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The Freshman (1925)
Directed by: Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor
Starring: Harold Lloyd, Jobyna Ralston
Length: 76 min.
Genre: Comedy
Based on: Original Screenplay by Sam Taylor, John Grey, Tim Whelan, Ted Wilde
#79 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs
Harold Lamb (Harold Lloyd) is going off to college, but unfortunately for him, his only training for college life was seeing a recent movie comedy.
Lamb arrives at college mimicing a short dance down by a comedy in a college comedy whenever he meets someone new. His silly antics immediately make him a target and everyone on campus makes fun of him as they pretend to treat him as one of the popular kids. He continuously finds himself in bad situations as he's egged on by his "friends".
As he tries to be the big man on campus, a girl (Jobyna Ralston) that works at the boarding house where Lamb is staying falls for him. Lamb is oblivious to this. He gets the idea to go out for the football team, where the coach makes him the tackling dummy for the day as a goof. He felt bad about not letting Lamb on the team after he withstood all of that punishment, so he lets him on the team as the waterboy, but doesn't tell him and lets him think he is a researve player.
The night of a big dance that Lamb is hosting, he has a suit made for himself, but it isn't quite finished in time. The proceeding scene is one of the funnier scenes I've seen in a comedy. His suit keeps falling apart while the tailor, in hiding, keeps trying to fix it. Lamb keeps retreating to get his suit fixed, but once one thing is fixed, two or three more pieces fall off.
He finds out that he is nothing but the college fool, and is determined to make everyone think he's not just a joke. When the coach runs out of players in the last football game, Lamb gets sent in and after nearly costing his team the game a few times, scores the game winning touchdown.
This is by far my favorite Lloyd movie to date. Harold Lloyd felt this movie was a much more character-centric movie than his previous films, so to help himself get into character, it was filmed in sequence. All of the scenes were very funny, and it got better as the movie went on. I know movies hardly present a sport realisticly, but just watching the football scenes in this movie does show just how far football has evolved from 1925.
Harold Lloyd had wanted to do a football movie for awhile, but this movie, his most successful on the 1920s, started off a wave of college movies that last into the 30s.
Entertainment Rating: 8/10
Historical Rating: 9/10
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