Generally ranked alongside Chaplin and Keaton as one of the masters of silent comedy, Harold Lloyd created a more conventional personality than those peers, a very American 'Everyman' that thoroughly captured the public's fancy during the 1920s. From 1922 through the end of the decade, his films were more popular than Chaplin's, with Keaton's a distant third. Unlike most of the silent comedians of his day, though, Lloyd had no background in vaudeville, so he brought no time-tested characters to the movies. The primary interest of this stage-trained performer was drama until Hal Roach persuaded him to attempt comedy. Creating his first major character, Willie Work, Lloyd began learning from his mistakes in the crucible of the single-reel short. Willie's distinguishing marks were a much-padded coat, a battered silk hat and a cat's whisker mustache, yet "Just Nuts" (1915, the only extant film featuring Willie) never bothered to investigate the main character in a close-up. It just wasn't important then.
Chaplin drove the industry in which Lloyd was trying to gain a toehold. Exhibitors who could not get the original demanded imitations, so Lloyd settled upon a variation of the Chaplin theme for his second major character, Lonesome Luke. Keeping only the Tramp's oversize shoes, Luke wore tight trousers and a jacket and traded Willie's thick, centered mustache for a two-dot version to complement triangular eyebrows, but Lloyd's efforts to be individual and unique, which included a refusal to copy the well-known Chaplin mannerisms, still only branded him as an "imitator." Bristling at the tag, he enjoyed great popularity as Lonesome Luke but knew the character was about played-out when the inspiration for his third and final character came to him in the spring of 1917. The gimmick that would become his trademark was a pair of eyeglasses, but it was not easy to convince Roach and the distributor (Pathe) to drop a proven winner they had just elevated to two-reel status. After battling for months, he got to debut The Glass Character in "Over the Fence" (1917) but kept making Lonesome Luke films until the success of 'Glasses' was sure.
Lloyd featured his bespectacled hero in a series of one-reelers to insure exposure in a new film once a week, eventually finding the formula that would make him rich. His character was not an outsider (like those of the other early clowns), but rather a working member of society, an optimistic plucker who smiled and fought his way through all adversity to achieve success and get the girl by story's end, while mirroring his audience in outward appearance and inward determination. The smooth-faced boy was primarily a clean-cut Horatio Alger-type from the middle class, a character celebrating the 20s boom and consumer consumption, although he ran the gamut from aristocrat to pauper, enabling people on every rung of the economic ladder to identify with him. The comedy did not arise from the quirkiness of character (you don't have to look funny to be funny), but rather from the situations confronting the character, and Lloyd became known for his "stunt" comedy, eliciting screams of fear as he teetered on the brink of disaster.
Since Lloyd was not inherently funny, he relied on jokes to propel the storyline. Each gag followed the next in a logical progression until the film's climactic vindication and triumph of the hero. An organizational genius, he inaugurated the circle of contributing gagmen and actually helmed most of his films, though there was always a titular director on board to take care of the details, and building the gags into a narrative line facilitated his expansion into feature production, beginning with "Sailor-Made Man" (1921). From 1922-25, he made two features a year before slowing to one a year for the balance of the decade. "Safety Last" (1923) became his most famous, responsible for the enduring Lloyd pose--dangling mid-air, clutching the hands of a clock, but hits were routine for him in the 20s. "Girl Shy" (1924) was one of the top money-makers of its year, and "The Freshman" (1925) was his most profitable ever with over $2.5 million in grosses, followed by the highly successful "For Heaven's Sake" (1926), "The Kid Brother" (1927) and "Speedy" (1928).
Though outwardly Lloyd's character never altered, the motivations shifted constantly. In "Grandma's Boy" (1922), he played a cowardly youth who, with the aid of an ultimately phony talisman, finds inner strength. A poor country boy who travels to the big city to get rich in "Safety Last", he switched to timid stutterer for "Girl Shy" (1924), saving the only girl who did not make him stammer from a bigamous marriage, then was equally believable as a rich man-turned missionary in "For Heaven's Sake". Continually flip-flopping from film to film, he effectively brought to life the comedy of the poor, the rich, the oafish and the ambitious, executing it all despite the dizzying handicap which he refused to make public during his lifetime. He felt so strongly about not revealing the loss of two fingers on his right hand that when producer Jerry Wald, in the late 40s, approached him about doing a movie about his life, disagreement over the treatment of the tragic accident led to the project's scuttling.
Although Lloyd's fall from box-office grace roughly coincided with the advent of sound, it had much more to do with the 1929 stock market crash, the Great Depression rendering his brash go-getting screen persona passe. He continued making films at a reduced pace (one every other year), enjoying only moderate success until calling it quits in 1938. Coaxed out of retirement by Howard Hughes for "The Sin of Harold Diddlebock/Mad Wednesday" (1947), a film which began with a sequence from "The Freshman" and then brought the character up-to-date, Lloyd claimed director Preston Sturges' inflexibility spoiled the project. He never stepped before the camera again, realizing once and for all that his time had passed. As for life imitating art, he was the ambitious boy of his pictures. He got the girl, former co-star Mildred Davis, and the two raised a family at their spectacular Beverly Hills estate, Greenacres. An honorary Oscar in 1952 for being "a master comedian and good citizen" put the icing on the cake.
Owning the rights to his films, however, ultimately compromised Lloyd's legacy. Guarding them from exploitation, he proved too zealous a protector, keeping them out of view so long that his reputation as a comic star faded into near obscurity. Though he relaxed his hold near the end of his life, the public remains more familiar with the work of Chaplin and Keaton, each considered by cineastes as more of an auteur than Lloyd. Would having taken co-directing credit have provided more concrete proof that he was the architect of his movies? His very respectability may have doomed him in many eyes when weighed against Chaplin's left-leanings and Keaton's wrecked personality. Perhaps his films just aren't as good as theirs, his popularity an aberration of the Jazz Age. No matter. Lloyd broke ground. His hiring of a team of gag writers to integrate a dramatic structure with comedy might just qualify him for this title: Father of the American Situation Comedy.