Speedy (Harold Lloyd Productions, Paramount, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” featured two Harold Lloyd movies, Hot Water (1924) and Speedy (1928), and thought I skipped Hot Water – I had a fairly recent moviemagg blog post on it from a screening at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park in 2012 with Dennis James providing live organ accompaniment (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/08/hot-water-harold-lloydpathe-1924.html) – I went ahead and watched Speedy. It was Harold Lloyd’s last silent film – unlike Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, who hit rough patches with the transition (Chaplin because of his aesthetic opposition to the whole idea of sound films and Keaton because his professional, marital and alcohol problems combined to destroy his career right at the transition point), Lloyd made the transition to sound smoothly and without seeming discomfort. Lloyd made it through his own company,distributed by Paramount (incidentally the opening studio logo said, not “A Paramount Picture,” but “A Paramount Release,” a circumlocution I hadn’t realized they were using before the 1950’s, when the studio system l broke down and it became the most common way for films to be made: by “independent” companies organized by their stars or directors, in collaboration with major-studio distributors) with Ted Wilde as nominal director – though Lloyd was the auteur of all his own films, especially after he broke through to major stardom. (One of the associates on the credits of Speedy was Lloyd’s brother Gaylord, who had attempted an on-screen career, got nowhere but ended up, like James Cagney’s brother William, in the organization of his far more famous brother.)

It’s ironic that Speedy was Lloyd’s last silent film because the whole plot deals with the human cost of technological change: Pop Dillon (Barry Woodruff) owns the last horse-drawn streetcar in New York City. He’s living with and raising his granddaughter Jane (Ann Christy, a personable young actress who kooks like a flapper but ls really a sedate “good girl” at heart). Jane’s boyfriend is Harold “Speedy” Swift (Harold Lloyd), who can’t keep a job because it’s so interested in baseball that he loses job after job because he’s so determined to follow the New York Yankees. This was at the time when Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were the Yankees’ big stars, and Ruth actually has a small but important role in this film. He’s billed fourth and plays himself, and his big scene occurs when Lloyd’s character has been hired as a cab driver by the “One Time Cab Company,” whose one cab is a dilapidated contraption that reminded me of the “Fresh Air Cab Company” on the Amos and Andy show. Ruth tells “Speedy” to get him to Yankee Stadium for a game, “and hurry!” Speedy takes that all too literally and drives the cab with Ruth in it at close to warp speed, bouncing the baseball great around in the back seat. At one pont Speedy tells Ruth how much he admires his skills on the diamond \– “Even when you strike out, you miss ‘em close” – and Ruth, commenting on Speedy’s driving, says, “Not as close as you’re missing ‘em.” When Ruth finallmmakes it to Yankee Stadium, he says, “Whenever I want to commit suicide, I’ll let you know.” Ruth invites Speedy to see the game, but as bad luck would have it, the guy who had hired him to drive the cab is sitting in the same section just two rows down, and the boss tells Speedy to give bacn the cab and everything he’s taken in – and Speedy gives him everything,including the two tickets he got for speeding.

Earlier he’s had a job as a soda jerk, but lost that one too when he stopped by an animated scoreboard of the baseball game in progress and as a result lost the bouquet his boss had told him to deliver to his wife to make up with her for the extra-relational activity she’d caught him doing. But the hard-core intrigue in the plot of Speedy concerns a group of monopolists who want to gain control of New York’s entire streetcar system – only to do that, they need to buy out or force out Pop Dillon. Since his contract with the city requires him to run the streetcar at least once every 24 hours on its assigned track, the evil monopolists figure that by hiring a gang of thugs to steal the car and move it to the other end of the city, they can put Pop Dillon out of business. Only Speedy happens to overhear their plans while hiding in a phone booth at Yankee Stadium, and in a thrilling, suspenseful sequence Speedy, with the aid of a group of Civil War veterans (remember this was 1928 and there were still some Civil War veterans left, though Lloyd wisely cast them with actors who looked old enough to have fought in the Civil War and still been alive in 1928), takes back the car from the thugs and drives it across town. When the car hits a manhole and its front wheel is shattered, Speedy resourcefully replaces it with the cover of the manhole and eventually makes it back to the track on time. Pop holds out ofr $100,000 as his price for selling his contract, and the boy, the girl and the grandfather presumably live happily ever after.

Speedy is a quite remarkable film, though when my husband Charles and I watched it for the first time it was in a sequence of Lloyd films being shown on TCM in sequence and it was a bit of a disappointment after the two films immediately preceding it in Lloyd’s canon, For Heaven’s Sake and The Kid Brother – one of which contains a bizarre sequence that seems to have been intended as a parody of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. Still, despite its New York City setting (and Lloyd actually shot a lot of it there, unusual for a comedy filmmaker in the late 1920’s, though Buster Keaton had taken a whole company to Oregon to shoot The General because there he had found a railroad that still used the narrow-gauge track in use during the Civil War), there’s an oddly pastoral feeling to Speedy, especially in the scene in which Speedy takes Jane to Coney Island to celebrate the loss of his soda-jerk job, and it would be interesting to compare this sequence to the similar one in Paul Fejos’s Lonesome, made the same year.