A Sailor-Made Man

Harold Lloyd was quite good at playing the louche man-about-town, even though he's more readily known for the good-natured all-American boy. He swaggers around in the opening scenes of this film, twirling his cane, blithely ignoring anything that bears no relevance to his privileged but cloistered world. He loves Mildred Davis (who else?) but her father tells Harold he must stop being an idle playboy and earn a living in the real world. Harold undertakes the challenge with typical laissez-faire, informing the recruiting officer at the naval office into which he has just strolled, 'I've decided to join your navy.' When he later has a change of mind, and tells the same officer that, 'I've decided *not* to join your navy,' he gets a very rude awakening.

There isn't much of a plot to this one, and you sense there's a quite a lot of padding, which means it perhaps isn't as funny as it could have been. Lloyd was a genius when he was inspired, but when he was going through the motions he could be very ordinary, despite his reputation as a perfectionist. Lloyd and Davis reunite in some middle-eastern bazaar where an evil rajah has his eye on her, and some frantic chases follow but this never comes close to measuring up to Lloyd's best material.