's involved in amateur theatricals and, being late for a performance, rushes out to the venue in his beloved car: amid the vehicle's breaking down on him, he falls foul of an elderly neighbor and a colored child; the race-against-time, then, culminates in the usual pursuit by a horde of policemen. The automobile trouble eventually gets a bit repetitive, but the film nevertheless includes the occasional inspired and hilarious gag - such as when Harold 'disappears' inside the car's engine compartment, an actor accidentally falling off the stage (after being 'killed') promptly going back up to resume his performance i.e. affecting a typically melodramatic 'exit' and, especially, when Lloyd sees a junkie getting high in the street and reasons that, if he injects his vehicle with the same substance, it will be likewise revitalized - which is what happens, as the car goes off on its own soon after 'taking' its fix!

Get Out and Get Under (1920)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

A young actor (Harold Lloyd) must rush to get to his play but his car starts all sorts of trouble. There's a few nice laughs here, including some nice bits with a young kid and a dog but some of the gags don't work as well. There's some amazing stunts including one where Lloyd jumps out of the car while it continues down the road. Lloyd must then catch back up with it. Another scene has the car going through thousands of people, which looks quite amazing. This was one of Lloyd's first films after a bomb exploded in his hand, nearly killing him and in a few close ups you can still see the scars on his face.

This is one of Harold Lloyd's most enjoyable short comedies, but if things had turned out differently it might never have been made at all. Get Out and Get Under was one of the first films Lloyd appeared in after recovering from a freak accident that nearly claimed his life. In the fall of 1919, while Harold was posing for publicity photos, actor Nat Clifford innocently handed him what was believed to be a prop bomb; it turned out to be real, and when it exploded both men were badly injured. After a period of convalescence Harold resumed his career, but his still-healing facial scars are visible in his first close-up in this film, and if you watch his right hand carefully you can see that he's wearing a prosthetic device in place of the fingers lost in the explosion. Nat Clifford is here too, as the neighbor at work in his garden.

Despite the circumstances under which it was made Get Out and Get Under is a surprisingly cheerful comedy, though much of the humor relies on anxiety and frustration. Harold plays an actor in an amateur theater production trying to get to his show on time, but auto troubles and other problems hinder him every step of the way. After a somewhat measured opening the story builds in momentum and suspense, becoming funnier, loonier, and more surreal as it goes along. One bit involving the creative use of a pup tent is especially memorable. Some of the gags suggest routines identified with Buster Keaton, as when Harold makes a wrong turn and crashes a parade (as Buster would do in Cops) or is sidetracked into a railroad yard and gets doused by one of those water spouts (as Buster did several times). It all goes to show that there was a lot of borrowing and cross-fertilization in silent comedy; Lloyd certainly returned the favor and borrowed from Keaton on other occasions. In any event, our hero ultimately achieves his goal, wins the girl, and delivers a neat pay-off gag in time for the fade-out.

Modern viewers might be surprised at the sequence involving a drug addict Harold meets during his adventure; the man is actually shown injecting a substance, presumably cocaine, into his arm, leading to a routine reminiscent of Chaplin's Easy Street but with a surprise twist. (Oddly enough, prolific character actor William Gillespie played the dope fiend in both movies!) This sort of subject matter would become absolutely taboo when enforcement of the Production Code kicked in during the '30s, but jokes about illegal substances and drug addicts crop up fairly often in silent comedy. Also of note here is the presence of Ernie "Sunshine Sammy" Morrison, the first African- American kid in the Our Gang series, who plays the boy who insists on participating while Harold is trying to fix his engine. Sammy has an easygoing charm and naturalness before the cameras that is striking in this sequence.