The Flirt (1917)
Safety Last! (1923)
The Freshman (1925)
In high school, Lloyd gave vent to his competitive energies as a boxer and debator, but the theater bug hit him and, after graduating, he obtained an acting spot in a traveling repertory company. When the company closed in Los Angeles, Lloyd began to make the rounds of the movie studios, seeking out a living as a movie extra. Another extra trying to scrape together a living was Hal Roach and the two became friends. When Roach inherited money and decided to make his own films, Lloyd went to work for him. Together they created the character of Willie Work in several shorts made from 1913 to 1915, but only the last one, JUST NUTS, found its way to theatrical distribution. On the basis of that film, Mack Sennett hired Lloyd, but, after an unsuccessful year at Keystone, Lloyd came back to Roach, where he created another character, Lonesome Luke. With Luke, Lloyd joined the legion of Charlie Chaplin imitators so popular at the time. Restless and unhappy with this less-than-original creation, Lloyd was trapped by its success, and the film exchanges were reluctant to allow him to try something different. However, Lloyd was determined to find a new character, even if it meant forsaking his newfound success.
After seeing a play featuring a fighting priest who wore horn-rimmed glasses, Lloyd experimented with the concept of a more realistic looking character who also wore glasses, not an outsider (as Chaplin's tramp was), but rather a working member of society. Lloyd featured his new character in a series of shorts, starting with OVER THE FENCE (1917), reducing his output from two-reelers to one-reelers to insure exposure of his new character in a new film once a week instead of twice a month. But it wasn't until THE CITY SLICKER (1918) that Lloyd finally developed the formula for this bespectacled character, a brash young go-getter whose single-mindededness leads him to succeed and get the girl by the story's end. In fact, what Lloyd had done was adapt the Douglas Fairbanks persona from the 1910s to his own talents, converting Fairbanks's aristocrat to a clean-cut Horatio Alger-type from the middle class. Lloyd's early films with this character were nothing more than remakes of old Fairbanks comedies: GRANDMA'S BOY (1922) is a remade version of THE MOLLYCODDLE (1920); DOCTOR JACK (1922) is a remake of DOWN TO EARTH (1917); WHY WORRY? (1923) another version of HIS MAJESTY THE AMERICAN (1919). But in adapting the Fairbanks type to the middle class, Lloyd had hit on a national archetype, a character who celebrated the 20s boom and consumer consumption. There was no criticism of the social structure -- in fact, according to Lloyd, the character reveled in it: "I think my character represented the white-collar middle class that felt frustrated but was always fighting to overcome its shortcomings. We had a big appeal for businessman."
A more realistic comic character emerged, giving rise to a more realistic comedy style which linked the energy and movement of the character clowns with the psychological realism of the dramatic tradition. Since the character was not essentially funny in himself, jokes had to be constructed around him, the gags more tightly controlled and used to propel the storyline. Each gag followed the next in a logical progression until the film's climactic vindication and triumph of the Lloyd hero.
Building the gags into a narrative line made it much easier for Lloyd to expand into feature production. Throughout the 20s Lloyd was a box-office draw, from A SAILOR-MADE MAN (1921) to SPEEDY (1928). His steady output -- two features a year -- kept his public happy with such pictures as GRANDMA'S BOY (1922), SAFETY LAST (1923), THE FRESHMAN (1925), and THE KID BROTHER (1927). But after the 1929 stock market crash, Lloyd's character became obsolete, his brashness coming off as abrasive.
And just as Lloyd had reworked the type from Fairbanks, the type was reworked again, transformed into the success-at-any-price gangsters of Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney. The sociable character with glasses had become a murderous sociopath. By the late 1930s, Lloyd's character had become merely wholesome and Newsweek noted that Lloyd was "the leading representative of 100 per cent American purity." After PROFESSOR BEWARE (1938), Lloyd left films, only to resurface ten years later in an aborted comeback, THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK / MAD WEDNESDAY, a subversion of his 20s persona to fit the doom-laden 40s, a film that one critic called "a slapstick equivalent of DEATH OF A SALESMAN."
Although Lloyd's films seem mechanical today, he made important contributions, with detailed gag constructions and dramatic structure integrated with slapstick, to leave a lasting mark on the film comedy landscape.
Honorary Award 1952: "Master comedian and good citizen." Winner presented a Statuette.
1 Honorary Award