Swing Your Partners

Poor Harold Lloyd, his films are so woefully unavailable. I cannot for the life of me understand why. He is at least an equal to Chaplin and Keaton from what I've seen, and apparently I haven't even seen anywhere near his best (the two most famous of his films that I've seen were Safety Last and Mad Wednesday). Anyway, as for this film, it must be the funniest short silent film I've seen, except for Sherlock Jr., which is pretty much a feature. This one is around 20 minutes, from what I recall (I saw it nearly a year ago), and the jokes are so fresh that they could have been written yesterday and still seemed funny. Mostly it involves to tramps, played by Lloyd and his frequent partner, the hilarious Snub Pollard, who are mistaken for dance instructors at a prominent dance school. As you could have guessed, most of the jokes focus on Lloyd and Pollard ogling the girls in their tutus, trying to knock each other out of the way so they can be the center of attention. There is a lot of Lloyd's trademark physical comedy, and it is absolutely classic. I really wish some company would rerelease Lloyd's work onto DVD, or at least VHS. Every day they remain unavailable, he becomes more forgotten (although, the Fox animated series Futurama had a character based off of Harold Lloyd a couple of months ago, so at least someone hasn't forgotten him!).