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A Major Disappointment

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

The last Harold Lloyd silent comedy, "Speedy" is a yuk-filled feature boasting some impressive thrill scenes and Jazz Age Manhattan ambiance. If not as satisfying as some earlier Lloyd silents, it manages to showcase just why Lloyd was the most popular of the big three silent clowns.Harold plays the title character, who may have gotten his name from undiagnosed ADD. Speedy flits from job to job while he dreams of baseball and his girl Jane (Ann Christy). Jane wants to marry Speedy, but first there's the business of her grandfather's horse-drawn trolley, which a greedy railway magnate wants to put out of business any way he can.As other commenters here point out, this is less a unified film than a sequence of four shorts stitched together as follows: 1. Harold the soda jerk. 2. Harold and Jane at Coney Island. 3. Harold the taxi driver. 4. Harold saves Pop's trolley. The only serious concession to "Speedy's" feature length is that some business of short #4 is introduced between shorts #1 and #2.Add to that the hit-or-miss gagginess of much of the film, and what you wind up with is less satisfying than Lloyd classics like "The Freshman" or "The Kid Brother." Even early Lloyd features like "Grandma's Boy" or "Dr. Jack" had loftier goals than the laugh-driven "Speedy". Yet "Speedy" is funny most of the time, and does work in some other ways, too.Though I'm not a Yankees fan, I'm a sucker with any movie that features Babe Ruth. Here, in a cameo, he does excellent work as a passenger afraid for his life getting a mad cab ride from the star-struck Speedy."Even when you strike out, you miss 'em close," Speedy enthuses, eyes on Babe and not the road."I don't miss 'em half as close as you do!" Babe yells back.It's cool just seeing these two icons share the screen, and if you watch just before the 53rd minute, you'll see a third icon, Lou Gehrig, slip into the background during a Harold-Babe two-shot and proceed to stick his tongue out at the camera!As fun as moments like that are, "Speedy" doesn't add up to the sum of its parts until the final third, when we resume the story of Pop's horse-drawn trolley. There we get a fitting capper to Lloyd's silent-clown career, with a hilarious street battle between young toughs and old coots fought with flypaper, horseshoes, and a pegleg, among other implements. Then there's the final trolley ride, which employs a horrific-looking real accident to create some tension over the question of whether Harold will save the day.Like many note, "Speedy" is as captivating for what you see in the background. So much of it was shot for real in Manhattan, and even when there's no comically rude Hall-of-Fame first basemen in sight, there's a lot of energy and activity on view, whether its tugboats on the Hudson, taxis on Times Square, or street urchins ingenuously looking at the camera wondering what's up. The Coney Island sequence is the most labored part of the film for me, but it's still not only inventively played out but especially edifying for those of us who wonder what amusement parks were like before the age of the steel roller-coaster or more stringent safety regulations.Lloyd and director Ted Wilde knew what the audience wanted, and deliver it here with a cherry on top. If not quite as on the money after more than 80 years, "Speedy" is still well worth watching for fans of Lloyd and silent comedy.

This was a bit different than "Girl Shy", "For Heaven's Sake" and "The Freshman". For a start Harold already had his girl - but it wasn't Jobyna Ralston, and you couldn't quite imagine the beautiful, demure Jobyna making an entrance where she kicks a couple of street urchins on the derriere and then makes cheeky faces at them as the trolley takes off. It was Ann Christy and she proved, initially, to be just as high spirited as Harold, but, as the story progressed and Harold's efforts at finding a job increased, her role petered out - and I definitely missed Jobyna. Harold wasn't the whole show in this - in fact Jane and her Pop, who operated the last horse drawn trolley car in New York, were introduced before Harold - and when he was, a bit of the old "up and at 'em" pep from his earlier movies was missing. In fact Pop was despairing of Harold ever finding a steady job - even though Harold was never without the "Help Wanted - Male" section of the paper. If jobs proved too difficult, as he said to Jane, he could always find another on Monday and Sunday was the best day to go to Luna Park. As with other reviewers, I found the visit to Luna Park was the highlight of the movie. Too much "funny stuff" happened to tell everything - the nippy lobster, when Harold thought he had wrecked his best suit, only to find it was the reflection of a lady's parasol and a pesky dog (played by "King Tut") who will not leave the pair alone and later on becomes an invaluable help as Harold does battle with a trolley gang. In fact the dog almost steals the movie with his comical expressions!!!Harold has a series of jobs and underlying them all is his passion for baseball. When he is a soda jerk, he has a hot line to the Yankee stadium and he keeps the kitchen staff up to date with scores by arranging doughnuts and pretzels. When he gets a job as a taxi driver his dreams come true when Babe Ruth hails his cab and orders him to take him to the ball park - and step on it!! He drives through the traffic like a maniac, dodging police and vehicles with precision - Mr. Ruth can hardly believe it!!The main story, however, has to do with Pop and the evil business men who are trying everything in their power to close his trolley down. As long as Pop can run the trolley for 2 hours a day everything is okay. The baddies are planning to cause a ruckus and carry Pop off, so his contract will be broken. They don't reckon on Harold and Pop's feisty Civil War buddies (it was the 20s). In the funniest sequence in the movie the elderly veterans jump into the fight with gusto (as one says "the only fights I've had in 60 years are with my wife - I'm on edge!!!"). In what was obviously a take off of the popularity of "Ben Hur" - Harold's trolley chase through the streets of New York is filmed like that famous chariot race. The horses are neck and neck and when he drives the trolley through the New York streets it looks just like a stadium. It is pretty spectacular.All in all a wonderful movie - even if I do miss Jobyna!!Highly Recommended.

Harold Lloyd's last Silent effort is also one of his best vehicles: as ever, production values transcend its simple, comedic nature - the film is particularly relevant as a time-capsule for its view of 1920s New York City - while the narrative itself is filled with enough engaging subplots to please just about everybody - Harold's failure to keep a job for long (we see him, hilariously, as a soda-jerk and a cab driver), his passion for baseball (replacing the game of football celebrated in Lloyd's earlier THE FRESHMAN [1925] and even featuring a cameo by one of its legendary exponents, Babe Ruth, as himself), not to mention an outing with his girl (Ann Christy - okay, if not quite in the same league as regulars Bebe Daniels, Mildred Davis and Jobyna Ralston) at Coney Island.The main plot, however, concerns a gang of big-city crooks intent on buying out Christy's grandfather (who owns the last operating horse-drawn cart in town); this eventually results in two wonderful set-pieces: the lengthy brawl between the villains and the team Lloyd rallies to resist them, a bunch of mangled but enthusiastic Civil War veterans, and the exhilarating final chase in which Harold ultimately makes good by bringing in the horse-cart on time against all odds - a tour-de-force in the style of Lloyd's climaxes for both GIRL SHY (1924) and FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE (1926). Incidentally, the ousting of an old-fashioned means of transport was also the theme of one of Ealing Studios' classic British comedies, THE TITFIELD THUNDERBOLT (1953), not to mention one of Luis Bunuel's Mexican films, ILLUSION TRAVELS BY STREETCAR (1954).Tragically, director Ted Wilde - who had also guided Lloyd through his finest movie ever, THE KID BROTHER (1927) - died of a stroke at the young age of 36 the year after he made SPEEDY but not before receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Direction of a Comedy Picture, the only time an award of this sort was handed out by the Academy.

the fact that films like this have over time morphed into complex tales with twists of irony and cynicism is kind of odd when you think about it. here you have old fashion pie eyed classic American values vs today's films which go as far as dogma or south park. the leap seems almost unimaginable. if this film has no other redeeming qualities it at least serves as beautiful archival footage of a time and place forever lost. new york city before the crash, the chrysler building, and king kong. outside of the plot and character, what unfolds on screen is a beautiful look at new york when horses and trolley cars still competed for space on the streets. and some wonderfully personal scenes of coney island. with in the movie is a typical harold comedy, complete with under cranked camera work in order to give the illusion of speed and early acting of physical comedy and choreography that has jackie chan as a distant offspring. the weird thing to think about during the film is that at this point in time everyone on screen has probably been dead for over fifty years! the comedy when it hits can be amusing, but nothing like the marx brothers or stooges would later achieve. llyod is a pioneer in that respect and often over shadowed by chaplin. the fight seen towards the end (what's new york without a huge riot?) goes on a bit too long and pushes the movie up to 85 min. which was rather long for that era. worth seeing once, at least 7 out of 10