by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
On last night's TCM tribute to silent comedy
Harold Lloyd was
represented by The Freshman, a 1925 comedy that was one of Lloyd’s biggest hits — and one can see
why; though Lloyd was 31 and therefore way too old to be playing a college freshman, he managed to project enough
guileless innocence he made the concept work. The plot cast Lloyd as Harold
Lamb (a name close to his own but also one which itself projects the innocent
lovability of the character), who’s grown up in a household in which his father
is a successful bookkeeper who’s taken up radio as a hobby. Dad spends
virtually all his time at home with his headphones on (in 1925 most radios
still played so faintly you needed headphones to be able to hear anything), and
his grand obliviousness to everything going on around him when he has his
headphones on seems all too au courant today! Harold has saved up nearly $500 to finance his college
education, and when we first see him he’s practicing college cheers in front of
the mirror in his room — and dad hears the noises his son is making and thinks
they’re static on his radio. He goes off to Tate University, described in an
introductory title as “a large football stadium — with a college attached” (yet
another aspect of this movie that’s still funny because it’s all too true today of nominal “colleges” that are really in the
sports business), wearing a knit sweater with a bit “T” on it that the other
students ridicule behind his back for being dated. The big man on campus
(Brooks Benedict) and the other students in his circle decide to ridicule
Harold and exploit him — there’s a marvelous scene in which he offers to treat
a few fellow students to ice cream and kids start pouring out of the dorms to
follow him and take him up on it — and the only person who’s nice to him is
Peggy (Jobyna Ralston, who replaced Mildred Davis as Lloyd’s on-screen leading
lady when Davis quit films to marry Lloyd for real), who runs a cigar stand at
a local store and who met him on the train taking him to college.
With his
whole idea of college influenced by a movie he saw (over and over again) called
The College Hero starring someone named
“Lester Laurel” (whose last name would be used by another one of the greatest
movie comedians of all time!), Harold tries to buy his way into the good graces
of the campus in crowd by hosting the “Fall Frolic” dance. For this he
commissions a new suit from the college tailor (played by Joseph Harrington as
a typical oy vey Jewish stereotype), only
the tailor suffers from dizzy spells and is merely able to baste the suit
instead of actually doing the final sewing job on it before the Big Night.
Warned not to over-exert himself in the suit lest it fall apart (and with the
tailor there to do emergency repairs in case Harold starts having wardrobe
malfunctions), Harold ignores the advice and the suit literally starts falling apart as he’s wearing it.
Originally Lloyd wanted to avoid a big pants-dropping scene because he thought
it would be undignified and too clichéd, so he shot the sequence losing just
the suit jacket — only when the film previewed the sequence went over like a
lead balloon and his gag men did a lot of I-told-you-so’s, so he went back,
recruited all the extras again, and dropped the pants for a screamingly funny
finish. The rest of the movie deals with Harold’s attempts to make his rep by
joining the football team — at which he’s so incompetent the coach first uses
him as a tackling dummy, then makes him the water boy, though he nominally puts
him on the roster (his jersey bears the number “0”). This actually comes in
handy during Tate’s big game against Union State, which forms the climax of the
film, in which the Union State players manage to knock so many Tate squad
members out of the game the coach has to put Harold in or forfeit the game — and of course after a few
glitches (like catching a spectator’s hat, thinking it’s the football, and
running with it to the end zone) Harold scores the winning touchdown and
becomes an instant campus hero.
The Freshman is a marvelously funny film — it has two nominal
directors, Sam Taylor and Fred Newmeyer, but Lloyd was clearly the auteur — and it benefits from Lloyd’s stiff-upper-lip
attitude towards pathos. Though there aren’t any of the big “thrill” scenes
people think of when they hear the name “Harold Lloyd” (I’ve seen an interview
clip with Lloyd complaining that he only made six movies with big thrill
sequences, but that’s all anybody remembered him for), the plot of The
Freshman puts Lloyd through a
series of traumas and tortures he handles with an almost masochistic
determination. Silent-comedy criticism has often both praised and damned
Charlie Chaplin for his use of pathos — ignoring that Lloyd and Buster Keaton
also did pathos in their own ways, though far less glaringly and romantically
than Chaplin did — and the grim determination with which Harold seeks to
overcome the trials of college and earn his reputation makes The Freshman more than just a very funny film — though it is a very funny film. One oddity about The
Freshman is that at no time are any
of these alleged “students” ever actually shown studying or attending class —
the only authority figure we see is the college dean, and he’s in the movie
only as a target Harold can inadvertently insult — it’s common for Hollywood
movies about college to de-emphasize academics but few of them have so totally ignored the “education” part of higher education
as this one!
