Saturday, June 10, 2023

Feet First (1930)

IMDb plot summary: An ambitious shoe salesman who unknowingly meets his boss's daughter and tells her he is a leather tycoon has to try to hide his true circumstances.
Directed by Clyde Bruckman and Harold Lloyd. Starring Harold Lloyd, Barbara Kent, Robert McWade.

Feet First is a Harold Lloyd comedy about a shoe salesman who falls in love with an upperclass woman but doesn't want  her to find out about his lowly status. This is the first Harold Lloyd movie I've seen that was a talkie, and for the most part the humor works just as well. There are some really funny clever bits of wordplay that go along with these smart slapstick moments, and as I've found in other Harold Lloyd movies, Lloyd himself is a thoroughly likable protagonist, bumbling without being truly stupid, just often unlucky and uncertain how to proceed. The more I watch of his, the more I think Lloyd might be my favorite of the classic 1930s film comedians that include names like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Now there is a fair amount of plot here that is pretty disposable, but it spends most of the time just enjoying the silliness of the characters in the situation they've gotten themselves into, so it's easy to skip over the filler pieces that are trying to set up the next gag. Definitely worth a watch.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Feet First > Bad Education
Feet First < Key Largo
Feet First > Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella
Feet First > Rock of Ages
Feet First > The Secret Garden (1987)
Feet First > Grosse Pointe Blank
Feet First > Barton Fink
Feet First < The Menu
Feet First > Amistad
Feet First < Leaving Las Vegas
Feet First > The Palm Beach Story
Final spot: #966 out of 3790, or 75%.

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