Sexylocher Masterful Movie

Maidexpl Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Bill Slocum {This review is for the 89-minute version.}Harold Lloyd revisiting one of his silent-comedy classics with the help of one of the sound era's most revered directors reads like a match made in heaven. The reality is much more earth-bound.Harold Diddlebock (Lloyd) is first seen in a flashback to his college days, a heroic escapade lifted entirely from the 1925 Lloyd comedy "The Freshman." Two decades later, the game-winning student has become an office drone, so much so his boss fires him for lack of initiative. Drowning his sorrows in strong drink for the first time, Diddlebock wakes up to discover he is wearing a loud checkered suit and lost all memory of the previous day.What we know, and he doesn't, is that his dismissal has awoken a ferocious beast inside him: "A man works all his life in a glass factory, well, one day he feels like picking up a hammer."This seems a fantastic set-up for a Walter-Mitty-style comedy; add to it the legendary Preston Sturges as writer-director, bringing along his team of wisecracking supporting players, and what's not to like?Apart from two or three scenes, pretty much everything."Diddlebock" spends too much time replaying "The Freshman," with insert shots of Diddlebock's future boss overreacting to every play on screen. Then we fast-forward to the then-present, in which the boss drops the boom on middle-aged Harold. Sturges and Lloyd play this very real, with only some black humor for levity.This actually kind of works, as it effectively sets up Harold's rebellion. Coaxed into a bar by Sturges regular Jimmy Conlin, he tells bartender Edgar Kennedy that this drink will be a first-time experience."You arouse the artist in me," the bartender murmurs, inventing a concoction he calls the "Diddlebock."Then Harold's off to the races, literally, putting all his severance money on a pair of longshot horses. The sequence is sustained nuttiness, up there with the best Sturges comedies.But the second half, woof, what a stinker! You get the feeling either Sturges never developed his story, or else lost it in the editing room. Instead of a development of the Diddlebock character, Sturges has Lloyd walk around with a lion and a ten-gallon hat, something about impressing bankers to invest in a circus idea, while Conlin trails after him screaming "Mr. Diddlebock!" over and over.It's such a shame because the film had a chance of being so much better. Sturges revisits old themes, sending up capitalism especially with the notion of Diddlebock's midlife crisis being brought on by corporate greed. Lloyd shows he had skills as an actor, developing pathos and charm (the latter especially in a sequence with Frances Ramsden playing the youngest of seven sisters with whom Harold has successively, unsuccessfully fallen in love).But all that good groundwork comes to naught as Sturges sticks Lloyd on a building to revisit past glories, dangling from a lion's leash with Conlin overacting by his side. This plays so hollow it makes one long for when he was just a fired office drone. Diddlebock finds success, improbably enough; more understandable is the sad fact neither Sturges nor Lloyd worked much after this half-baked partnership bombed.

Michael Neumann If the combined swan song from erstwhile silent clown Harold Lloyd and director Preston Sturges compares poorly to their individual, earlier masterpieces, it nevertheless remains an engaging minor work from two mismatched comic talents. The funniest sequence is, perhaps not surprisingly, the silent prologue, lifted intact from the last reel of Lloyd's 1923 classic 'The Freshman'. What happens after graduation to college gridiron hero Harold Diddlebock (Harold Lamb, in the earlier film) should have inspired a typically madcap satire of the American work ethic, but after a promising start the ideas disappear in a hurry (everything in the film happens in a hurry). The first twenty minutes, up to where Harold loses his job and boldly takes his first drink, is classic Sturges: witty, sophisticated, and quite daring for the way it gently mocks the optimistic ambitions of its hero. But in a desperate attempt to earn his laughs the easy way Sturges later enlists the help of a tame lion and fakes a thrill sequence a la 'Safety Last', for a less-than-hilarious climax more exhausting than it is exhilarating. Lloyd, ironically, caps his long career with an atypically rich (and thus, for him, all the more effective) performance, at least until all the shouting takes over.

Geoffrey Parfitt Between 1940 and 1944, Preston Sturges wrote and directed some of the best film comedy ever produced. His eight movies for that short period are all good, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that four of the eight have the touch of brilliance.This sequence of movies came to an end when Sturges left Paramount following what he legitimately saw as increasing interference by studio bosses. His high stature at the studio hadn't prevented two of his movies from being taken out of his hands and re-cut against his wishes, one of which - The Great Moment - was never restored to the movie Sturges intended.At this point, Sturges declined to join a rival studio, and instead formed a partnership with Howard Hughes, hoping to protect his future movies from the interference he could see was becoming more common within the studio system. However, for a combination of reasons, this partnership with Hughes was not a success, and the only film Sturges produces in that period - The Sin of Harold Diddlebock - shows a decline in his work.The whole look and sound of the movie is inferior. It is impossible to know whether this decline was the result of an inevitable burn-out in his ability after such sustained success, or the absence of support and quality control that Paramount had applied to the benefit of the wonderful movies that had come before.So... to "Diddlebock" itself! It is difficult to identify why it isn't as funny as we might expect. The film was created as a star vehicle for Harold Lloyd, and by all accounts his comedy instincts did not match those of Sturges. As much as Stuges tried, clearly such a big talent and personality as Lloyd was never going to completely submit to direction with which he didn't agree, and there must be some evidence of that in what we see on screen.There is a complete lack of the 'sparkle' we have come to expect. The familiar faces around Lloyd remind us of the great Sturges movies, but to me this is like an inferior pastiche of a Sturges movie by a lesser hand, without such a reliable instinct for film comedy. But perhaps that describes what Preston Sturges had become in such a short time.

Niffiwan Anybody who watches this expecting an example of what made Harold Lloyd the most popular comedian of the 20s (no, it wasn't Chaplin) will be sorely disappointed, and may even think that his earlier films are not worth watching. The truth is, this "comeback film" is nowhere near the quality of his earlier silent films, and especially not "The Freshman", to which this is supposed to be a sequel.***POSSIBLE SPOILER WARNING***The problem with this film starts with the first 30 minutes; they are typical of a director whose style is completely inconsistent with Lloyd's trademark 1920s optimism. The first 30 minutes of this film (the footage from "The Freshman" excepted) are spent ridiculing in its entirety the philosophy that made Lloyd's previous films so fun to watch; his go-getter mentality, always making the best of a bad situation. The first part of this movie starts out slowly and depressingly, portraying Harold as a miserable loser who's been in the same job for 30 years who comes to work one day and gets fired.Sound like comedy gold to you? Me neither. It's really not the type of thing that Harold's character is best suited to, and it was only through the faint hope that something better might lie ahead that I kept watching. Thankfully, the movie does get better after the bar scene, where Harold has the first drink of his life and metamorphosizes into something resembling his old character again (he bets on a horse-race against incredible odds and wins a whole load of money, which he promptly uses to buy a circus). From there on, there are a few very funny gags (the best of them having to do with a lion), although there are also too many hysterics on Harold's part for my taste; something that wasn't present in his earlier silent movies. The final scene of the movie pays homage to Harold Lloyd's climb up the side of a building in his 1923 "Safety Last".***END OF SPOIILERS***I'm pretty sure that the only reason that this film's reputation has gotten this high is that almost all of Harold's other films have been owned by his family and though well-preserved, withheld from public view (aside from a limited-release VHS run in the early 90s and regular showings on TCM for those who get it). This is truly a shame, because his earlier works, unlike THIS uneven piece of film-making, are truly great comedic masterpieces on a level with the best of Chaplin's and Keaton's films. I dare anyone who's watched "Safety Last", "The Freshman", "Why Worry?" or "The Kid Brother" to say otherwise.Thankfully, The Harold Lloyd Trust has recently secured a DVD deal with New Line Cinema (27 of his films will be released on DVD in November 2005!) as well as a theatrical release deal with Sony (his films will play in New York City from April to May 2005, and there are also plans for Paris and other places). You can visit the official page of the Harold Lloyd Trust if you want to know more (haroldlloyd.com) Thankfully, Harold will be more visible soon than he has been in the last 50 years! I recommend that nobody buy this uneven movie but wait for his masterworks to come to a theater/store near you!