Comedy first Harold Lloyd at the Brattle BY STEVE VINEBERG
	"Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd" At the Brattle Theatre June 17 through 23.

Film historian Kevin Brownlow, in the title of his documentary about the great silent comic Harold Lloyd, dubbed him "the third genius" — that is to say, alongside Chaplin and Keaton, who have garnered far more attention. The recently restored prints of Lloyd’s output, 13 of which are being shown in a tip-top series at the Brattle this week, should prove true to Brownlow’s assessment. Lloyd wasn’t as consistently inspired as Keaton — was anyone, in the whole history of movie comedy? — and he didn’t produce a collection of movies as dearly beloved as Chaplin’s. (Then again, he was seldom as sentimental.) And his character was more distinctly tied to his era, the Roaring Twenties. But he was the breeziest of the silent comedians, the most effortlessly upbeat, the most cheerily reckless. A glance at the names of his movies confirms it — Speedy, Why Worry?, Welcome Danger, Feet First, Safety Last.

In fact he has two typical roles, and they’re not as far apart as they might seem. In most of his pictures, he plays a hick (from Great Bend or Little Bend or Magnolia Meadows), and he’s socially backward — cursed with a stutter in Girl Shy (June 18), or struggling to live up to his manly father and brothers in The Kid Brother (June 20), or suffering a movie-fed delusion about what will make him popular on his college campus in The Freshman (June 17). And he has to prove himself — which he does, with a combination of conviction, inventiveness, and stick-to-it-iveness that’s purest Horatio Alger. But in other pictures, he’s a rich boy who loses his self-absorption when he discovers romance, though what makes these films fun rather than sententious is that he never alters his mode of behavior — he just applies it, with resounding success, to his new project. That’s the case in Why Worry? (June 22), where he’s a millionaire hypochondriac who travels to an island off the coast of South America for his health and lands in the middle of a revolution. And in For Heaven’s Sake (on the same bill), a thousand-dollar check he throws at a soul saver in the toughest part of the city, to replace the coffee wagon he inadvertently set aflame, winds up building a mission and turning him into first a reluctant philanthropist and then — once he’s seen the preacher’s beautiful daughter — a fervent participant.

The classic Lloyd routines showcase his character’s resourcefulness; he makes expert use of the items at his disposal to achieve his goal. In Speedy (June 17), he’s a baseball nut — Babe Ruth makes an appearance in the picture — who at the beginning is holding down (just barely) a job as a soda jerk. But his real focus is on the game he’s listening to on the radio, and on communicating its progress to his co-workers in the kitchen. So between whipping out banana splits, he arranges doughnuts in the display case in the shape of numerals to signal the score. (For "3," he bites out the side of a pretzel.) In Safety Last (June 23), he’s so desperate to get to his clothing-shop job on time that he lies down on the street outside an ambulance so he can catch a ride on a stretcher. Sometimes he gets himself in hot water and has to use his smarts to get himself out again. When the clothes line where he’s hung the laundry in The Kid Brother is attacked by a hungry goat and then swings out of control, depositing clothes on a tree, he tricks the local bully into shaking them down by offering himself as a decoy, then slips away from the guy. (Lloyd is faster than anyone.) In perhaps the most celebrated of these sequences, from The Freshman, he shows up for a dance in a just-basted suit — the tailor hasn’t had time to complete it, so he hangs around behind Harold, making the necessary adjustments whenever a section comes loose. Harold has to think up ways to conceal the vulnerable parts so he doesn’t embarrass himself, at one point chatting away to a co-ed across a café table while he stretches his legs flat behind him through a curtain.

The only Lloyd episode that tops the falling-apart-suit bit is the one in Safety Last where, for complicated reasons, he has to climb the side of a seven-story building in front of a growing crowd. Each floor brings its own set of perils — a menacing dog, a little boy flinging peanuts, a flock of birds that go after those peanuts (most of the birds, like most of the peanuts, land on Harold), a swinging wind gauge. The trademark image of Lloyd hanging from the deconstructed clock comes from one of the climaxes of this routine, which is a breathtakingly sustained piece of comic wizardry, as terrifying as it is hilarious. It makes sense that Lloyd and not Chaplin or even the gravity-defying Keaton would wind up in one of his comedies mounting the side of a tall modern building. Lloyd is Mr. Modernity, the master of the kinetic geometry of the industrial age, able to swing with barely a shrug from one mode of transportation to another — as he does when he abandons a runaway trolley car for a dog-pound van in order to make his own wedding on time in For Heaven’s Sake.

The Brattle series includes most of the key silents, which were released between 1923 and 1927, six of them featuring the dark-haired beauty Jobyna Ralston, with her "soft-boiled" eyes (as one intertitle has it) and that smile that catches slightly, sweetly, on one tooth. In addition to the indispensable Safety Last and The Freshman — a perfect American comedy — I wouldn’t miss Speedy, Girl Shy, Why Worry?, or For Heaven’s Sake. (The Kid Brother and Dr. Jack [June 22] are a tad sappy for my taste, and Hot Water [June 24], about the tribulations of married life, is uninspired.) And I don’t plan to miss the single film I was unable to preview, Welcome Danger (June 19), which is a genuine rarity. Lloyd and his collaborators shot it just as sound was coming in, so he junked it and started over again, releasing it in 1929 as a part-talkie. But he kept the negative in his vaults, so we can now see a restored version of a movie that never reached audiences.

Lloyd survived into the talkie era, but his movies lost their rhythm; his 1947 comeback, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (a/k/a Mad Wednesday), which was written and directed by Preston Sturges, is the only one I’ve seen that figured out how to use his talents. (It isn’t part of the Brattle series.) In Feet First (June 23), which followed Welcome Danger in 1930, and Movie Crazy, from two years later (also June 23), all the talk seems to gum up the works. You can’t help thinking that Harold’s first encounter with co-star Barbara Kent in Feet First would work fine — and in roughly half the time — if you didn’t have dialogue explaining the obvious. (And if you didn’t have to listen to Kent’s tinny voice.) At least Movie Crazy has one terrific sequence where Lloyd winds up with a tux belonging to a magician, not to mention the gorgeous Constance Cummings as a tough-talking aspiring actress whose lines have the tang of ’20s Broadway comedy. (The screenwriter, Vincent Lawrence, came from the stage.) The Cat’s-Paw (June 21), from 1934, isn’t good but it’s better, a fish-out-of-water comedy with Lloyd in a truly oddball role as a missionary who comes from China to find a wife and somehow becomes the reforming mayor of a city overrun with gangsters and grafters. It’s worth checking out. In fact, you might just want to camp out at the Brattle for the week.