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| Harold Lloyd as the jack of spades in Dr. Jack (1922). |
In the realm of American silent film comedy, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd constitute something of a trinity. But a modern-day Arian heresy has erupted, and just as the Arians denied the equality of God and Christ, and put Christ in a distinctively inferior position, so have the critics marginalized Harold Lloyd in comparison to his contemporaries, Chaplin and Keaton. Now, it�s only recently that I�ve started watching some of Harold Lloyd�s films (Criterion has been adding them to their Hulu page, God bless them), but I am finally in a position to opine on the eclipse of Lloyd�s reputation.
I believe there are two primary reasons for Lloyd�s perceived inferiority to Chaplin and Keaton, one of them obvious, one of them less so. Let�s start with the obvious: Chaplin and Keaton were both directors and screenwriters in addition to being actors (hell, Chaplin also wrote the music for his movies). Lloyd was neither a director nor a screenwriter; he was merelyan actor (as if that were some mean accomplishment). But because of their multiple roles, Chaplin and Keaton aren�t just actors, they�re auteurs, and so the Cahiers du cin�ma crowd can include them in the ranks of Welles, Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, and all their other favorites. Not so, Harold Lloyd. And in fact, this is where the auteur theory breaks down, because it doesn�t account for the unique type of brilliance on display in a Harold Lloyd movie. Let�s take, for example, Dr. Jack (1922), directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and starring Harold Lloyd. Now, this delightful film is a Harold Lloyd vehicle, and it looks distinctly like a Harold Lloyd film; his fingerprints are all over it. But he didn�t write it and he didn�t direct it (Fred C. Newmeyer directed it, and who the hell is he? Is he an auteur? Do the films of Newmeyer present a coherent oeuvre with recurring themes from which we can draw broad conclusions? (These questions are mostly rhetorical, what the hell do I know about Fred C. Newmeyer?)) So because Lloyd is �just� an actor, he can�t be included in the auteurist pantheon like Chaplin and Keaton (Keaton, it should be mentioned, usually had a co-writer and a co-director, as opposed to Chaplin, who did everything).
The second problem�if we can call it that�with Lloyd is that he has a distinctively different on-screen style than Chaplin or Keaton. Chaplin, as the little tramp, is awkward and clumsy but consequently self-effacing; he�s always doffing his hat and attempting to preserve his tramp�s dignity. Keaton is a bit less self-effacing, but he�s also always ready to doff his hat in an attempt to make-up for whatever awkwardness he�s just perpetrated (the doffing of the hat is their �essential gesture,� to borrow and pervert an express from Nadine Gordimer). Lloyd, by contrast, is not a hat-doffer, because Lloyd isn�t that comically awkward. Sure, he finds himself in absurd physical situations, but he himself isn�t absurd; rather, he�s an everyman trying to ride these situations out. So, let�s consider a gag from Speedy(1928), in which Lloyd�s character is visiting Coney Island with his girlfriend and a crab slips into his pocket (don�t ask why) and starts pinching passersby. The joke is that the passersby don�t notice the crab, and so they become enraged at Lloyd, who is also unaware of the crab and thusly doesn�t understand why people are getting irritated with him. His reaction to the situation is fundamentally different from how Chaplin or Keaton would act in his place. If Chaplin were to find himself inexplicably subject to the outrage of strangers, he would doff his hat and bow and try to make himself look small and inoffensive. I suspect Keaton would do much the same. Lloyd, however, does not do this. Lloyd�s reaction is probably more realistic, which is in line with his normal-person-in-strange-situations shtick. When the crab�s victims turn to yell at Lloyd, he yells back. Yes, he responds to the situation with his own sense of outrage. Whereas the Chaplin character probably thinks, �Oh, what have I done now?�, the Lloyd character is only concerned with his insulted dignity. And so�and it�s silent, mind you�he yells and gestures back at his persecutors. If this was a 21st-century film, one would not be surprised to hear him say, �Yeah, well fuck you, asshole! Piss off!� (These are the expressions that the rage on his face conveys).
And this is not what we�re looking for in our silent comics. If you come to silent film comedy after first seeing the ever-modest Chaplin and Keaton, Lloyd looks almost sociopathic by contrast. Because his character is just as disruptive to his surroundings as Chaplin and Keaton, but he only responds to people�s justified anger with his own rage. It�s not particularly funny to see him do this. And�again, coming to Lloyd after Chaplin and Keaton, as I suspect most people do�it�s downright disconcerting. This is not to say that Lloyd isn�t extremely funny under the right circumstances�Dr. Jack is one of the most purely pleasurable movies I�ve seen lately�but it undermines his long-term position within the canon of classic film. And if you couple it was his failure to be an auteur�and I�m sure he didn�t know that that was something that would later be expected of him�he tends to be overshadowed by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and their towering reputations. Harold Lloyd is delightful in his own right, but his is a different kind of talent, and to dismiss him by comparison with his contemporaries is to do him a disservice.
