HAROLD LLOYD & J. HULBERT

Greymouth Evening Star, 19 December 1934, Page 14

HAROLD LLOYD & J. HULBERT

METHODS OF A COMEDIAN. I Harold Lloyd is one of my favourite comedians (writes the Film Critic of the London “Sunday Times”). He has little of Chaplin’s genius. His pictures are not, like Chaplin’s or Rene Clair’s or such masterly foreign satires as “The Captain of Koepenick” and “Ces Messieurs de la Sante,” a criticism of life. Chaplin’s theme is always the futility of ambition, tho loneliness of the altruistic dreamer, buffeted and mocked by fate. Lloyd’s stories are cut to the same pattern as stories in the “Saturday Evening Post.” Chaplin’s heroes are all failures. Lloyd’s are all successes —“Local boy makes good.” “The Cat’s Paw” (Capitol), though similar in theme, is something of an experiment in the way of actual plot. Its hero is not the confident, bustling Babbitt of previous films, but a nervous young missionary from China, out of place and ill at ease in the American town in which he finds himself. He has returned merely to find a suitable wife—a mother for China’s orphan millions. In order that there shall be some show of an election, but no chance of their own rascal of a candidate being defeated, the local grafters run him for the office of Mayor. To everybody’s amazement he is elected, and, instead of turning out a cat’s paw for the crooks, cleans up the town by the methods he has learned in China.

The beginning is rather quiet. The high spot of the picture is the scene where he has all the crooks in the town arrested and taken, not to the gaol, from which they would speedily be extricated by writs of habeas corpus, but to the cellar of a Chinese friend. There he offers them the choice between writing their confessions and suffering the fate of bandits in olden China —and the . gigantic executioner’s sword that two half-nak-ed headsmen are noisily sharpening on a grindstone makes the alternative only too clear. A joke? A bluff? So the gangsters all believe. But supposing it isn’t? Supposing he’s crazy? The thought is contagious. Beads of sweat appear on once confident faces, fingers pluck at collars grown all of a sudden tight. The first victim is dragged into the next room, a second. A body, with the head neatly repo’sing in a tray, is slowly wheeled past the others’ staringeyes. There is a sudden yell, “I’ll confess,” and all the crooks are clamouring for pen and paper. The campaign for honesty is won. An amusing scene, cleverly worked out, with Mr Lloyd suggesting just that touch of visionary fanaticism which has been known to make godly men—e.g., John Brown, the abolitionist —welcome the shedding of unrighteous blood.

HOW IT IS DONE. Mr Lloyd’s pictures are not all inspired, but for that very reason they deserve the closest study from the trade. He once described his methods to me. He has a team of scenario writers and “gag-men”—ex-vaudeville artists, ex-journalists, anybody who has shown a capacity to understand his technique. Thej r meet at his house every morning about ten. They work all the morning, one suggesting an idea, a stunt, another improving on it, Mr Lloyd himself adding a new twist. It is tried out. It is found to be funny, is added to his collection, cardindexed for future reference. (You remember the farcical sequences in which he accidentally changed coats with a conjurer, released white mice I on the ball-room floor, and shot jets I of water from his button-hole into the , eye of his employer’s wife? He had ■ that idea stored for years before it I was actually used.) 4 Or perhaps it is not funny. Then it is discarded, or changed and polished until it is funny. When he has his story and “gags” all ready, after about three months’ work, he begins to shoot his picture. He cuts it and re-shoots the dull patches, and then tries it out on a typical audience, without warning. Anything they don’t like is changed p"«un. I

“Gerald, dear, when we are married we must have many servants.” “You shall have as many as you want—but not all at once.”

Contractor: Does the foreman know that the trench has fallen in? Labourer: Well, sir, we’re digging him out to tell him.

Mrs Jackson: Tell me, dear, your real reason for giving up drink. Husband: Well, it was like this. The last time I came home late your mother was there. I saw two of her. The shock cured me.