Lloyd had tried out a number of personae over his career but when he put on those round glasses and flashed that smile, he created the incarnation that made him one of the biggest stars of the twenties. He referred to that creation as "the glasses character" but in the movies he was invariably called Harold. In The Freshman he's Harold Lamb, a small town boy preparing to go to college by watching movies and practicing his elaborate greeting, a little jig of a dance step followed by an extended hand and a slogan of an introduction: "I'm just a regular fellow - step right up and call me 'Speedy'." (Fans of Yasujiro Ozu may recognize that bit from his Japanese college comedies like I Flunked, But... , an example of life imitating art; where Harold copies it from a fake movie, Ozu's students pick it up from their love of Harold Lloyd comedies.) He's convinced himself that the movies and the dime novels about campus heroes are an accurate portrait of college life and he studies them like textbooks. In fact, he studies them instead of textbooks. The Freshman is a college film where no one attends a class, goes to the library, or crams for a test. "Tate University - A large football stadium, with a college attached," reads the title card for Harold's arrival on campus, and the film makes good on the joke.
This is your basic underdog triumph tale. Harold is the energetic naïf who arrives at school in duds years out of date and a gee-whiz attitude that immediately puts him in the crosshairs of the practical jokers on campus. What would be a humiliating ordeal to anyone else becomes a challenge for Harold to put everything he thinks he understands about college social customs into practice. That mix of spunky resilience and wide-eyed obliviousness inspires the pranksters to keep it up for the full term, convincing Harold that he's in the running for "Most Popular Student" while the entire student body snickers behind his back.
Lloyd could be quite the wise guy in films like Safety Last (1923) and Hot Water (1924) but he's all eager-to-please rube here. In fact, his need for acceptance and popularity is so great that he blows his college money treating fellow students to ice cream (clearly this is no campus that Clara Bow would attend) and takes a beating as a human tackling dummy at football practice and comes back for more, just so to get on the team. Because, as those same mean-spirited pranksters remind him, you won't win "Most Popular" if you're not on a football player. It would kind of sad if Harold wasn't so darned plucky. Faced with potentially demoralizing mistakes and public disasters along the way, he simply picks himself up and tries again. You can't help but root for a kid with this much college spirit, even if he wastes it all on simply being the most popular guy on campus. But the bubble inevitably pops, of course, and his last chance to redeem his image is to play in the big game and become a football hero. This is your basic tale of underdog triumphant so it's no spoiler to say that there's a happy ending in it for our aspiring college hero, or that he will make all sorts of comic gaffs on his way victory. What's unexpected is that Lloyd and his team of gag artists don't parody the success story clichés along the way, they affirm them. Becoming "Most Popular" isn't a distraction from college, it's the point of, as far as this film is concerned.
The Freshman lacks the high stakes of Keaton's comedies and the pathos of Chaplin's struggles but it doesn't lack for comic invention or filmmaking polish. Longtime Lloyd collaborators Sam Taylor and Fred C. Newmeyer direct and his regular writing team (Taylor, Ted Wilde, John Grey, and Tim Whelan) provide the story, gags and titles, but this is Lloyd's production down the line and he lavishes all the time and money necessary to perfect every gag. The campus backgrounds are filled with students, the big dance has Lloyd maneuvering through throngs of couples while quite literally tearing his suit apart (a hilarious sequence that builds to a predictable yet comically perfect gag finale), and the big game looks like it was shot at a real championship match. Throughout it all, every last extra seems to hit their marks and react on cue.
The Freshman is as big and complicated a production as any silent comedy but it's so smoothly directed and centered around Lloyd in every scene that it doesn't feel sprawling. The focus remains on Harold and, to a lesser extent, on Peggy (Jobyna Ralston), the daughter of his boarding house matron and the girl Harold really likes, if only he'd stop trying to impress the cool kids long enough to realize it. Ralston is Lloyd's regular screen partner and while she leaves the funny stuff to Lloyd here, playing the good-hearted girl with the same small-town integrity that defines Harold, she has proven to be a fine comic match as a savvy urban young woman in Hot Water and the worldly professional to Lloyd's pompous rube in Girl Shy. The sweetest scenes in The Freshman are between Lloyd and Ralston, meeting cute over a crossword puzzle on the train and falling into such natural rhythm as she sews up a ripped shirt and he nods his head back with every tug of the needle.
Harold Lloyd preserved all of his pictures and his estate continued the practice after his death, so when UCLA restored The Freshman in 1998 they had fine materials to work with. Criterion's release is mastered in 4k from the 1998 restoration and it is a stunning-looking disc, far more crisp and clean and sharp than we expect to see from silent movies. The bright, snappy new score is composed and conducted by Carl Davis and performed by the Chamber Orchestra of London. It has jazz-age energy and collegiate rah-rah feel and matches the era and Lloyd's energy marvelously. The recording is brassy and bright.
The three accompanying shorts, all newly restored, are a reminder of how much Lloyd evolved by the time he turned to features. In these three shorts--The Marathon (1919), An Eastern Westerner (1920) and High and Dizzy (1920), the latter two directed by slapstick legend Hal Roach--he's a real smart-aleck, arrogant and rude and at times a complete jerk. High and Dizzy (1920), Lloyd's second "thrill" comedy short, is the most famous of the three and it offers up the urban wise-guy version of "the glasses character." It casts Lloyd as a young doctor fresh out of medical school with no patients, but that set-up gives way to an extended drunk act (thanks to a still in a nearby office) for the most of the 27-minute comedy, a series of stand-alone gags that ultimately sends him stumbling along the ledge of a high rise apartment building behind a sleepwalking girl. There's nothing organic in the construction of the short, just an anything-for-a-laugh aesthetic that defined the early slapstick era and the professional polish Roach and Lloyd brought to their films. The Marathon features a new piano score by Gabriel Thibaudeau and An Eastern Westerner and High and Dizzy feature new orchestral scores by Carl Davis.
The film features commentary by director and Harold Lloyd archivist Richard Correll, film historian Richard Bann, and film critic Leonard Maltin, and you can see an on-camera introduction to The Freshman that Lloyd filmed for the 1966 compilation film Harold Lloyd's Funny Side of Life, followed by a clip-reel from the film. The disc also features Harold Lloyd: Big Man on Campus (a new visual essay on the film's locations by Lloyd author John Bengtson), a conversation between Lloyd archivist Richard Correll and film historian Kevin Brownlow, footage from a 1963 Delta Kappa Alpha tribute to Lloyd featuring comedian Steve Allen, director Delmer Daves, and actor Jack Lemmon, and Lloyd's 1953 appearance on the television show What's My Line?, plus a booklet featuring an essay by critic Stephen Winer.
by Sean Axmaker
