Harold, hold on!

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Movie
German title Harold, hold on!
Harold Lloyd - The dream dancer
Original title Feet first
Feet First poster.jpg
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1930
length 91 minutes
Rod
Director Clyde Bruckman
script Felix Adler
Lex Neal
production Harold Lloyd
music Claude Lapham
camera Henry Kohler
Walter Lundin
cut Bernard W. Burton
occupation

Harold, hold on! (Original: Feet First ) is an American slapstick comedy from 1930 by Clyde Bruckman with Harold Lloyd , who was also responsible as the producer, in the title role. This German title makes particular reference to the last quarter of the turbulent film.

action

The less self-confident Harold Horne works as an ambitious but not too successful employee in a shoe store in Honolulu . Nobody here trusts him to sell shoes, so he is looking for new ways to finally strengthen his underdeveloped self-confidence, even if he takes appropriate advanced courses. When he met the alleged daughter of his boss, Barbara, one day in a small rear-end collision, he really wanted to impress her and cheated on her that he was extremely rich and very successful in the leather business. Little does Harold know that Barbara is merely the secretary of his top boss, Mr. Tanner, a gruff hire-and-fire businessman. Barbara leaves Harold in this belief for the time being. From then on, Horne has his hands full hiding his true circumstances in order not to collapse his body of lies. Harold Horne is therefore doomed to constantly maintain the facade of his success; be it in the club, to which he actually has no access authorization and where he meets Barbara again, be it in the shoe store, where he also has to serve Mrs. Tanner, his boss's grouchy wife, or be it at a drop off in Los Angeles Ship where Harold should deliver a delivery.

On this passenger steamer he not only meets Barbara again, but also Mr. Tanner and his corpulent wife. She thinks she immediately recognizes the awkward Honolulu shoe seller in Harold, but Tanner himself, who since meeting Harold at the club, has also believed that Horne is a very successful businessman in the leather business, considers this to be impossible and says that his wife does sometimes like to confuse people. When the ship casts off, Harold no longer comes off board and now has to travel with him. In the coming days he will have his hands full, not being discovered as a stowaway without a ticket and also eating something on the side. Any means is fine for him: For example, he steals treats intended for a small dog in front of Barbara's nose. Finally, three men on board reveal him to be a stowaway, and Harold has to go into hiding as quickly as possible. He is about to tell Barbara the truth when his boss, Mr. Tanner, appears again. He scolds his secretary loudly because she should not have submitted a bid for a contract to the Chief of Ordnance in Los Angeles in time. Now the bid is too late because the ship won't dock for a few days. Tanner threatens to fire Barbara as soon as one is ashore. Harold finally sees an opportunity to show that he would do anything for his beloved. He flees from the ship's officers to the mail room. Letters handed in on the ship are stamped here and flown to Los Angeles by seaplane. Harold crawls into one of the mailbags with Tanner's written bid and lands in Los Angeles much earlier than the ship.

Alec Francis and Harold Lloyd in one scene

Due to a mishap in front of the Triangle Building, which houses the post office, the mailbag with Harold wriggling in it ends up on scaffolding, which is pulled up. Harold frees himself from the sack with a knife and realizes that he is in the air. Panicked, he kicks around on the scaffolding, which is becoming increasingly unstable. Finally, he holds on to a ledge in the window, pinching Harold's fingers and falling from the scaffolding at the same time. I manage to climb back onto the scaffolding. As soon as Harold believes he has been saved, a cigar thrown out and lands on the scaffolding brings Horne new trouble. Clinging to the wall of the house, Harold finally tries to get into the building and ends up on an outside awning. Finally, a paint bucket falls on his head, so that he can no longer see anything. The bucket drops and Harold manages to hold on to something. But this is a fire hose which, in view of Hornes pulling pressure, continues to detach itself from the hose reel. When the black house boy accidentally turns on the water, Harold, hanging from the hose, is tossed back and forth on the wall of the house. The boy picks the hose with an ax, believing he is helping Harold with it, and Horne falls down, landing on the scaffolding again. When Horne finally finds an opportunity to get into the building through an open window, this time it is a stuffed gorilla who makes his hair stand on end. Harold is almost scared to death. Again he clings to the scaffolding and is pulled up to the roof of the building. With the last of his strength he climbs up and falls on a bottle from which ether flows out. Harold is dazed and falls down again. Harold arrives only inches above the pedestrian walkway - a rope wrapped around his foot held him from the fatal impact. Harold only has a few minutes to submit Tanner's bid to the authorities. He succeeds in doing this. Now the way is clear for Harold's happiness with Barbara.

Production notes

Lloyd's second sound film, Harold, hold on! was written in mid-1930 and premiered in New York on October 30, 1930. The German premiere took place on June 9, 1931, the Austrian in the same year. There the strip ran under the title feet first! . In Germany, Harold received, hold on tight! at the re-performance in 1976 a new title: Harold Lloyd - The Dream Dancer . A newly dubbed version was launched in Germany on September 7, 1980.

The central running gag of the film is a spoon trick that Harold Horne simply does not want to succeed on several occasions. In the final scene, where it finally works with a shovel instead of a small spoon, the punishment follows immediately: The shovel hurls into a can of paint, which promptly spurts out and looks at Harold and Barbara from top to bottom.

Co-star Barbara Kent was already his partner in the previous film Harold, the Dragon Slayer , Lloyd's first sound film.

As Der Spiegel claimed for half a century, the film is said to have been a veritable failure. “With the" dream dancer, "however, Lloyd experienced his first real crash - at the box office. The cinema audience, shaken by the economic crisis, could obviously no longer delight in the antics of a man who, out of unswerving career addiction, was doing gymnastics on the gleaming facades of a world that had already collapsed. "

Reviews

The ratings of this Lloyd film, which was released in 1930 with the gaudy headline “ A thrill a minute! A laugh a second! A comedy cyclone! “Was advertised, turned out to be quite different. Here are a few examples:

The journal Variety ruled in 1930: "This Lloyd was a little overworked in making laughs, which may have been due to the fact that he is dangling down from a high-rise building again".

Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times located "another burst of laughter" in Lloyd's film and again praised Lloyd's daring stunts: They were "both hair-raising and funny"

Halliwell's Film Guide concluded: "Very funny early sound comedy, probably the last fully satisfactory film by the comedian."

The Movie & Video Guide found that the “episodic film” had “some very funny good moments”, but that its common “hang-up number was not really going”.

Wolfram Tichy wrote in 1976 on the occasion of Lloyd's rediscovery in a lengthy article in Die Zeit : "Feet First" (The Dream Dancer) from 1930, the first sound film by the great comedian with glasses, rightly belongs to the then new medium despite clear difficulties come to the funniest works in film history because of his virtuoso final passage at the skyscraper. "

The film service says: “A somewhat verbose resynchronization of Harold Lloyd's second sound film comedy, which is not as consistently structured as the similarly positioned Skyscraper, of all things ! , but compensated for it with an abundance of typical Lloyd situations of the best comic quality. "

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ This is not so. The strip cost $ 650,000 and grossed $ 1.5 million. Nevertheless, the net profit remained behind that of his first sound film "Harold, der Drachentöter" (Welcome Danger).
  2. ↑ Dream dancers on the ladder to success , mirror report from January 14, 1980
  3. ^ Review in the New York Times, October 31, 1930
  4. ^ Leslie Halliwell : Halliwell's Film Guide, Seventh Edition, New York 1989, p. 819
  5. ^ Leonard Maltin : Movie & Video Guide, 1996 edition, p. 419
  6. ↑ The ambitious optimist , report from March 12, 1976 in: Die Zeit
  7. ↑ Harold, hold on tight! In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed December 31, 2019 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 

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