Three Harold Lloyd Comedies: "Number, Please?," "High and Dizzy," "Get Out and Get Under" (Rolin Films, Hal Roach Studios, Pathé, 1920)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the two Lifetime movies I switched to Turner Classic Movies for the last episode of their “Silent Sunday Showcase” weekly feature with host Jacqueline Stewart before it and Eddle Muller’s “Noir Alley” both go on hiatus for the month of August, when TCM does its “Summer Under the Stars” feature (in which they showcase the work of a different movie star each day in the month of August). Last night they showed three two- or three-reel shorts from 1920 by the great comedian Harold Lloyd: Number, Please?, High and Dizzy and Get Out and Get Under, all of them produced by Lloyd’s own company in partnership with Hal Roach Studios and originally released by the U.S. branch of the French company Pathé. All three co-starred Mildred Davis as Lloyd’s leading lady, a post she held until 1923, when she abruptly quit acting for him to become Mrs. Harold Lloyd in real life. She remained married to him until her death in 1969, two years before he passed, making Lloyd the only one of the major male stars of silent comedy to marry just once. (Charlie Chaplin had four wives and Buster Keaton, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Harry Langdon each had three.) All three films were credited to Roach himself as director, though Number, Please? had a co-director credit to Fred C. Newmeyer, who would become Lloyd’s usual director when he and Roach split on friendly terms in 1925 (and who on his own would make one of the worst films of all time, A Shriek in the Night, a relentlessly silly melodrama so bad it wasn’t released for eight years and only surfaced when its star, Lon Chaney’s son Creighton, became a Universal horror star as Lon Chaney, Jr.). I had anticipated Number, Please? would be about Lloyd’s character having a telephone installed in his home and High and Dizzy would be about him buying an airplane and getting into various scrapes attempting to fly it, but I was wrong on both counts.

Number, Please? actually casts Lloyd and Roy Brooks as romantic rivals for Mildred Davis, in which both men want to take her on a balloon ride at a fairgrounds. Only the man who pilots the balloon and runs the concession tells them that they need permission from Mildred’s mother to take her, and Mildred herself sets up a race between them: the first one who can reach her mom and get her to give her permission will be the one she takes. Roy actually wins the race – when Harold finally reaches Mildred’s mom she says she’s already given the permission to Roy – but, because he was the star, the producer and soon to be Mildred’s leading man for real, it’s Harold who ends up with her at the fade-out. High and Dizzy, which along with Get Out and Get Under lapsed into the public domain at one point (and I remember seeing both in that form on American Movie Classics in the early 1980’s), is actually another story about Harold and Roy Brooks being rivals for Mildred’s affections, though this time the authority figure they have to deal with is not her mom but her dad (Wallace Howe). The reason this one is called High and Dizzy is that Mildred’s character is a sleepwalker who in the film’s climax takes a somnambulistic stroll out of her room. Harold, anxious to protect her against a fall (according to imdb.com the room set was built only a few feet off the ground but the sequence looks as scary as all get-out), follows her on the ledge, but unbeknownst to him Mildred has returned to the room and closed and locked all the windows. So Harold finds himself locked out on the ledge, and I thought, “Ah, now it looks like a Harold Lloyd movie!” (Lloyd himself complained that all too many audience members thought of him only in terms of death-defying stunts: he once said, “I made just six thrill pictures, and those are the only ones anybody wants to talk to me about!”) For the edition TCM was showing, a restoration from 2004 copyrighted by Lloyd’s notoriously litigious granddaughter Suzanne, Robert Israel supplied a new musical score and appropriately quoted the big final aria, “Ah, non credea mirarti … Ah, non giunge!” from Vincenzo Bellini’s 1831 opera La Sonnambula, a comedy about a sleepwalking woman who inadvertently ends up in a nobleman’s bed, much to the hurt and anger of her boyfriend.

Get Out and Get Under I regarded as the funniest of the three films; this time Harold is an aspiring actor in a local theatrical company and also the proud owner of a relatively new car of which he boasts, “Just two more payments and then it will be mine, all mine!” The title would have made 1920 audiences instantly expect that the film’s plot would be about car trouble – it came from a 1913 song by Maurice Abrahams, Grant Clarke and Edgar Leslie, “He’d Have to Get Under – Get Out and Get Under (To Fix Up His Automobile),” about a man who was out driving with his girlfriend but every time he started necking with her, the car would break down and he’d have to, you guessed it, get out and get under it to fix it. In Lloyd’s version, his girlfriend (Mildred Davis again) is acting in an amateur play which Lloyd is supposed to star in, only he’s already late and keeps getting later because of all his car trouble. Harold is worried because if he doesn’t make it to the play on time, his rival (Fred McPherson instead of Roy Brooks this time, though Brooks is listed on imdb.com in an uncredited role) will displace him as both the play’s leading man and in Mildred’s affections. The play requires the leading male to appear in a heavy-duty costume that conceals his true appearance, and for a while it looks like Harold never got there and Fred played his part, but at the fade-out it turns out Harold got there after all and he and Mildred end up in the obligatory clinch. Lloyd actually begins his film with a prologue set in a photographer’s studio, in which he is having a formal portrait taken – only various vermin, including a fly (Mike Pence fans, take note!) and a mouse, get in the way; the fly lands on his nose and the mouse crawls up his pants leg. (Incidentally Harold is shown with the back of his neck in a brace to keep him from moving during the long exposure time needed to take the shot – a phenomenon of 19th century photography but one I was surprised to see in a film made and set as late as 1920.) Then the photographer tells Harold that the girl he was having the picture taken for is scheduled to marry the other guy that very day – and though the imdb.com synopsis lists this as a real event in the plot I had assumed it was a dream sequence.

While I can’t think of Harold Lloyd without recalling Stan Laurel’s bizarrely left-handed compliment towards him – “He hardly ever made me laugh, but I admired his inventiveness” – his films are generally quite funny and hold up well. It’s true he didn’t have the blazing imagination of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, but in their own lower-keyed way his films are just as entertaining even though only rarely (notably in his little-known 1927 feature The Devil’s Brother) did Lloyd “push” himself as far as Chaplin or Keaton did. Lloyd also earned my admiration for how he coped with physical disabilities – in 1919 he lost two fingers on one hand when a prop bomb unexpectedly exploded while he was holding it, and he had a prosthetic glove made to conceal the missing digits (it still amazes me that he was able to do all that daredevil climbing in his best-known film, 1923’s Safety Last!, with less than a full complement of fingers) – and his unusual solution to the problem of how he could still portray single characters after he was a married man. That’s right: he developed another prosthetic glove so he could keep wearing his wedding ring even while appearing not to be on screen. And though Lloyd’s visual trademark was his horn-rimmed glasses, he really didn’t need them; look carefully at his close-ups and you’ll see the “glasses” are just empty frames. Lloyd boasted that the glasses gave him a privilege rare among movie stars at his level: “With the glasses I am Harold Lloyd, Without them I’m just an ordinary citizen.”