A good movie

In contrary to Charles Chaplin or Buster Keaton, I haven’t watched so many movies with Harold Lloyd so I thought I might as well check this one out. Well, the first interesting thing with this movie was how much it clearly stood out from the comedies they made at the time, by Harold Lloyd himself but also by all his other colleague comedians. Indeed, there was in fact no visual gags, no slapstick, no elaborate seemingly hazardous stunts involved and, instead, they went for something dialogue-heavy. Fortunately, I thought that Lloyd did pull it off rather nicely. On the other hand, it was rather cringe-inducing to keep hearing Jake Mayo mentioning these ‘Chinks’ but, since the character was supposed to be a corrupt ignorant moron, I guess it was acceptable. Una Merkel was also pretty good as she had some of the best lines, even though I thought it was rather unlikely that Pet Pratt would decide to get married with Ezekiel Cobb. Eventually, even though I do believe that Harold Lloyd made the most of this material, the concept was still pretty thin and I wish it would have been slightly shorter. Concerning this satire of the politics in a small town in the US, sure, it was exaggerated but, on the other hand, I always thought that there was something bothering me about this country where you can vote only for 2 parties and 2 parties which are vastly similar after all on top of that. Obviously, it is not the same as the corruption displayed in this movie but the lack of choices between candidates did feel similar and hardly democratic. Anyway, to conclude, even if it was nothing really groundbreaking, I thought it was a decent watch though and it is worth a look, especially if you are interested in Harold Lloyd’s work.