497 - Number, Please?, United States, 1920. Dir. Hal Roach.

Saturday, May 12, 2018

497 - Number, Please?, United States, 1920.  Dir. Hal Roach.

"An old, old story of men who have loved, lost, and tried to forget.

Some seek the whispering shadows of the great outdoors haunted always by the face of the One Girl.

Some lose her image in the mystic haze of the silent seas.

Others turn from The Girl to the feverish lure of the gaming table.

The devil-may-care type--he who toys with death--anything to forget the Only Girl."

The Boy "toys with death" by riding a roller coaster.  Maybe that will help.

"The Girl.  Grief laid its heavy hand upon her--but the hand slipped."

She is happy again.  She is with a new boy, The Rival.  They, too, are at the amusement park.  Together.

As The Boy, our boy, rides the roller coaster, alone, his hat keeps flying off and landing back on his face.

The Girl walks and laughs with the Rival at the games of skill.

The Boy, now walking, sees The Girl with The Rival and jealously begins throwing balls.  Rather than hitting their targets, they hit the porcelain dolls laid out as prizes.  He must pay the game operator for the damage.

General Pershing gets lost.  General Pershing is The Girl's dog.  Both boys race to be the first to find the pooch.  They both find it.

The threesome comes upon the balloonman.  He is not little and lame.  He does not whistle far and wee.  The boys are not coming from marbles and piracies.  But it may be Spring.  And they may just as well be eddieandbill, since Harold Lloyd has given them no names.

And the world may as well be mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

But enough about e. e. cummings.  Back to our movie.

The balloon man offers two passes to the three people.  The Girl says she will take whichever boy first gets her mother's permission.

The boys race to get her mother's permission.  The Rival races to the mother's home.  The Boy tries to outflank him by calling the mother on the telephone.  But all kinds of problems ensue, from crowded phone booths to testy operators to wrong numbers to someone's baby ending up in his arms.

The boys get permission and scamper back to the Girl, only to find a pickpurse pickpocket has picked her pocket and pilfered her purse to pillage and pocket her pay.

The Boy, of course, is mistaken for the purloiner.  The police chase him.  Because in the physical comedies of 1920, just about every movie seems to be a pretext for a police chase.

Cut to the chase.

The best physical jokes come in this section.  The Boy puts a real boy on his shoulders covered with a long coat to make the two of them appear like one really tall man.  (Which Hal Roach used in full force with his Our Gang shorts.)  When they walk, the little boy gets stopped on an awning with the coat dangling, and The Boy keeps walking without his "top."

While running, Harold Lloyd runs straight at a man riding a bicycle and jumps over him.  These are the moments you want to see.  The plots are so uneven and the physical humor sometimes dated, sometimes classic, that whenever you get to the pure physical comedy, true stunts that never age, that is when you appreciate Lloyd's prowess.

This is one of the Harold Lloyd films where he does not get The Girl.

The Rival and The Girl walk off arm-and-arm, presumably to go to the hot-air balloon, but the movie has abandoned it.  The Boy then rides another ride alone.

"Again, a lone wanderer roams the world facing the drab dawn of a dead tomorrow."

The End.