by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago the Spreckels Organ Society presented the
annual silent movie night at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, featuring a
live organist (Donald MacKenzie, whose main gig is as the theatre organist on
the Compton organ at the Odeon Theatre in Leicester Square, London — an organ
Fats Waller recorded on!) accompanying a silent film and thereby bringing us as
close as we’re going to get to what a silent film showing was like “in the
day.” The film was For Heaven’s Sake, a
marvelous 1926 comedy starring (and produced by) Harold Lloyd, and while the
“official” director, Sam Taylor, had something of an independent reputation
(he’d also worked for Mary Pickford and directed the 1929 film she and her
then-husband, Douglas Fairbanks, did of The Taming of the Shrew — with the oft-ridiculed writing credit, “By William Shakespeare. Additional dialogue
by Sam Taylor”), for the most part it didn’t matter who was credited with directing a Harold Lloyd film
since Lloyd himself was the auteur.
I’ve noted in these pages before that most of the great silent comedians worked
within a specific part of the class system — Charlie Chaplin was lower-class
(once he worked out the “Tramp” character in his early days at Keynote and
Essanay he played nothing else for two decades, until Modern Times in 1936), Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was working-class,
Harold Lloyd was middle-class (usually he cast himself as a white-collar
striver) and Buster Keaton was upper-class. But there were occasions when
Keaton dropped down a notch and poached on Lloyd’s middle-class territory
(including doing a 1927 film called College that was an out-and-out ripoff of Lloyd’s The
Freshman), and in For Heaven’s
Sake Lloyd poached on Keaton’s territory
and cast himself as J. Harold Manners (I wondered if the name was a deliberate
parody on the then-popular playwright J. Hartley Manners).
J. Harold Manners is a rich playboy who literally has more money than he knows what to do with. The
character is introduced with a note that he’s bought a white car just so it
will match his outfit, and when he wrecks that car he calmly walks into an auto
showroom, sits down in the most expensive car on display, whips out a
checkbook, writes a check for the full price and drives off in it. While he’s
out in his new car it’s commandeered by the police and involved in a shootout
with gangsters, only the cops abandon it and grab someone else’s car after
Lloyd’s runs out of gas (typically cars in showrooms have very little gas in
them so even if someone steals one, they can’t get very far in it), and it ends
up stalled across a set of train tracks and, of course, is smashed into
smithereens by a train. (Oddly Lloyd didn’t steal Keaton’s famous gag of having
a train pass the car on an adjoining track without hurting it — and then another train coming the other way wrecking it. That would
have made an already funny scene even funnier!) A newspaper runs a rather
snippy column noting that J. Harold Manners bought — and totaled — two cars in
one day, and invites readers to write him to suggest other ways he can spend
his money. The item is noticed by Hope (Jobyna Ralston, the quite fine actress
who replaced Lloyd’s previous leading lady, Mildred Davis, when she quit to
become Mrs. Harold Lloyd for real), daughter of Brother Paul (Paul Weigel), who
runs a pushcart dispensing free coffee to homeless people and wishes someone
would give him enough money to start a mission. Manners comes to the “downtown”
location (the titles say that in every city there’s an “uptown” where the rich
people live and a “downtown” where the not-so-rich live), immediately falls in
love with Hope at first sight, accidentally burns up Brother Paul’s pushcart
and writes a check for $1,000 to pay for it and give him the money to start his
mission.
Later he reads a newspaper headline that some rich guy has given some
poor preacher $1,000 to fund a mission downtown — and Manners is dismissive of
the whole thing, saying the guy probably gave the money just to get himself
favorable publicity. Then he opens the whole paper and finds out he is the benefactor — what he intended as an anonymous
donation has become anything but; there’s even a sign outside the building
announcing it as the “J. Harold Manners Mission.” (Given the penchant for rich
people today to slap their names on everything they fund, Manners’ reticence about the whole idea
is refreshing.) Manners goes to the mission, starts tearing down the sign, and
is confronted by Hope, who has no idea who he is and thinks he’s just a vandal.
Then he meets Brother Paul, who does
know who he is, thanks him and introduces him to his daughter, not knowing
they’ve already met and she’s insulted him. Nonetheless, to get close to Hope,
Manners becomes a volunteer at the mission. There are a few amusing scenes in
which Manners accidentally eats his own powder puff (men were starting to use
powder puffs in the 1920’s — a phenomenon credited to, or blamed on, Rudolph
Valentino, leading to the infamous “Pink Powder Puffs” editorial that so
incensed Valentino he literally challenged its author to a duel) and a cleaning
sponge thinking they’re the pastries Hope has baked for the mission clients.
Hope tells him that the real
challenge would be to get the neighborhood’s criminal element, which mostly
hangs out at Bob’s Pool Hall (which it’s hinted is also dispensing illegal
alcoholic beverages — this was
Prohibition, after all), into the mission — which he does, in a brilliantly
conceived gag sequence, by insulting him all and having them chase him until he
leads them into the mission. The film’s debt to Chaplin’s Easy Street is rather obvious, but it’s still very funny.
Eventually Manners proposes to Hope, she accepts, and they arrange to get
married at the mission, with her dad performing the ceremony and the crooks
they’ve redeemed — including their leader, “Bull” (played by Noah Young, though
he looked so much like Nat Pendleton Charles and I thought it was he and even
imagined hearing the lines in the dialogue title in Pendleton’s voice, with its
weird mixture of toughness and whininess) serving as the witnesses and
reception committee. Only three of Manners’ rich friends decide to kidnap him
and thus “spare” him from the fate of marrying so far beneath him — and this
sets up the final gag sequence, the funniest and most spectacular scene of the
film, in which Manners and his ex-gangster friends commandeer various vehicles,
including a bus, to get him to the mission before Hope assumes he’s abandoned
her and calls off the wedding. Lloyd once complained that he’d made only six
“thrill comedies” but those were the movies everyone remembered (and even
people who’ve never seen a complete Harold Lloyd movie no doubt recall that
iconic image of him dangling from the hands of the giant clock in Safety
Last), and certainly this is one of his
best and most exciting thrill sequences — indeed, Charles and I watched the
tail end of this movie a few weeks earlier on TCM and we’d both said, “Gee, I’d
really like to see the whole thing sometime.” For Heaven’s Sake isn’t one of Lloyd’s most strongly plotted movies,
and it doesn’t have the surprising darkness of 1927’s The Kid Brother (especially its scenes on board a derelict ship,
which reminded me so much of Murnau’s Nosferatu I wondered if Lloyd had seen it and was deliberately
parodying it), but it’s screamingly funny. Maybe Lloyd didn’t have quite the
depth as an actor or storyteller of Chaplin or Keaton, but so what? He was an
efficient laugh machine and his films are generally delightful.
