Cinema Revisited: Feet First (1930), Harold Lloyd’s first full talkie

Feet First

Directed by Clyde Bruckman and Harold Lloyd. Cast: Harold Lloyd, Barbara Kent, Robert McWade, Lillian Leighton, Henry Hall, Noah Young, Arthur Housman, Willie Best, James Finlayson, Leo Willis. November 8, 1930. Running time: 93 minutes.

Harold Lloyd made a smooth transition from silent movies to sound films, and while his silents are indeed superior, his few talkies were, at the very least, amusing. Lloyd handles dialog nicely, and is able to maintain a semblance of his go-getter personality from the silent era. His character gets into jams, but always comes out on top, due to cleverness and ingenuity.

“Feet First” was Lloyd’s first full talkie, but not his first sound film. After he had finished filming his 1929 feature “Welcome Danger” as a silent, the sound movie boom hit hard, and he hastily dubbed-in voices and shot some new footage. Thus, “Welcome Danger” was released as a talkie to theaters who were equipped to run sound films, and in its silent version to theaters that were not. “Welcome Danger” was fun, but rather clumsily structured as result of this decision. “Feet First,” a full-talkie, comes off better.

Harold is a stock boy at a shoe company who longs to be a salesman, but is told he has no personality. He takes a crash-course in salesmanship and discovers a few ideas that result in some success as a salesman. He meets a pretty girl, played by Barbara Kent, and she believes he’s a wealthy leather magnate. Barbara is his boss’s secretary, and Harold thinks she is his daughter. Harold delivers shoes to a ship bound for California, and runs into Barbara who thinks he is a passenger. He ends up not getting off the ship in time, so he has to both keep up the ruse with Barbara, while avoiding being seen by the ship’s crew because he has no ticket. He sneaks around, sleeping in lifeboats and other such hiding places. When he finds that Barbara has failed to mail an important letter, he tries to save the day by stowing away in a mail bag with the letter in order to hand deliver it on time to California. The sack ends up dumped onto a scaffold that is being hoisted up by some painters. When Harold cuts himself out of the sack with a pocket knife, he discovers how high up he is, and must somehow either climb down or make his way into the building. This gives Lloyd a chance to engage in the sort of thrill comedy that he had performed in silents like “Never Weaken,” “High and Dizzy,” and, of course, “Safety Last.”

There are some particularly funny gags and comedy sequences appearing throughout “Feet First.” An early bit in the shoe store has a woman sitting on a couch near a mannequin leg that Harold must retrieve. Naturally, he grabs each of the women’s actual legs before securing the correct one. During a sequence where he is selling shoes to a haughty woman who turns out to be the boss’s wife, he frustrates and humiliates her in several instances, from fitting her with the discarded shoes of a nearby customer, to putting on a shoe that contains a discarded, and lit, cigar butt.

One long sequence on shipboard deals with Harold discovering that his image as a salesman is the cover story of a magazine. Realizing this will destroy his ruse as a leather magnate, Harold runs around the ship trying to secure every magazine so Barbara, and his employer, don’t see it. This results in his confronting everything from a crying baby, to a woman who has the cover unknowingly stuck to her butt. However, most of the laughs on the ship deal with Harold having no change of clothes, no room to sleep, and no means to eat. Humor stems from his clever methods of dealing with these situations (he gets a dinner suit from a seasick passenger, after talking to the queasy man about greasy salt pork, codfish and cream, etc.)

But the real highlight of “Feet First” is Harold Lloyd’s recreation of the building sequence from “Safety Last.” Some studies have claimed that this sequence fell flat when first presented to 1930 audiences, because the fact that it was sound and they could hear Lloyd yelling and panting made it more unsettling than funny. In fact, past reviews indicate that this scene was a highlight then, and when seen now it continues to hold up well. A lot of the same ideas from the “Safety Last” sequence are reused effectively here, and the addition of sound actually gives it another thrilling dimension. Lloyd really knows how to use his body for comedy, and his frantic movements in a comical attempt to avoid danger help sustain the pace of the scene as well as the laughs.

Perhaps the only drawback to “Feet First” is casting Barbara Kent as his leading lady. Cute and diminutive, she has little personality, and certainly pales in comparison to the likes of Jobyna Ralston, Bebe Daniels, and Mildred Davis (who became his wife) in the silents. Kent had also appeared in “Welcome Danger,” and this would be the last time Lloyd used the same female co-star more than once. Kent left films in 1935 and later would state that she never particularly liked being in movies and remembered little about her screen career. She lived a long time, dying in 2011 a couple months prior to her 104th birthday.

Harold Lloyd’s successful transition to talkies notwithstanding, the comedian didn’t particularly like the sound movie format and made only 5 more films after 1930, sometimes spaced apart by several years (his last two films were made in 1938 and then 1947). While “Feet First” was a box office success, Lloyd was disappointed that it made less money than his previous movie, and that his talkies did not generate the same income, or interest, as his silents had. His sound career might be aesthetically successful as per each individual movie, but it constitutes only a small portion of his filmography.