Hot Water (1924) - film review

Harold is the very epitome of the confirmed bachelor – or he is until he runs into an attractive young woman whilst running to his best friend’s wedding.  It is love at first sight and Harold knows he must yield to the inevitable – Cupid has done his work and now there is no escape.  Harold’s marital bliss is immediately compromised when his wife’s battleaxe mother and her sons – a layabout and a brat – move into his home.  How can love thrive in such a toxic environment?  Everything Harold does merely upsets at least one member of the household.  Even an expedition in his new motor car ends in total disaster.  Harold decides to take the advice of his friend.  Fortified by strong liquor, the henpecked husband decides to tell his mother-in-law to go elsewhere.  Unfortunately, the aforementioned mother-on-law has extreme views when it comes to alcohol consumption...

With its plethora of inventive laugh-out-loud gags, Hot Water is undoubtedly one of the most entertaining of Harold Lloyd’s silent films, and it is no surprise that it was also one of his biggest successes.  For once, the story is not concerned with Harold’s attempt to win his wife, but rather with the grim aftermath of the connubial coupling.  And that’s aftermath in the post-nuclear holocaust definition of the word, for this is a story of heroic survival against insurmountable odds.  Naturally, the bane of Harold’s new life is his mother-in-law, a dragon of the kind that made St George a household name, and most of the jokes revolve around Harold’s attempts to fend off this fire-breathing monstrosity.

The film’s funniest sequence is the one in which Harold takes a spin in his brand new car and manages to infringe every traffic law within the space of about five minutes, regaling us with some hilarious death-defying stunts as he does so.   This is followed up by Harold’s horrifying close encounter with his zombified mother-in-law, which makes this cinema’s first zombie movie (not White Zombie (1932) as some would have us believe).  Whilst Hot Water lacks the plot structure and character development of Lloyd’s other silent features, it is still just as entertaining, perhaps more so because the jokes are less constrained by the exigencies of plot and character.  Whatever, if you are in desperate need of a really good no-strings laugh, this film is just the ticket.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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