1932's Movie Crazy Showcases Harold Lloyd At His Very Best

Harold Lloyd was a prolific fixture of silent screen comedy, a milquetoast looking man with the soul, spirit and boundless courage of a daredevil. He was a mouse of a man with the bravery of a lion. Lloyd made the leap to sound much more confidently and successfully than many of his contemporaries. Some of Lloyd’s best loved and best remembered films came after the silent era, including his exquisite Preston Sturges-helmed comeback movie and final film, 1947’s The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, a.k.a. Mad Wednesday.

But Lloyd’s post-silent career was so sparse that even though Lloyd didn’t die until 1971 at the relatively ripe old age of 77 his 1932 hit Movie Crazy has the curious distinction of being at once one of the comedy icon’s first sound movies and one of his last.

Though Lloyd was nearly forty by the time Movie Crazy hit theaters he retained the ebullient, boyish air and all-American innocence of an eager young man on the go. In Movie Crazy, Lloyd plays Harold Hall, an affable Midwestern doofus who isn’t about to let a complete lack of talent and/or savvy keep him from pursuing his delusional dream of making it as a big time Hollywood movie star.

Due to a mix-up, a short-tempered studio executive mistakes the bespectacled movie lover for a handsome young actor and invites him to Hollywood for a screen test. Harold is too naive and gullible to realize just how quixotic his quest for stardom truly is. He cannot comprehend the infinite depths of his talentlessness. Thankfully God looks after fools of his magnitude so Harold’s experiences in the lowest and highest rungs of show business are defined by alternating currents of bad luck and astonishing good fortune.

Harold’s preposterously over-the-top good luck gets him through some prestigious doors at which point his genius for wreaking unintentional destruction takes over and he becomes a human hurricane, laying waste to everyone and everything around him yet somehow always emerging unscathed.

Upon arriving in Hollywood, for example, Harold lucks into work as an extra whose job is to be as inconspicuous as possible, to be so indistinct and forgettable that he fades into the background, serving less as an actor than as scenery with a pulse. Harold, alas, is incapable of doing anything inconspicuously or correctly so his time as a background actor is understandably cut short by his propensity for lunging absent-mindedly for the spotlight.

As part of a never-ending comedy of errors Harold finally receives his ill-gotten screen test. But it goes so disastrously that by the end he’s racked up a volume of takes to rival Stanley Kubrick at his most sadistically perfectionist, albeit with more hilarious bungling and less chilly distance.

Harold is a one-man war on social order. He is a chaos agent, a force for anarchy. At a fancy dinner party lousy with swells and show business big shots he accidentally switches jackets with a magician and all too slowly discovers his error and its calamitous consequences around the same time he single-handedly transforms an orderly get-together into a near riot. 

Harold ends up failing upwards spectacularly both personally and professionally, in his love life and in his seemingly doomed pursuit of movie stardom. As a Midwestern outsider he has a tough time separating the elaborate, exotic fictions of a movie industry he worships but does not understand from reality yet that ends up working out in his favor.

The angel-faced innocent with the signature hat and bow tie falls for glamorous actress Mary Sears (Constance Cummings) without realizing that, in costume and make-up for her latest melodrama, she’s also the Mexican actress he’s also fallen for. Cummings toys with her doe-eyed, babe-in-the-woods suitor like a cat playing with a dead mouse. She’s at once charmed by our hapless hero’s very un-Hollywood guilelessness and dewy innocence and understandably annoyed by his obliviousness. He’s something new in Hollywood. In a dirty business he’s a pure soul.

Harold’s child-like innocence and misadventures in dream land intermittently recall another rollicking comedy about a bow-tie-wearing man-child who wreaks joyful chaos on a Hollywood sound stage while in monomaniacal pursuit of an impossible dream: 1985’s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Tim Burton’s feature debut similarly concluded with a man with no business even visiting a Hollywood studio set as a tourist somehow managing to charm a movie world bigwig into believing in an outsider and their unlikely cinematic potential.

Movie Crazy’s rambling, episodic structure suits the preeminent silent screen star’s unique skill set. Sequences like Harold’s introduction to film act as yet another vehicle for creating accidental, wanton destruction.  It plays like an elegant short film but also suits the story and Lloyd’s character and the film’s depiction of Hollywood as both ridiculous and enchanted.

Lloyd brings a balletic grace and an understated athleticism to intricately filmed and choreographed sequences that represent a master class in comic craftsmanship. Lloyd also reportedly directed much of the picture when its credited auteur, legendary gag-man Clyde Bruckman, was too incapacitated by alcoholism to do the job.

Movie Crazy is a surprisingly elegant, understatedly cinematic movie. It’s full of gorgeous deep focus compositions, gliding camera movements and long takes that serve the intricately crafted gags, visual and otherwise, but also lend the proceedings a sense of momentum and style. The filmmakers are intent on realizing cinema’s capacity for doing so much more than capturing vaudeville style gags, routines and pratfalls for posterity. In Movie Crazy, the camera is a powerful tool both for storytelling and for making people laugh. The camera is another potent weapon in the filmmakers’ arsenal.

Movie Crazy enjoyed a robust second life when it was included in the 1962 compilation film Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy alongside clips from other Lloyd classics like Safety Last! and The Freshman. Assembled by Lloyd himself, the documentary introduced Lloyd, who had been absent from the screen for a decade and a half at that point, to a whole new appreciative audience.

It makes sense that Movie Crazy would live anew as part of a movie designed to illustrate its star and creator’s singular genius. Movie Crazy is more than the sum of its remarkable parts, but those parts lend themselves unusually well to being de-contextualized and re-contextualized as stand-alone tributes to Lloyd at his late-period best.

The movie’s climax, which once again finds our movie-mad and impressively clueless hero confusing moviemaking with real life, was taken largely from a silent 1927 Lloyd comedy entitled The Kid Brother. What worked on the silent screen works equally well with sound. With Movie Crazy, Lloyd was able to build upon everything that he had created as a silent filmmaker while taking advantages of the myriad possibilities, comic and stylistic, presented by sound.

For all its gleeful irreverence, Movie Crazy nevertheless conveys a genuine sense of awe at the sheer scale and scope of Hollywood make believe. Lloyd’s goofy valentine to the art form that made him a star is appropriately titled and, not coincidentally, precisely the kind of delight that makes people fall in love with movies in the first place.

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