Feet First

1930 talkie comedy

Rating: 15/20 (Abbey: She didn't watch enough of this to give it a rating, but she sat down and watched a little bit, declared this "the worst movie ever," and left.)

Plot: Harold (I'm guessing that's his name since that seems to be the name of every other Harold Lloyd character) is a shoe salesman with much, much loftier ambitions. He meets and falls for a girl, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, and through no fault of his own, convinces her that he is a big wig in the leather industry. Through some fault of his own, he winds up on a cruise with them and has to fight to not blow his cover.

Abbey's wrong about this being the "worst movie ever," but this probably has my vote for the "gayest movie poster ever." Look at that thing! The thing Harold Lloyders (that's the term I've come up with for his fans) will notice is that Lloyd pretty much plagiarizes his own Safety Last! with an up-the-side-of-a-tall-building stunt that takes up the last twenty or so minutes of the film. But it's different because he gets to talk in this one, so we get to hear both his fear and racial insensitivity. A dimwitted black janitor (played by Willie Best in one of the most racially-insensitive movies of all time [The Littlest Rebel, with Shirley Temple in blackface]) shows up for comic purposes, and Lloyd gives him the nickname Charcoal. Since, according to the Wikipedia page for this movie, Lloyd had parts of this redubbed to change his name from Harold to Charlie for reasons never explained, it seems like he could have redubbed it so that he said "Hey, black janitor!" instead of "Hey, Charcoal!" But it's a minor quibble, and my man Buster had more embarrassing moments in his career. Anywho, Lloyd's building hijinks, here the result of accident rather than in Safety Last! when he climbs the building intentionally, are just as entertaining, straddling a line most film makers wouldn't have even known existed between dangerous and hilarious. So I can forgive the whole "My first talkie stunk, so I'd better recycle an idea that worked well in an earlier film" thing. There's not much to see with the plot here. There are a lot of funny moments and sight gags, but you have to trudge through a lot to get there. The movie really picks up when Lloyd gets on the boat. Like Safety Last!, this is not a movie I would not recommend to my acrophobic (or homophobic, I guess, because of that poster) readers.

shane-movies trivia: This is the second movie in a row with a Samuel Taylor Coleridge reference. That beats my previous record of one.