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Best movie of this year hands down!

A Disappointing Continuation

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Harold Lloyd said farewell to the big screen with his collaboration with director Preston Sturges on The Sin Of Harold Diddlebock. While some of Lloyd's humor from his great days is retained in this film it will not be remembered as one of the best from either Lloyd or Sturges.Possibly I think that Lloyd may have been too old to be doing all the physical comedy this role called for. It was not as bad as Stan Laurel in Utopia because Lloyd was in better health, but he clearly was playing his age and people in their fifties just don't do some of the crazy stunts this role required.And Lloyd was one of the most physical of silent screen comedians and certain things were expected of him, most especially his work hanging from ledges in high places. The public that remembered him expected that and Harold was obliged to give it to them.In the title role we first get a prologue of sorts from Lloyd's greatest silent screen hit The Freshman where we see him glasses and all winning the big football game for his school. After that an enthusiastic Raymond Walburn offers him a job at his advertising agency and Lloyd thinks this is the start of a great career.Flash forward by presidents from the Harding to the Truman years and we see Lloyd just toiling away at a drudge job and then gets the final blow. No doubt to make room for some eager young hotshot fresh from college, Lloyd gets the pink slip. After getting his pink slip from Walburn fortune takes Lloyd to a bar run by Edgar Kennedy and the companionship of Jimmy Conlin. Where he takes his first drink, a concoction mixed by Kennedy and he changes in personality totally. After that it gets way too complicated to describe.The famous stunts from cinematically achieved great heights, a specialty of Lloyd's involves Lloyd, Conlin, and a circus lion on the edge of a skyscraper ledge. It's good, but doesn't work as well as those same stunts in Lloyd's salad days.As for Preston Sturges, he borrows a leaf from WC Fields who borrows from Charles Dickens in creating some great character names starting with the title role. Look down the cast list of some great character players who have names suiting their personalities. Fields did the same in The Bank Dick which is a much better film.The Sin Of Harold Diddlebock is a decent enough film for Harold Lloyd to put his career to rest, but far from his or Preston Sturges's best work.

If the combined swan song from erstwhile silent clown Harold Lloyd and director Preston Sturges compares poorly to their individual, earlier masterpieces, it nevertheless remains an engaging minor work from two mismatched comic talents. The funniest sequence is, perhaps not surprisingly, the silent prologue, lifted intact from the last reel of Lloyd's 1923 classic 'The Freshman'. What happens after graduation to college gridiron hero Harold Diddlebock (Harold Lamb, in the earlier film) should have inspired a typically madcap satire of the American work ethic, but after a promising start the ideas disappear in a hurry (everything in the film happens in a hurry). The first twenty minutes, up to where Harold loses his job and boldly takes his first drink, is classic Sturges: witty, sophisticated, and quite daring for the way it gently mocks the optimistic ambitions of its hero. But in a desperate attempt to earn his laughs the easy way Sturges later enlists the help of a tame lion and fakes a thrill sequence a la 'Safety Last', for a less-than-hilarious climax more exhausting than it is exhilarating. Lloyd, ironically, caps his long career with an atypically rich (and thus, for him, all the more effective) performance, at least until all the shouting takes over.

In 1947, 9 years after his last film, Harold Lloyd re-appeared once more to give the world his swansong. The story tells of a college hero who ends up in a dead-end job and how his life changes when he ends up redundant aftter 22 years. There will always be an interest in the last film of any great clown and while some disappoint, Lloyds finale is quite a joy. Make no mistake though, this is a far cry from his groundbreaking, hilarious romps of the 20's, but if you don't expect that you'll have a very enjoyable 90 minutes. After being made redundant the lifelong teetotal ends up getting drunk very quickly, and noisily!! Later on Harold wins a fortune on the horses embarks on a huge bender. When it's all over and Harold wakes up and he realises he can't remember a single thing about Wednesday! It turns out he had bought a circus and the rest of the film centres around that little problem. As you might hope with a Lloyd film there are antics high on a skyscraper which, strangely, aren't as convincing as his silent days of yore but still amuse. On a whole the film is fine ending to Lloyd's movie career, while not capturing his early greatness, the film entertains and a good few belly laughs are to be had. There is a romantic sub-plot, but this is kept exceedingly minimal and is quite amusing in it's own way.

Between 1940 and 1944, Preston Sturges wrote and directed some of the best film comedy ever produced. His eight movies for that short period are all good, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that four of the eight have the touch of brilliance.This sequence of movies came to an end when Sturges left Paramount following what he legitimately saw as increasing interference by studio bosses. His high stature at the studio hadn't prevented two of his movies from being taken out of his hands and re-cut against his wishes, one of which - The Great Moment - was never restored to the movie Sturges intended.At this point, Sturges declined to join a rival studio, and instead formed a partnership with Howard Hughes, hoping to protect his future movies from the interference he could see was becoming more common within the studio system. However, for a combination of reasons, this partnership with Hughes was not a success, and the only film Sturges produces in that period - The Sin of Harold Diddlebock - shows a decline in his work.The whole look and sound of the movie is inferior. It is impossible to know whether this decline was the result of an inevitable burn-out in his ability after such sustained success, or the absence of support and quality control that Paramount had applied to the benefit of the wonderful movies that had come before.So... to "Diddlebock" itself! It is difficult to identify why it isn't as funny as we might expect. The film was created as a star vehicle for Harold Lloyd, and by all accounts his comedy instincts did not match those of Sturges. As much as Stuges tried, clearly such a big talent and personality as Lloyd was never going to completely submit to direction with which he didn't agree, and there must be some evidence of that in what we see on screen.There is a complete lack of the 'sparkle' we have come to expect. The familiar faces around Lloyd remind us of the great Sturges movies, but to me this is like an inferior pastiche of a Sturges movie by a lesser hand, without such a reliable instinct for film comedy. But perhaps that describes what Preston Sturges had become in such a short time.