495 - Never Weaken, United States, 1921. Dir. Fred C. Newmeyer.

Thursday, May 10, 2018

495 - Never Weaken, United States, 1921.  Dir. Fred C. Newmeyer.

The Boy loves The Girl.

The Girl works for The Doctor.  The bone doctor.  The osteopath.

He is going to have to lay her off.

He just does not have enough patients to justify keeping her on.

Good thing The Boy finds out about it.  He knows just what to do.  He takes a stack of the good doctor's business cards and hands them out to people on the street who need his services.

How does he find people who need his services?

He creates their situations!

You have heard of ambulance-chaser attorneys.  How about an ambulance-attractor boyfriend.

The next sequence displays Harold Lloyd in his creative physicality.  As he meets people in town, he sets up situations that cause them to fall or have something fall upon them, and then surreptitiously deposits one of the good doctor's business cards on their person.

Before no time business is booming.

But in a repeat of a previous film, he misunderstands something he overhears The Girl say and thinks she is marrying someone else.  So in the next sequence he tries to end it all in various unsuccessful ways, only to have everything work out in the end.

As with many of his films of this period in his career, the skeleton plot is a framework upon which to hang his comical physicality, and the film works as a warm-up for his later features.