May 10, 2018
Grandma’s Boy –
US, 1922
My old English teacher Mr. Dowling once remarked that it was
illogical for a character to suddenly display abilities at a key moment if he
or she has not demonstrated them previously. This observation came after his
class had been assigned to finish a short story about a bullied boy with no
athletic skills. In all of my classmates’ finales, the boy stepped up to the
plate with the game on the line and hit one out of the park, an action for
which the boy was lauded and paraded off the field on his teammates’ shoulders.
Mr. Dowling’s point was a good one, and over the years, I’ve scratched my head
at moments like these in movies – John Cusack suddenly being able to hit a
basket when it counts, Sammo Hung’s partners’ mysterious martial arts skills, Kristen
Stewart’s incredible horse-riding skills after spending her whole life locked
in a tower, Dumbo realizing he doesn’t need the feather. (All right, I admit that
last one choked me up.)
This incredible ability to excel at something all of a
sudden has been a staple of comedies for as long as I can remember. Buster
Keaton employed it in his fun film College,
and it was commonplace in the 1980’s, a decade when Michael J. Fox’s buddies on
the basketball team found their shooting touch at just the right moment, and
Elizabeth Shue was able to belt out the blues without any musical training. Sometimes
these changes work, providing laughs and a good sense of cosmic karma; other
times, they just come across as lazy writing, the kind that you get when a
writer is forced to come up with a happy ending. The suddenly they could do it moment is an easy out of a scenario that a
writer has boxed himself into. Yet for some reason they work for films from the
silent and slapstick periods, and a good example of this is Harold Lloyd’s Grandma’s Boy, directed by Fred C. Newmeyer.
The film is about a young man with a yellow streak a mile
long. In the opening scenes, we see a montage of moments in which he declines
to stand up for himself against school bullies. We finally settle on his
nineteenth year, when we find him deeply in love with a young lady named
Mildred (Mildred Davis) and still refusing to stand up for himself. As luck
would have it, his competition for Mildred’s affection is the most recent bully
to decide to push him around (Charles Stevenson). The first half also
introduces a subplot involving a scary-looking tramp, one who appears to fear
nothing but an old woman and a broom. In a clever bit, Harold tried to send a
dog to do a man’s work, and all it takes is for the tramp to look at him and
sneer for the dog to go running. In the second half of the film, Harold must
find a way to deal with both of his adversaries while also proving he is good
enough for Mildred. Somehow I think he has a pretty decent chance of success.
There’s an undeniable sweetness to Harold Lloyd’s
characters. In him, we recognize the best of ourselves – someone that never
gives up, someone that knows true love, someone who is both a sensitive soul
and a warrior when called upon. He’s also someone who can be counted on to rise
to the occasion, and sometimes doing so involves finding a skill all of a
sudden. Is it realistic? Not entirely, yet Lloyd pulls it off, partly because
he works so hard to persuade us that it is really happening. Here, he employs a
talisman, one similar to Dumbo’s magic feather and Bugs Bunny’s secret potion
in Space Jam, and part of the fun is
in watching the way his character changes, from his new confident body language
to the aggressiveness with which he pursues his goals. Lloyd embodies these
changes; he makes them believable in the moment in a way that his later
contemporaries have not always been able to do, and it is a wonder to behold.
The film is stacked with memorable comedic moments. There’s
Harold’s shrink-proof suit, the one he dons as a replacement, the humorous intertitles,
the ramifications of using goose grease to polish his shoes, and his numerous
attempts to be the hero and impress the girl he loves. Much of the comedy in
the first half goes by quickly, as the film rarely slows down to stretch a gag
or make it a key plot point, unlike his seminal film The Freshman. The exact opposite is true of the gags in the second
half. Here, Lloyd is given the opportunity to take his time, and in doing so,
he creates a world of truly zany lunacy.
Is some of it predictable? Sure. Would the same situation be
humorous in a more modern film? Probably not. And I have no doubt that some
viewers will be more than a little put off by the positive view of the
Confederacy espoused in the film. Again, this is not something we’d see much of
in today’s films, but back in the 1920’s, this kind of portrayal was not
uncommon. Here the Confederacy occupies a small part of the plot, which is quite
unlike what Keaton did in his masterpiece The
General.
I never had a chance to ask Mr. Dowling what he thought of particular
motifs in movies or whether he applied the same critical standard to Hollywood
productions as he did to literature. It’s possible he would look at a film like
Grandma’s Boy, shake his head, and
utter those analytical words Impossible.
Just where did he get these incredible
skills? Somehow, though, I think he would still have found a way to see the
fun in the illogical, to sit back, put his hands behind his head, and just
enjoy the film for what it is: a spirited work by a genius in front of the
camera. I know I did. (on DVD as part of Kino’s Slapstick Symposium: The Harold Lloyd Collection)
3 and a half stars
