Feet First (1930) - film review

Harold Horne, a modest sales assistant in a Honolulu shoe store, falls for a girl whom he believes to be his boss’s daughter.  By chance, he ends up on a boat with the girl, his boss and the latter’s wife, and immediately starts trying to impress them by impersonating a business tycoon.  Harold’s attempts to conceal his real identity become increasingly desperate when he sees an advertisement in a newspaper in which he is shown to be a successful graduate of an "improve your personality" correspondence course.  Having finally succeeded in throwing all of the incriminating newspapers overboard, he ends up in a mail bag and is transported by mail plane back to the mainland.  When he finally manages to get himself out of the mail bag, he finds himself on a window cleaner’s cradle, halfway up the side of a tall building...

The second, and arguably best, of Harold Lloyd’s sound pictures is this rollicking madcap satire on the diabolical art of social climbing, with Lloyd once again playing the bespectacled everyman character which made him the highest paid actor in Hollywood.  The film was directed by Clyde Bruckman who worked with the other great comic actors of the era, Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy.

Feet First is best remembered for the hilarious set piece in which the comic genius indulges in a series of death defying stunts halfway up the side of a skyscraper.  This sequence, similar to one seen in Lloyd’s silent masterpiece Safety Last (1923), was realised without any camera trickery and shows the comic performer at his most inventive.  Just when you think the gag has run its course, Lloyd surprises us with another Dare Devil stunt which provokes even greater hilarity.  Whilst Lloyd’s sound films rarely matched the brilliance of his earlier silent films, this is one that does show an inspired touch, filled with gags which still have the power to reduce a grown adult audience to tears of laughter.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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