The Freshman

Harold Lloyd's biggest box-office hit was this silent comedy gem, featuring the befuddled everyman at his eager best as a new college student. Though he dreams of being a big man on campus, the freshman's careful plans inevitably go hilariously awry, be it on the football field or at the Fall Frolic. But he gets a climactic chance to prove his mettle - and impress the sweet girl he loves.

Review from The Criterion Collection

At the beginning of Harold Lloyd’s 1925 masterpiece The Freshman, Lloyd, as young Harold Lamb (possibly the greatest name for a silent comedy character ever), is preparing to leave home for his first year at college. He is preparing not by studying or checking a syllabus or packing a trunk. No, he is preparing by looking in a mirror and imitating a fictional character in a (fictional) movie: The College Hero, starring “Lester Laurel.” He is dressed identically to the hero we see on the film’s poster on his door. “I’m just a regular fellow. Step right up and call me Speedy,” he says, copying the quote on the poster. This is followed by a little jig, presumably Laurel’s trademark. Over the course of The Freshman, it’s Harold’s attempts to become this character in his own life at college that will lead to comic catastrophe and then to ultimate triumph.

Lloyd understood well the powerful influence of popular culture. He had broken into movie comedy himself by imitating a fictional character: Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, whom Lloyd repurposed first as Willie Work and then as Lonesome Luke. But by 1925, these mild copies were well in his past. He had created what became known as the “Glasses Character,” after the horn-rimmed ones he wore. The Glasses Character was something new in film comedy: more realistic in look and manner than the other clowns of the period. He became hugely popular. Indeed, his fans, like Harold Lamb, wanted to look like their hero, causing a spike in the sale of horn-rimmed spectacles—cosplay before its time.

As Lloyd entered features, he took his perfected character and developed a structure that best exploited him. Many of the finest Glasses features follow a variant of the same plot: a young man leaves home in an attempt to enter and succeed in society at large. In Safety Last! (1923), he wants to succeed in the city. In Girl Shy (1924), he wants to succeed as a writer/lover. In the sound film Movie Crazy (1932), his dream is to become a movie star. And in The Freshman—directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor but, like all the films of his prime, creatively controlled by Lloyd—he wants to be the Big Man on Campus. In all of these films, by a combination of will and determination, he achieves his goal. This is not the typical plot of comedy. It actually has more in common with the then popular rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger. In short, this is the Great American Success Story, and Lloyd’s use of it makes him the most American of all the legendary Hollywood clowns.

Read the rest of the review from Stephen Winer here...