‘Third Genius’ Applauds Wit of Harold Lloyd

He came out of thin times in Nebraska and joined a touring theater company, determined to be a serious dramatic actor. He landed in the dusty, hand-cranked Hollywood of 1912 and chased jobs as a Western extra alongside a new pal named Hal Roach.

More than Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, both of whom had grown up in vaudeville, Harold Lloyd was an accidental comedian. But in the end, he made more films than both of them together and, as Kevin Brownlow and David Gill amply prove in a two-part “American Masters” profile that commences tonight at 8 on Channel 28, Lloyd had a gift for physical comedy that was probably the equal of Keaton’s.

“Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius” was produced jointly by Thames Television in London, WNET in New York and the Harold Lloyd Estate, which explains its remarkable trove of clips and memorabilia (including posters from Lloyd’s stock company days).

There is a glimpse of Lloyd in Indian garb in what was apparently his first appearance on camera. The heart of the first installment of the profile is extended clips from what is undoubtedly Lloyd’s most famous film, “Safety Last” (1923), in which he hangs from the hands of a clock on an office building high above Broadway in downtown Los Angeles.

Using rare production stills, Brownlow and Gill rather naughtily reveal how the illusion was created that Lloyd was hanging in space. At that, the stunt was far from danger-free, although a building set-back allowed Lloyd no worse than a short fall and gave the camera a position from which it seemed to look only into several stories of space.

Illusion or not, it remains a white-knuckle spectacle and seeing it for the dozenth time (or more), you realize how ingeniously Lloyd and his writers extended the central joke with sub-gags, including a mouse that invades his pant leg while he is clinging to a ledge, and further including a flagpole that bends like a willow branch.

Lloyd did not come at once to a character like Chaplin’s Tramp or Keaton’s gloomily impassive loser in the porkpie hat. When Roach came into some money and started producing and directing shorts, he and Lloyd created Willie Work, who or which was not a success. They did better, after Lloyd had briefly left for a stint with Mack Sennett, with a new character called Lonesome Luke, quite derivative of Chaplin’s Tramp.

Then Roach and Lloyd came up with the character that stuck: straw boater, blazer, scholarly black-rimmed glasses, saddle shoes; Lloyd was the very model of Joe Freshman, or perhaps an apprentice bank clerk on a Sunday outing, or an early day Clark Kent who had no cape and tights to change into.

In a sense, Chaplin was still the originating impulse: the new Lloyd was still the little guy, not quite so far down the economic ladder as Charlie but nevertheless an average guy who is not always a loser. Through wit, chutzpah and courage, and some truly spectacular physical feats, Lloyd wins the girl and the day.

His physical feats were the more amazing because he had lost part of a hand when he picked up a prop bomb to examine it and it exploded. He wore a glove to conceal the missing fingers and was still able to scale buildings and scare the pants off his audiences, even as they laughed hysterically.

Lloyd, who eventually had his own unit at Paramount, kept working into the sound era. But his last film, “Mad Wednesday” (first called “The Sin of Harold Diddlebock”), produced by Howard Hughes and written and directed by Preston Sturges in 1947, was unsuccessful.

Like Chaplin but unlike Keaton, Lloyd was a smart businessman who kept title to his work and enjoyed the income from its re-releases. Brownlow and Gill include some footage of Lloyd talking about his art at film gatherings in the ‘60s. He died in 1971.

There are interviews with admirers such as Jack Lemmon and Roddy McDowall, and with some surviving associates, including the extraordinary Hal Roach himself, now 98.

Director Lindsay Anderson does the narration.

Watching “Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius” is to be reminded that Lloyd was indeed a genius at making comedy: “constructing each scene as carefully as though it were the mainspring of a watch,” Robert E. Sherwood wrote of him in 1923.

But watching is to be reminded in a larger way of what a rich and amazing art form silent comedy was. “Silence,” says the film historian David Shipman, “created the movie clowns, from Max Linder forward. If movies had talked from the beginning, their physical action might have been confined to what was possible behind a proscenium arch.”

Instead, the action reached dizzying heights.