A Sailor-Made Man (Hal Roach Productions, Pathé, 1921)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later on my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube stream of the 1921 Harold Lloyd comedy A Sailor-Made Man – the title was a pun on A Tailor-Made Man, a hit Broadway play by Harry James Smith first staged in 1917 and derived from Hungarian and German antecedents, but A Tailor-Made Man would not be filmed until a year after A Sailor-Made Man. Though most of the leading male comedians of the silent-film era played relatively recognizable and stable class identities – Charlie Chaplin the lower-class “Tramp,” Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle the working-class joe, Harold Lloyd the middle-class striver and Buster Keaton the upper-class twit – sometimes they would cross over into each other’s territories. In this case Lloyd is playing in Keaton’s usual territory as “The Boy,” a spoiled rich kid who’s in futile love with “The Girl” (Mildred Davis, three years before she quit acting to become Mrs. Harold Lloyd for real). Unfortunately for “The Boy,” “The Girl”’s father can’t stand him and doesn’t want him as a son-in-law until he can make something of himself by actually getting and keeping a job. Accordingly “The Boy” joins the U.S. Navy. Then “The Girl”’s father invites all her friends, including “The Boy,” onto his yacht for an extended pleasure cruise – only “The Boy” can’t go because he’s stuck in the Navy until his three-year enlistment contract expires. At this point I was sure that “The Girl,” her father and her friends would be shipwrecked somewhere out in the middle of nowhere and “The Boy”’s ship would rescue them.

That’s not how Lloyd and his crew – director Fred Newmeyer (who would eventually leave Lloyd’s employ and make some of the ghastliest “B” movies ever made, most notoriously A Shriek in the Night, shot in 1935 but not released until 1943 because it was so God-awful) and writers Hal Roach (who also produced), Sam Taylor, Jean C. Havez and H. M. “Beanie” Walker (the last-named wrote the intertitles and was one of the few title writers who was able to make the transition to screenplays for the talkies, notably for Laurel and Hardy) – charted their course. After some relatively amusing by-play between Lloyd and his best buddy on the ship, “Rough-House” O’Rafferty (Noah Young), who start out as enemies but end up as friends after O’Rafferty admits to an officer that it was he who threw Lloyd’s box at him, the crew end up on shore leave at a fictitious [East] Indian or Middle Eastern kingdom called “Khairpura-Bhandanna.” The uncertainty of the location stems from the Indian “sound” of the name of the place but the decidedly Arab architecture – in fact I was wondering if the crew went over to Paramount studio to borrow the sets from the recently completed Rudolph Valentino blockbuster The Sheik. Khairpura-Bhandanna is ruled by a nasty, super-horny Maharajah (Dick Sutherland, later the villain in D. W. Griffith’s German-set and -shot Isn’t Life Wonderful?), and when “The Girl,” her father and her friends arrive there the Maharajah instantly falls head over heels in lust for “The Girl” and sends a crew to kidnap her and hold her hostage in his palace until she yields to his slimy advances. Fortunately, “The Boy”’s ship also docks in Khairpura-Bhandanna and the crew gets shore leave, whereupon by Lloyd’s usual combination of cunning, guile and sheer speed he is able to rescue her and get her out of the palace.

Like a lot of other silent comedies, A Sailor-Made Man is stronger in its parts than as a whole. Lloyd’s character is introduced on board ship dressed in a natty white officer’s uniform, and everyone salutes him. Just when we were wondering, “How did he ever get to be an officer?,” the camera pulls back and we realize … it was all a dream, and the “woman” who was nuzzling his neck in the dream sequence turns out to be a monkey. Later the monkey turns up again in a scene in which O’Rafferty is trying to shave, only he accidentally knocks out the glass containing his shaving mirror, the monkey turns up in the frame instead, and O’Rafferty wonders just how he ended up looking like that. (It’s nice that Harold Lloyd didn’t monopolize all the laughs in his films and let his supporting players get a few, too.) There’s also a scene in which Lloyd takes on the ship’s champion boxer, and – thanks to a timely bar of soap on which the champion slips and falls – he wins. That sets up a later scene in which he and O’Rafferty are attacked by eight ruffians on the streets of Khairpura-Bhandanna; O’Rafferty knocks all eight of them out in turn but, by collecting their supine bodies, Lloyd racks up four and once again he’s hailed as a hero. And there’s a clever finale in which Lloyd’s ship is across the harbor from “The Girl”’s father’s yacht and Lloyd uses semaphore signals to propose to her. “I will,” she answers back.

A Sailor-Made Man runs 46 minutes, on the cusp between a short and a feature, and according to its Wikipedia page it was originally intended as just another Harold Lloyd two-reeler. It seems that Hal Roach’s practice was to shoot way more footage than needed for two reels (about 20 to 25 minutes’ running time), preview the film and then edit out the parts that got either no or very few audience laughs. Only this time the preview audiences thought so much of the film was funny that Roach and Lloyd decided to keep everything in and release it as a short feature. This was at a time in the movie business when producers and studios didn’t think a comedian could sustain audience interest long enough to merit a feature. That changed in 1918, when Mack Sennett produced a feature-length movie called Mickey which starred his sometimes girlfriend Mabel Normand as a miner’s daughter. After a troubled production history – Mickey went through four directors and the one who finally finished it, F. Richard “Dick” Jones, literally held the negative hostage until he and Sennett settled a pay dispute – the film became a blockbuster hit, surpassed in gross earnings during the silent era only by The Birth of a Nation and The Big Parade.

Then every silent comedian wanted to make features. Charlie Chaplin made The Kid with the young Jackie Coogan in 1920 (a brilliant film, though Chaplin weakened it when he prepared it for reissue in the 1970’s and slashed it to ribbons; if you can find a public-domain DVD of the 1920 original, you’re in luck!). Buster Keaton made The Three Ages in 1922 (though because the film had three separate story lines – it was a parody of D. W. Griffith’s 1916 film Intolerance, which had four – he was playing it cautiously and figured he could divide it into three two-reelers if it didn’t work as a feature) and Our Hospitality in 1923. Lloyd used A Sailor-Made Man to edge into feature production until he could make his first film actually planned as a full-length movie, Grandma’s Boy, a year later. And Hal Roach would return to the 45-minute movie length in 1940 when he started shooting what he called “streamliners” (the word “streamline” had the same sort of marketing cachet in the 1940’s that “high-tech” did in the 1990’s), four-reel films that Roach felt would bridge the gap between shorts and features. Unfortunately, Roach’s “streamliners” didn’t find the audience he was expecting, either in the early 1940’s or at the end of the decade when he decided to make them all in color at a time when color comedies were still a relative rarity.