The Word Is Madcap: Harold Lloyd @ The Paramount

FACT: On August 24, 1919, film star Harold Lloyd -- while posing for publicity shots in which he was lighting a cigarette from a lit bomb -- blew the thumb and forefinger off his right hand. "Somehow," accounts explain, "a real bomb had gotten mixed in with the props." In 1923, as if to underscore learning nothing from the experience, he released one of the most famous films of all time, Safety Last! (Which you won't see at this month's retrospective of the films of Harold Lloyd because they just showed it a while ago.)

Lloyd, writer, director, star, was an adrenalin junkie. There's a scene in Girl Shy (there was a snafu in getting a copy of Grandma's Boy) where Lloyd is racing a wagon with a team of horses through town, trying to stop a wedding in time. It's an absurdly busy street: cars, bicycles, pedestrians, woman yanking children out of the way. With horses at full gallop, a wheel comes off -- Lloyd eyes this development nervously, then unhitches the wagon from the team, hops across the hitch itself, and jumps onto a horse's back. (There's a jump cut later after the horse stumbles and falls on its rider. Ouch.)

This is a small part of a larger chase sequence that begins with Lloyd running madly after a train, hitching rides on cars (and "borrowing" others), and doing about 50 through town on a trolley car. (Last night's other movie, Dr. Jack, is more about people falling down huge flights of stairs, though Dr. Jack's loving care of an elderly patient recalls this recent New Yorker article.)

Thrills are one thing, but with Lloyd there's more to watch for. The silent movie intertitles could easily be turned into Jay Leno monologues: "Didja hear that one about Dr. von Saulsberg? That fancypants doctor with the sanitarium? Yeah, they say his monthly bills read like the German war debt." Ha! That'd be $33 billion! That's comedy. We think he was probably the Stephen Colbert of his day. You can see the resemblance. Uncanny.

Lloyd makes images do double-duty; when his stuttering, lovestruck tailor's apprentice runs into the wealthy hottie Mary Buckingham a second time, they have a getting-to-know-you conversation. He keeps steering her away from his town's "inappropriate" rural scenes: a sow suckling piglets, kids skinny-dipping -- the things he'd normally talk about, being a country boy, show up and so what you see is him censoring himself. He's also careless enough to rest his hand against a tree trunk running with sap -- which we've done, it's a drag -- and then the lovely Mary's hand gets stuck to his, too. Mutual attraction makes people look stuck together.

The Trader Joe-sponsored shows are Mondays this May, at 7pm at the Paramount, with Dennis James at the Mighty Wurlitzer Organ. Tickets are $12 adult, $9 students/seniors. We mention Trader Joe's because they took their sponsoring seriously, and came with free munchies and a grab-bag raffle. We hear they're doing this for every show. You don't even need to bother trying to sneak in popcorn. Thanks for the pretzels, Trader Joe.