DVR Diary: WELCOME DANGER (1929)

Harold Lloyd had finished shooting his latest silent film before he started taking talking pictures seriously. The way he told it afterward, he realized that talkies were here to stay when he dropped in on a theater and found the audience enthralled by the sound of bacon frying in a pan. That doesn't quite sound right, since the only movie I know of with such a scene is King Vidor's Billy the Kid, made a year after Welcome Danger was released as a 100% talking picture. The point stands, however, that Lloyd abruptly determined that the film he'd just made was obsolete. Since he was his own producer, releasing his films through Paramount, he went back into production, shooting new talking scenes while post-syncing as much of the original silent footage as he could get away with. The film reached theaters in the fall of 1929, making Lloyd the first of the major silent clowns to make his all-talking feature-length debut.  It was a big hit, but soon gained a bad reputation, not just for the poor quality of the synchronization but also for its excessive length (113 minutes was outlandish for a comedy at the time) and its political incorrectness. Inevitably, Clyde Bruckman's film is a mixed bag, including some good gags, some jokes on the new talkie audience, and some or the worst stuff Lloyd ever did.

The first act establishes Harold as an amateur botanist traveling to San Francisco. Switching trains at a station, he stops in a photo booth to get his picture printed on a paper medallion. He gets a double-exposure, since the paper disc had gotten stuck when the previous customer, Billie Lee (Barbara Kent) had her picture taken. Getting a two-shot for the price of one, Harold is smitten, convinced that the girl in the picture is his destined love. He then proceeds to meet cute with Billie, though it plays out as the opposite of cute. Having missed his train, Harold finds Billie and her lame kid brother in their car; they're driving to Frisco and camping out nights. Billie is in grease-monkey clothes to work under the car, and when she appears Harold takes her for a dirty boy. Mishaps ensue along the way, the joke being Harold's increasing contempt for the "boy" who's actually his dream girl. He gets pretty insulting as Billie's difficulties with the car increase. The thing is, Billie seems to be just as stupid as Harold takes her to be. Asked whether there's a problem with the spark plugs, she answers that they're certainly clean because she washed them with soap and water the night before. They later run out of gas because she forgot to fill the tank. Thinking something else may be wrong, she removed the carburetor and then leaves it on the running board of a good samaritan's car after borrowing gas from him. Forced to camp on the spot overnight, Harold and Billie are equally incompetent as tent-pitchers. Finally Billie retreats into the tent and femmes herself up so Harold will recognize her as the girl whose picture he's been mooning over all along. When it finally sinks in he's so crestfallen that he runs off into the woods. Destiny finally asserts itself when Billie is frightened by a stray cow. Her rush into his arms inspires Harold to keep on frightening cows. This sequence retains much of the original silent footage, badly dubbed, but the clearest sound you hear is Harold Lloyd digging his own grave. Harold is often brash to the point of obnoxiousness in his silent films, but with sound he's almost irredeemably so. His put-downs and his high, smug voice are really repellent. Slowed by sound-film speed, he seems (at age 36) suddenly too old for his archetypal role as the earnest, aspiring young man. He acts like an utter jerk with Billie, but she comes across as so stupid that she hardly deserves better. And after half an hour we still don't really know what this film will be about.

It turns out to be a police comedy. We learn that Harold Beldsoe is the son of a famous Frisco cop, and that one police captain in the big city believes that blood will tell. He's summoned Harold with the thought that young Bledsoe will have a hereditary talent for dealing with the crime wave in Chinatown. The opium trade there is controlled by a masked mystery man called The Dragon, while the eminent orthopedic surgeon Dr. Gow (James Wang) aids the forces of law and order. Lloyd gets to have it both ways in Chinatown, indulging in nearly every stereotype of sinister, secretive Chinese crime while portraying Dr. Gow as such an advanced specialist in his field that Billie Lee has brought her brother to San Francisco to be treated by him. In addition, Bruckman establishes early that the Dragon is a white man, and none other than the moral crusader John Thorne (Charles "Ming the Merciless" Middleton). This is established early so we'll note the irony when a desk sergeant (Edgar Kennedy), annoyed at Harold's new obsession with fingerprints, gets a sample from Thorne and as a practical joke tells Harold that it's the Dragon's fingerprint, lifted from "the neck of a strangled Chinaman." The storylines converge when Harold meets Billie again while Dr. Gow is examining her brother. Harold has brought a potted plant that he stole from a Chinatown florist when the proprietor refused to sell it to him. When Gow accidentally smashes the pot, they find that the Dragon is using the potted plants to smuggle opium. Gow is promptly kidnapped by the Dragon's spies, who had chased Harold all the way from their shop, and Harold makes a crusade of rescuing the doctor so he can operate on Billie's brother. His sole helper is Clancy (Noah Young), a breathtakingly stupid Chinatown beat cop --frustrated at a Chinese corpse who doesn't savvy English, Clancy asks him, "Sprechen sie Deutsch?"-- who proves more of a handicap as Harold has to fight his way out of the secret basement passages beneath the flower shop and save Dr. Gow from a human sacrifice to the Dragon. After all that, Harold must overcome the skepticism of the regular cops as he confronts Thorn with proof of his criminal double life.

The flower-shop sequence drags on almost interminably, punctuated by repetitive bits of slapstick from Lloyd and Young and literal blackouts as rooms go dark for one reason or another. There's something brazen in Lloyd's decision to give the audience sound and nothing else for long moments in these bits, but his audacity is more admirable than laughable. Funnier is a slow-motion sight gag involving a turtle with a candle on its back first burning Young's butt -- he leaps about thinking himself shot as Lloyd scoffs while the turtle inexorably brings the flame to Harold's own rear. Better still is a multi-part gag involving changes of clothes. Clancy is KO'd by a gang member who takes his police uniform and puts him in Chinese clothes, gags him and trusses him up. Later, Harold is fighting off a small horde while yelling for Clancy. Clancy manages to stumble into view, his costume making him look like a hopping vampire, but Harold mistakes him for a Chinese and clobbers him. He does this several times over, all the while yelling for Clancy. Later, Harold dons Chinese clothes to get out of a tight spot by mingling with his pursuers. By that time Clancy has freed himself and, taking Harold for another Chinese, clobbers him back. Too much of this sequence is simply sprawling knockabout violence, while the climactic showdown with Thorne and his whip-wielding black servant (Blue Washington) is more brutal than funny. Writing of Lloyd's next talkie, Feet First (a quasi-remake of Safety Last!), Walter Kerr noted that the comedian undercut the mute grace and humor of his exertions with constant grunting and yelling. You can see that already in Welcome Danger's cacophonous violence, while Lloyd's reedy voice coarsens his persona nearly as much as Buster Keaton's croak did his. Once the novelty of a talking Lloyd wore off, his audience must have noticed that some of his magic was gone; Kerr notes that each subsequent Lloyd talkie made less money than the last one. Sound didn't bankrupt Lloyd creatively; he'd have a strong run of films in the Thirties, including one, The Cat's Paw, that refines many of the Chinatown tropes of Welcome Danger by making Lloyd himself a Sinicized American and a fish out of water in the Depression U.S.A. While Welcome Danger itself looks like a failure in retrospect, making it a talkie may have been a can't-lose proposition for Lloyd. It could very well have been a total dud as a silent, but the assured box-office success of his talkie debut, regardless of its quality, gave him breathing room to experiment further until he got sound comedy right.

SAFETY LAST! (1923)

Despite two directors and Hal Roach looking over his shoulder, Safety Last! is Harold Lloyd's show and the film that made him, by then already a star, an immortal. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton are deemed Lloyd's masters, but the definitive image of American silent comedy is still Lloyd dangling from that clock on that building. It's but a moment in an uncanny twenty-minute climb that preserves its power to thrill pretty much undiluted after 86 years.

The climb eclipses the majority of the film, which is so archetypal a Lloyd story of striving for success that, despite being identified only as "The Boy" in the opening credits, a pay stub identifies him as "Harold Lloyd." Harold has gone to the big city to make good, and sends bits of jewelry home to his sweetheart, "The Girl," (Mildred Davis, the eventual Mrs. Lloyd) as boasts of his success. In reality he is sacrificing food and falling behind on his rent in order to buy the trinkets with his salary as a flustered fabric salesman in a department store. Eventually The Girl comes to visit and Harold must pretend that he holds a higher position.

Humiliated in his own eyes despite surviving his imposture, Harold is more desperate than ever to achieve some coup, and the chance comes when management wants a publicity stunt to promote the store. Harold's roommate (Bill Strother) is a prodigy as a climber, as Harold had seen when they both had to get away from an angry cop. He proposes having his roommate climb the store building to attract a crowd. If it goes over, he'll earn a $1,000 bonus. But just before the climb begins, the angry cop recognizes Harold's roommate and chases him inside the building. With the pressure on and his pal unavailable, Harold must climb the tower himself, with the roommate coaching him from floor to floor but always telling him to go one floor more "until I ditch the cop."

There's the clock, and there's Harold Lloyd. I will not show him dangling from it.

The climb has a kind of mathematical grandeur. It's a masterpiece of perspective, an exemplar of illusion grounded in reality. How it was done is well known. Harold is always as high up as he seems to be, but in any given shot he's climbing one of a series of facades constructed on rooftops. The stages of the climb are shot so that the street seems ever further down, and except for close-ups necessary for some gags you can always see the street. Harold is always a good distance above a saving pillow-padded platform and is clearly exerting himself with considerable strength and agility as he climbs the facades. He's doing this with roughly one and a half hands, having blown part of one away with a live "prop" bomb while posing for a publicity shot. After the fact, Lloyd said that if he'd held the bomb closer to his face he would have died. As for his chances on the Safety Last climb, he claimed that he tested the platform by dropping a dummy from one of the facades. It bounced high and fell off the roof.

While Bill Strother plays Harold's unreliable human-fly pal in the story, in real life he was the human fly who inspired the movie and did the heavy-duty climbing in long shots like the one below.

The pure thrill of the climb is leavened with more mundane comedy bits as Harold is beset by pigeons, a rat, a net, a dog, a hectoring old lady and a man posing, gun in hand, for a crime magazine cover. And on every floor his friend reliably appears to excuse himself for failing to shake the cop. None of this is exactly hilarious, but it does build up anticipation for what godforsaken thing The Boy might encounter next. And Lloyd tops it off with a tension-straining bit of business on the roof with some spinning doom device which is either a wind gauge or something meant only to hit human flies in the head. He knows what has to happen and the audience knows it, so he makes them wait, teasing the blow several times over before taking it and setting up the final, supposedly spectacular but actually anticlimactic gag in which Lloyd's stuntman swings from his heel through space. Nothing can top the spectacle of the climb.

So Safety Last! isn't the funniest silent comedy by any means. Nor does it come close to Lloyd's funniest films, among which I count Why Worry?, For Heaven's Sake and his pioneer fish-out-of-water sound film The Cat's Paw. But the climb is not so much a gag as a "chariot race" climax on the Ben Hur model, the term Merriam C. Cooper used to describe another climb up a building in King Kong. For want of a really definitive term, Harold Lloyd's climb is one of the greatest things you'll ever see in a movie.

WHY WORRY? (1923)

American silent comedy is the ancestor of modern global action cinema. The linkage has been pointed out by such authorities as Jackie Chan, and the more I've thought about it, the influence grows more obvious, especially if you look at the stunt-oriented films of Buster Keaton. You can make the case that Keaton is the first "action hero," as opposed to swashbucklers like Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and that The General is the first action movie in the modern sense of the word. Action movies as we know them come out of the period when Keaton was elevated above Chaplin by many critics and praised for his emphasis on technology and his anti-Chaplinesque unsentimentality. A generation of directors had to be influenced by all that talk. You could go to a further extreme, look at a budget-buster (no pun intended) like Steamboat Bill Jr. and argue that Keaton gone too far was the Jerry Bruckheimer of his day.

But other silent comics were nearly as action-oriented as Keaton. Many of Mack Sennett's shorts from the 1920s were little more than car chases, and lesser known producers made even more specialized films that we might recognize as action cinema. Harold Lloyd has also been acknowledged by Chan as an influence on his style. Lloyd is known for "thrill comedy," also emphasizing dangerous-looking stuntwork. That label makes it seem as if Lloyd was out to scare people by climbing the clock tower in Safety Last. But here is a film from 1923, Lloyd's last year with Hal Roach and the same year as Safety Last, that is more like an action film than a thrill picture, but with less emphasis on technology than on pure human action, and a pure human special effect that puts the fictional island nation of Paradiso on the map of the wild world of cinema.

Lloyd spent years refining his "glasses character" since he adopted it in place of his Lonesome Luke tramp persona in 1917. There never really was a single "Harold" persona, though. Just as Keaton could play parts across the class spectrum, Lloyd could do millionaires as well as small-town strivers. His films have in common the plot requirement that Harold man up at some point and do the right thing. In his first feature, Grandma's Boy, that meant he had to overcome cowardice with the help of a legend and a kind of placebo fetish. But Harold Van Pelham, the wealthy protagonist of Why Worry?, is no coward. To the contrary, he's often stupidly fearless, and that's one of the things I like about this film. At a certain point I got tired of comedians always being cowards, simply because there seems to be only a limited number of ways to be cowardly and funny at the same time. But though no coward, Harold still needs to man up, only from a different starting point.

Harold Van Pelham is a hypochondriac. He's on a huge regimen of medicine and has a full-time nurse (Jobyna Ralston) to tend to his every whim, along with a male servant who gets to do the cowardly bits in this picture -- don't panic, the guy is white. He's convinced that he's relentlessly sick, but he doesn't really show it. He seems jaunty and arrogant even when being wheeled about by Jobyna, as if he enjoys his supposed dire illness. His presumed invalidism is really a cinematic synonym for pure idleness. His privileged standing allows him to get away with doing nothing, apart from taking trips to exotic lands for health reasons. Harold will have to overcome irresponsibility, not cowardice, in his South American adventure.

As it develops, Harold is also a kind of Ugly American, not so much disrespectful but oblivious of local customs. He has a tendency to deal with everyone as if they're servants or someone's employees. He's used to being waited on or catered to. If war breaks out, he expects to be able to tell both sides to stop because he came to Paradiso to rest and the excitement is bad for his heart. His is such a pampered life that he seems to have no real concept of danger. He leans his belly on a cannon's mouth, for instance, to remonstrate against the men preparing to fire it. Harold is a jerk and you're meant to see him that way, but an essential innocence that comes with his irresponsibility redeems him -- at least by comparison with a real Ugly American. That would be Jim Blake, a "renegade American" who's conspiring to overthrow the Paradiso government to further his business interests. A consortium of international bankers is on to his scheme and has warned him that they're sending an agent to thwart it. Blake mistakes Harold for this agent and intends to have him killed. That's your plot.

Late in his career James Mason (as Blake, above) had to change his film name to Jim Mason, possibly to accommodate his then more famous British namesake. There seemed little point to the change, however, since the vast majority of Mason's work in B westerns in the sound era went uncredited. This may be the biggest role he ever had.

In a way, Why Worry? is more sophisticated than its makers probably realized. Lloyd's creative team of Sam Taylor and Fred Newmayer seem to realize that Americans often bring chaos to distant foreign backwaters like Paradiso. To give you some perspective, we're only about a decade removed from the setting of The Wild Bunch. Why Worry? acknowledges that some Americans abroad are pure predators, though in reality those were less likely to be "renegades" than the writers would like. Harold, in his clueless fashion, is as much a sower of chaos as Blake, but the film expresses a faith that these forces of chaos will cancel each other out or, better yet, that innate American virtue, however initially misguided, can overcome the evil influence of renegades. It's up to Americans, in fact, to clean up the messes they make.

So much for the analysis. You can now rest assured that it's good for you to see a silent comedy that kicks ass. Let's get the praise of Harold Lloyd out of the way right away. He's often diminished in comparison to Chaplin and Keaton because he was, the claim goes, a mere actor rather than a creative genius. Fine, but if acting means playing a distinctive character than Lloyd may have been a better actor than his two rivals. He totally sells Van Pelham's privileged sense of illness, as well as the fact that Harold is quite possibly shamming even to himself. He can do awesome facial expressions, as when he falls rapturously in love with an enraged Jobyna before our eyes when she finally stands up to his petty tyranny. I had better give credit to Ralston while I think of it for her first of many films with Lloyd. She has a character arc of a sort as well, transforming from Harold's meek minion to his partner in adventure after she's forced to dress in boy's clothes to avoid Blake's fate-worse-than-death attentions. Seeing a real crisis explode around her and experiencing real danger rouses her to prod Harold toward the moment when he will finally man up in her defense for a fierce fight with Blake, only to be told afterward, "Why didn't you tell me that I love you?"

I've saved the best for last. Anyone with a sense of film history may have three iconic visions of Harold Lloyd in his or her head. Everyone, I suspect, can see him hanging from the clock. They may think of him in his battered football uniform from The Freshman. Finally, they may recollect Harold standing next to a giant or firing a cannon mounted on the giant's back. That's Why Worry? and the giant's name is John Aasen.

He was reportedly the second choice for the part of Colosso the hermit who for some reason Blake's rebels needed to throw in jail. The giant originally cast for the part dropped dead. Aasen himself only lived to age 48, but he was 33 here and is a genuine physical marvel. Publicity claimed that he was over eight feet tall, but seeing him next to Lloyd, I'd guess he actually wasn't much over seven. That's still pretty impressive looking, especially given how well he moves in this film. He may benefit from the speeded up projection of silent movies, but however it came about his may be the most dynamic performance by a big man in all cinema.

He's introduced being hauled laboriously into prison by about a dozen men, it being explained that his capture was possible only because Colosso is dazed by the pain of a severe toothache. Harold, thrown into the same cell, having thought he was being conducted to a hotel, quickly sizes up his man (a tall order, of course) and orders him to help him escape.

Freed, he finally notices Colosso's affliction and is overwhelmed by empathy. "Isn't it wonderful?" he enthuses, "You're sick, too." But Colosso's condition is curable, though Harold is forced to undergo an ordeal of sight gags before the offending tooth is removed.

Colosso is afterward the proverbial loyal lion and a one-man army with which Harold intervenes against Blake's coup attempt. He flings cannons over walls. He bowls over troops with cannonballs while Harold keeps score. He lands devastating punches, pounds on soldiers like Kong pounding on the El, uses men as missile weapons or as swinging clubs. I may have to revise my history and declare John Aasen the first action hero for this sustained run of mayhem. It is a joy to behold.

The only thing I can fault Why Worry? for is running about ten minutes too long. The story has been pretty much wrapped up at about the 51 minute mark as Colosso has destroyed Blake's army and Harold has destroyed Blake. But by now there was a competition among the comedians to make feature films, and Roach and Lloyd needed to get this one past the 60 minute mark to qualify. So they try to top themselves in what proves an anticlimactic manner as Harold, Colosso and Jobyna fend off a second army, relying mainly on deception rather than raw power this time. The one thing that keeps this last act amusing is Jobyna's delegation to Colosso of responsibility for feeding Harold pills every two minutes in the middle of the battle. The payoff is Harold's final rejection of pill-taking and his ultimate realization that he was never as sick as he wanted to be. So the film sputters a bit, but so much before then was too good to be outweighed by a disappointing finale.

Why Worry? will reward viewers who overcome any lingering aversion to black and white movies, films without spoken dialogue or slapstick comedy. It may not be politically correct in its portrayal of Latin America as the land of siestas and incompetent armies, but let's face it: even the American characters are stereotypes. Comedy often paints with broad strokes, and the filmmakers seem conscious that they're dealing with already well-established cliches. If it reminds you of something out of a pulp adventure magazine, it probably reminded 1923 audiences of the same thing, on purpose. Approach it in the right spirit, and it's a blast almost from beginning to end.

THE CAT'S-PAW (1934)

"The blind man, lest he stumble in darkness, welcomes the guiding footsteps even of an ass"

--LING PO.--

Watching the talking picture career of Harold Lloyd is rather like watching the German army retreat across Europe. Here is a still-powerful force, often displaying incredible skill, professionalism and innovation, yet utterly doomed. The films running from Welcome Danger (1929) through Professor Beware (1938) are Lloyd's war against obsolescence. Like Chaplin, he had the resources to wage such a war, and his efforts were often brilliant, perhaps no more so than here, where he breaks with his familiar screen persona. While critics and biographers often rank his previous film, Movie Crazy (1932) or his next one, The Milky Way (1936) as his best talkies, I find The Cat's-Paw his most fascinating sound film. In many ways it's a product of a very specific moment in movie history, and in others it seems decades ahead of its time.

Lloyd seems safe in his ranking as the "third genius" of American silent comedy, while Chaplin and Keaton still vie for the top spot in posterity. He seemed to have made a safe transition to sound with Welcome Danger, which he post-synched and reshot on the fly, but stumbled with his next films, Feet First (in part a do-over of his definitive climbing act from Safety Last) and Movie Crazy. History's verdict is that Depression audiences repudiated Lloyd's brash but naive go-getter persona, and the man himself seemed to agree. As his own producer, he decided to do a more detailed script than usual, based on a magazine story he'd purchased. For the first time in ages, he would not be "Harold" on screen.

Instead, he is Ezekiel Cobb, the son of China-based American missionaries. While his parents spread the gospel in the Middle Kingdom, Ezekiel immersed himself in Chinese culture. When he is sent to America to find a bride, he is, in manner, more Chinese than American, polite to a fault and prone to quote his favorite poet, Ling Po. He is also out of touch with modern society. He doesn't know how to use a telephone, doesn't understand slang (even the meaning of "two bucks") and is confused when he hears his name being broadcast from a car radio.

Ezekiel goes to Stockport, where he's supposed to stay with Rev. Junius P. Withers, who dies before Ezekiel can introduce himself. Withers was the perennial mayoral candidate of the city's Good Government League. As one leader puts it, "he was the best candidate we ever had. He never had a chance." To clarify: he was the best because he never had a chance. The GGL is a kind of dummy organization secretly patronized by Mayor Ed Morgan, the corrupt political boss of Stockport. It exists to present the semblance of a competitive election, lending legitimacy to Morgan's regime, which has presumably shut out real competition. When GGL leader Jake Mayo discovers Ezekiel and learns that he's a protege of Withers, the League decides that young Cobb is an ideal losing candidate. Mayo explains Cobb's background to a skeptical colleague:

"Say, what is this missionary racket?"

Mayo: "Sort of cleaning up a joint, you know."

"Oh, the old reform gag, eh?"

Lloyd has made a perfectly modern film for 1934, embracing the decade's irreverent, hard-boiled sensibility. As this is the last "pre-Code" year, he allows himself to cavort clumsily on a nightclub stage with a stripper and a band of scantily-clad chorines. This actually wins over a crowd inclined to despise a reformer. Better yet, he gets into a fight with the drunken mayor after the chief executive knocks down a newsboy. All this impresses his fellow boarder Pet Pratt (Una Merkel), who runs a hotel cigar and newsstand. Pet's not her real name, but "They call me Pet because they know I'd slap 'em down if they used my right name." So I'm not telling. She's the one who first warns Ezekiel that he's being used as a "cat's paw" by Mayo and Morgan. But as with Mayo, Pet's initial contempt for the guileless Cobb is tempered by an instinctual respect for his inherent honesty.

Publicity over the incidents at the nightclub leads to an upset victory for Ezekiel, who didn't want to win. Assured initially that he had no chance to win, he didn't understand why he wasn't supposed to until everyone's anger clues him in. He never expected to serve, but he's shamed by Pet into accepting the victory. Once he does this, he can't help but be his own man. He eventually makes a real ally of Mayo (who has the virtue of being honest about his own dishonesty), but has the rest of the Stockport political establishment against him. Undeterred, he vetoes pork-barrel spending, cuts salaries and fires corrupt officials. He's fearless in the face of threats from Morgan's goon Strozzi (Nat Pendleton), who's scared off by the coincidental display of an ancient Chinese sword. Ezekiel makes a mental note of this.

Morgan uses the stripper and a corrupt district attorney to manipulate Ezekiel into a career-killing scandal that guarantees his removal from office by the governor. Notified that he has 24 hours left as mayor, Cobb resolves to take drastic action to ensure that "the rulership of this city [will] not revert to these gangsters and racketeers." Repudiated by the GGL, Ezekiel declares himself "my own political organization, a party of one." Conceding that "I'm destroyed," he vows to destroy his enemies in return. With Mayo's help, he pulls off one part coup d'etat, one part coup de theatre in a last-ditch effort to terrorize the Morgan machine into submission.

The Cat's-Paw blends two popular motifs of early 1930s cinema. Ezekiel Cobb is a kind of "cinderella man" of the kind introduced in Frank Capra's Platinum Blonde and perfected in Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The cinderella man is an ordinary (albeit usually mildly eccentric) person elevated into prominence by a media establishment that seeks to exploit him, first by making a fool of him, then by ruining him through scandal if he starts to rock the boat in any way. Cinderella men and wisecracking women are also prominent features of screwball comedy, which was on the way to defining itself in 1934 with films like Twentieth Century and It Happened One Night.

In its political aspect, Lloyd's film (directed by Sam Taylor) is part or parody of the "fascist" tendency in films like the messianic Gabriel Over the White House and Cecil B. DeMille's elusive This Day and Age. Ezekiel Cobb comes to think of himself as a dictator and instructs his police chief to disregard the law while rounding up the criminal element. When told that habeus corpus writs will spring the arrested men from jail, he orders them confined in Chinatown instead, where the courts presumably can't reach and Cobb will be able to deal with his enemies with maximum ruthlessness. It probably goes too far to call The Cat's-Paw itself a fascist movie. It is a comedy, and as such is probably self-consciously aping the extreme measures of other films without necessarily endorsing them for real-world use.

More than a "cinderella man," however, Ezekiel Cobb will strike modern viewers as a character type better known as a "fish out of water," the stranger who is always underestimated for lacking proper sophistication, yet prevails over the slickers because of some native virtue. Given the popularity of this kind of character and story in the 1980s, it's not unreasonable to say that The Cat's-Paw was as much as fifty years ahead of its time. Its portrayal of Chinese culture may seem backward, and its overuse of American actors in Chinese roles definitely is, but the presentation of that culture is always respectful, as if Lloyd were atoning for his awful portrayal of Chinatown crime in Welcome Danger. As 1934 was around the peak of Charlie Chan's popularity, it probably isn't surprising to see a China-bred American portrayed as a pillar of unshakable virtue. Arguably, were a comedian to remake The Cat's-Paw today, the depiction of Chinese culture might be more offensive. If the film were remade, Ezekiel would almost certainly know kung fu. This might have seemed like a natural direction for a physical comedian to take in Lloyd's time, but from all I've seen martial arts were identified almost exclusively with Japan (judo, ju-jitsu) in those days.

The film benefits from a snappy screenplay full of hard-boiled wisecracking, vintage romantic cynicism and possibly record usage of the word "chink." It has an adorable romantic lead in Una Merkel, whose southern accent makes her seem almost as alien in Stockport as Cobb.

Best of all, Lloyd gives a thoroughly focused performance, rendering Ezekiel Cobb a real character rather than a thin mask for Lloyd's usual clowning. With help from his writers, Lloyd conveys that Cobb is an essentially alien personality, as much prejudiced in his own way as he is naive. His sexism may not have seemed so offensive then, but given Una Merkel's sympathetic performance as a wise woman, Ezekiel's attitude is clearly meant to look stupid. "Why is it that all American girls are so lacking in individuality?" he asks Pet tactlessly, "They all look alike: big eyed, pasty faced and, well, one exactly like the other....They seem to lack that sense of inferiority that woman should have in the presence of a man." This is just before he makes an ass of himself with the stripper. Likewise, his lurch toward dictatorship is meant to be distressing. It terrifies Mayo, at least, and the suspense of the last act is based on whether or not he follows through on his threats. Ezekiel Cobb is neither simply laughable or simply lovable. In his effort to overcome his own outdated image, Harold Lloyd puts something authentically strange on screen. But it didn't stop his decline, perhaps because it was too strange. So it was on to the next battlefield, and then another, and then it was exile until Howard Hughes and Preston Sturges summoned him to his Waterloo. But The Cat's-Paw was a victory of a kind that's worth remembering.