Welcome Danger

Don't get me wrong, I love Harold Lloyd - both his talkies and silents. However, "Welcome Danger" was a real disappointment. It was Lloyd's first talking picture, started as a silent. When he finished he realized that sound had "arrived" and reshot it as a talking picture.

The awkwardness of the picture is no worse than any other early sound film, but the big problem is Harold's persona. As usual, he is the eager beaver trying to make good, but for some reason he makes his character out to be one of the most annoying personalities in film history. He is outright mean to people who really don't deserve it.

Lloyd plays Harold Bledsoe, a college student studying botany. His father is chief of police in San Francisco. After his father dies, Harold returns home to help the force with a crime wave in Chinatown. However, he becomes fascinated with fingerprint technology and soon has the department tied in knots with all of his cataloguing and fingerprinting. Soon the police department that welcomed him so heartily would do anything to get him out of their collective hair.

It is a shame this isn't on DVD because it is not THAT bad, and it is an important milestone in cinema history since it was Lloyd's very first talking picture. "Feet First" was his second talking effort, and a much better film too. One of the real treats of this film is an unbilled appearance by Edgar Kennedy as a desk sergeant in the San Francisco police department. He spends a long time on screen for him to have no credit whatsoever, but he does a wonderful job of playing the irascible beat cop we see in his later films.

This film was started as a silent and finished as a sound film. One would expect, then, to see some classic Lloyd "silent" comedy sequences, but this is a very disappointing and largely unfunny film. Lloyd's hallmark was always fresh, original, well-worked-out visual gags, but the poorly timed shenanigans here often remind one of something below the Three Stooges: the Bowery Boys, maybe. In virtually every other Lloyd film, regardless of whether he was shy, cocky, a success or a bumbler, his character was always inventive, thinking up ingenious solutions to the problems he found himself in. In this film, much of the humor is based on his simple stupidity. There are endless really primitive early action gags: one character gets the bad guys to chase him while the another stands behind a large crate and bats them on the head as they go by; a character takes a swing with a club to hit someone in front of him and accidentally hits someone creeping up behind him; a friend puts his hand on Lloyd's shoulder so he won't get lost in the dark, but when Lloyd gets back into the light the hand on his shoulder is that of a foe. These and other familiar lightweight gags abound, and the Lloyd's imaginative building of original gags is nowhere to be seen. In addition, nearly identical weak gags are sometimes repeated several times in a row. The bumbling around in a chinatown basement just seems interminable.

What happened? Lloyd's films before and after this one are all classics of top-notch comedy. This is a lapse that's unique in Lloyd's career.

There are actually two different versions of this film available. Yes, Lloyd re-shot a lot of his silent footage and released it as a "talkie". But he also released the silent version to the overseas markets and to theaters not yet wired for sound. While the story remains the same, the two versions are quite different in several areas.

I recently had the privilege of seeing the silent version restored by Jere Gulden of the UCLA Film & Television archives with a new score by Robert Israel at the Motion Picture Academy.

I enjoyed it. While not as good as the classic Lloyd films like "Safety Last", "The Freshman" and my personal favorite, "The Kid Brother", it's still pretty good and I think is superior to the sound version, particularly in the use of music. Also, it seems like once Lloyd found sound, sometimes he didn't know when to shut up. There are some nice moments in the sound version, but by 1928 Lloyd really knew what he was doing with silence and I think this version is superior.

Barbara Kent provides a nice, though tiny love interest (her bio says she was only 4'11). The scene in which Lloyd, without knowing she is the girl in the picture, goes on and on how beautiful she is, is heart warming and romantic. It plays so much better in the silence. Kent was brought back for Lloyd's "Feet First".

Just a note: the great Edgar Kennedy only appears in the sound version. He replaces the desk Sargent from the silent movie.

Hopefully they will soon release both versions on one DVD, similar to what they did with the two versions of "The Big Sleep" (war and post war versions).

Harold Lloyd's first talkie is a take on the always popular genre of a seemingly buffoonish, and klutzy inspector who solves the big case while acting the fool. First of all, the movie works, basically. Secondly, it fails to heed the unwritten rule of comedy "Keep them wanting more". Every gag is funny the first time, the second time but the third, fourth and fifth... NO!!! Despite this, Lloyd is funny and symphathetic. But I must comment, something was lost when Lloyd went to sound. It's like hearing him talk took away some of his movie star magic, a little star dust faded astern. He also seems to be slumming it, more interested in keeping his fans and his star status than making genuine great comedies. That said, the side kick inspector is good, and the final twenty minutes though a bit draggy is very funny. I laughed a number of times through that sequence. And the final shot and line is what the silent Harold Lloyd comedies were all about. It's a pity we don't get more of that in this movie.

Welcome Danger was Harold Lloyd's first talkie, and the transition was not an easy one. Well, easier compared to those of Keaton and Chaplin, but Lloyd's silent pratfalls are poorly paced for a soundie and the film is desperately overlong. This is best reserved for hardcore Lloydites--beginners are advised to check out his mid to late twenties silents before investigating his talkies, of which this is the weakest.