by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a TCM “Silent Sunday Showcase” airing of a 1922
movie called Dr. Jack, which judging
from the synopsis in the TCM schedule (“a naive
country doctor fights to save the woman he loves from a crooked specialist”)
and the absence of any actors listed as being in the movie, I had assumed would
be a melodrama. Surprise! It was actually a Harold Lloyd comedy — and a quite
funny one, too, though as Ben Mankiewicz observed in his introduction it kind
of got lost in the shuffle back then because it was released between Grandma’s Boy and Safety
Last, two of Lloyd’s biggest hits, and
it’s been underrated since (but then, at least partly because he owned
virtually all his own films and kept them out of circulation for years, all of Lloyd’s work was underrated for quite some time even
after Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton had been hailed as geniuses). The plot
is simple enough: Dr. Jack Jackson (Harold Lloyd) is a small-town physician,
relentlessly overworked (his servants have to chase after him with bits of his
uneaten breakfast, and in one quite funny scene he bails out of his car and
waits while it travels in circles until he can get back into it again) and
curing his patients more through psychology than anything else (when a young
kid is shamming illness to get out of going to school, Dr. Jack tells him the
schoolhouse just burned down and he makes a “miraculous” recovery; later he
protects the kid by padding his ass with a pillow as his mom tries to spank him
for faking illness to get out of going to school).
A character identified only
as “The Sick-Little-Well-Girl” (played by Mildred Davis, in one of her last
on-screen roles before she quit acting and became Mrs. Harold Lloyd, which she
remained for 46 years until her death in 1969, two years before his — of all
the great silent comedians Lloyd was the only one who married just once) is in
the clutches of Dr. Ludwig von Saulsbourg (Eric Mayne), who’s extracting large
fees from her bamboozled father (John T. Prince) and claiming she needs total
isolation from all other people and must live her entire life in dark rooms and
take scads of medicine. (One intriguing thing that dates this film is that all
the medications in it are liquid; pills existed in 1922 but quite a lot of
drugs were still drunk instead of swallowed
with water.) Needless to say, there’s nothing really wrong with her, and when
they get stranded in Dr. Jack’s small town and dad calls him in to get a second
opinion, the first thing Dr. Jack does is open the window shades, curtains and
windows in the girl’s room to get her some sunshine and fresh air. The second
thing he does is fall in love with her — represented by inset shots of a model
castle, showing the idyllic life he imagines with her — only when he
accidentally kisses her (a stool he was standing on to examine her gave way and
brushed his face against hers), his dad and Saulsbourg give him until the next
morning to get out of their house. (When this happens there’s a shot of that
model castle crumbling.) Eventually the plot is resolved by a deus ex
machina; the house is visited by two
policemen looking for an escaped lunatic, and while we never see the lunatic or
find out what happened to him (in a 1930’s film it would probably have turned
out that Dr. Saulsbourg was the lunatic), Dr. Jack disguises himself as the lunatic — in a makeup that seemed to me to be a
deliberate parody of the one John Barrymore wore as Mr. Hyde in Paramount’s Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde two years earlier —
and does some marvelous acrobatics and quick changes as he poses as the lunatic
and also appears in his true Dr. Jack
identity allegedly fighting the madman. (Lloyd might also have been parodying
Lon Chaney and his multi-role movies in
these scenes.) Eventually, of course, Dr. Saulsbourg is disposed of, the girl
gets better and Dr. Jack gets her (and that model castle reassembles itself in
the final scene).
It’s not much of a movie but it’s a convenient peg on which
to hang some very funny gags — including an illegal poker game Dr. Jack gets
involved with after a little boy asks him to break it up before his father, one
of the participants, gambles away his entire paycheck, and which Dr. Jack
successfully disrupts by feeding all four players a stacked hand with four aces — leading to a bitter
argument on the final call and the arrival of the sheriff to break up the game.
Lloyd was a surprisingly creative filmmaker with a strong eye for what was
going on around him — the director of record of Dr. Jack was Fred Newmeyer but it was clear Lloyd was the auteur — and there are some interesting overhead shots and other
examples of creative filmmaking far ahead of what Charlie Chaplin was doing at
the time (Chaplin was an incredible performer but not much of a director; his
philosophy, as James Agee put it in his review of Monsieur Verdoux, was “if you can invent something worth watching, the
camera should hold, clear and still, so you can watch it,” and both Lloyd and
Buster Keaton were considerably more inventive as total filmmakers). There’s
also an intriguing example of what imdb.com calls “Crazy Credits”: all the
opening credits are written on a doctor’s prescription pad, the introduction
says “Hal Roach Prescribes Harold Lloyd” (instead of the usual “Presents”) and
the supporting players are introduced with a card headed “In Consultation.”
