The Freshman (1925)

Directors: Sam Taylor and Fred Newmeyer
Writers: Sam Taylor, John Grey, Ted Wilde and Tim Whelan
Star: Harold Lloyd

Index: That's a Wrap!

I watched a lot of Harold Lloyd features back in 2005 and ranked this one up there with the best of them, but it doesn’t stand up to a fresh viewing the way that Safety Last! did two years earlier for its centennial. It’s cleverly funny, both because of Lloyd and its intertitles, but it has precious little substance to prop it up.

The premise is almost ludicrously simple. A young man, Harold Lamb, wants, needs, aches to go to college and he’s been accepted to one, Tate University, “a large football stadium with a college attached.” He wants to be popular, so prepares with glee, copying a movie character, The College Hero, right down to the little jig that its star, Lester Laurel, does as he greets people. In his mind, he’s already replaced Chet Trask, the most popular student at Tate.

Of course, that makes him seem ridiculous, a little endearingly, sure, but still ridiculous. It’s enough to gain unwelcome attention from the college cad, who pranks him quickly and often enough for it to become a big deal. Harold has become quickly known to the student body, a feat he interprets as popularity but isn’t. Only late into the movie is it made clear to him that he’s just the college boob.

So this is about a character who wants to be popular, thinks he is but really isn’t. And that’s not far off the entire movie. Fortunately, there are a couple of other angles.

One is the romantic angle, because it’s clear to us quickly that Peggy, in the lovely form yet again of Jobyna Ralston, fell for Harold when they met on the train to Tate and she sees him often, being coincidentally the daughter of his landlady. She knows that he’s being made fun of but finds that she can’t tell him because he’s just so happy being at the heart of college life. However, she sticks with him throughout and their ending is always inevitable.

The other is the football angle, as Harold is eager to join the college team, being the surest way to popularity. He doesn’t make it but does become their living dummy in tackle practice. It’s here that his dedication shines and even a gnarled old coach can see it. He can’t put him in the team but he doesn’t want to lose him, so sidelines him as the water boy and theoretical substitute. No guesses for figuring out how the last and most important game of the season is going to go just from that alone.

In other words, there’s really not a lot here. Harold thinks he’s popular but is just a joke. If there’s a plot, it’s the inevitable journey to the point where he realises it. The reason that this skimpy writing isn’t a huge problem is that it’s mirrored by his depth of spirit. The tighter the cad’s trap grabs hold, the more he perseveres and that lends him oodles of sympathy. Some of it is sad and cruel, to be sure, as reflected in the suffering on Peggy’s face as she watches it, but it isn’t accident that takes him through to the other side, it’s determination.

As long as we’re on board with this skimpy premise, every character an archetype, Harold Lloyd makes the rest work through a series of showcase scenes, supported by effective jokes on the intertitles. Hopefully we don’t notice a lot of the cracks.

For instance, the first pranks tend to feature the distinguished Dean, setting Harold up in a sure conflict with the man in charge. However not a single thought is lent to building that as a running gag with an actual payoff at the end. It’s simply forgotten about.

The first major prank sets him up on stage in front of the entire student body and he runs with it, even giving a speech to much applause from his peers. However, the point is that they are all laughing at him while he thinks they’re laughing with him, thus setting up the movie. What I don’t get is why that’s so uniform. The routine, as we would see it, with a kitten and a host of more static props, is slapstick mastery and Lloyd’s timing is perfect. Harold can’t see it that way, of course, because he’s isn’t aware of the joke, but the students are watching like we are. Would every one of them see him only as the joke and none as the comedian? None of them saw The College Hero and thus realised he was riffing on it and quoting from it?

The inevitable football game is probably the showcase scene that most viewers will fall for, however ridiculously it plays out. Again, it’s an impeccably performed comedy routine played exquisitely straight, without any grounding in reality at all. To us, it’s hilarious, Lloyd on top form yet again, but I couldn’t help wondering how the officials and other players could stay oblivious to the humour in their midst.

And that said, easily my favourite showcase scene is the most ridiculous of all, namely the Fall Frolic. This is an annual dance and Harold plans to conquer it but unfortunately picks the wrong tailor to make him a suit. Even at 10pm on the night he’s still in the shop waiting for it and the tailor can’t finish all the stitching. So he accompanies Harold to the dance and fixes every rip and tear on the fly, somehow able to keep everybody else present from noticing an interruption to normality. It’s wildly hilarious, another masterpiece performance from Lloyd, but, once again, it’s so unrealistic that we have to start considering that every other character in the film isn’t just an archetype but a prop.

And that’s how we have to see this. It’s yet another Harold Lloyd movie that stars Harold Lloyd doing what Harold Lloyd does. When we look at it from that perspective, it’s exquisite. The problem comes when we look at it from a different perspective, any other perspective at all, even that of Peggy, because Jobyna Ralston is given less to do here than in any other Lloyd film, I think. As delightful as she is, she’s mere set decoration and everybody else is a prop.

The question, of course, is whether we care, given that we’re here to watch Harold Lloyd. What I found was that, when I wanted to look beyond him, I discovered historical detail.

For instance, in his room at home, Harold is so eager to go to college that he practices yells and I found that a rabbit hole. This was so long ago that college sports had no cheerleaders, at least in the form we know today. Instead, the task of stirring up the crowd at games fell to male students known as cheer or yell leaders, who even landed a cheerleading fraternity in 1903. Girls weren’t permitted to join in until 1923, and it took until World War II for them to take over. Only in the sixties did it start to evolve into what it is today, not truly getting there until the seventies, through innovations by Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders at Super Bowl X in 1976. But that’s another movie...