The Milky Way

Adolphe Menjou plays up milkman Harold accidentally knocking out the middleweight Champ into a fixed series of fights. And what strikes me is that--unlike poor Buster Keaton, or Charlie Chaplin's Tramp suddenly sounding like an English butler in "The Great Dictator"--Lloyd was perfectly cast in playing the nice likable sound version of his nebbishy Clark-Kent hero, even if he was getting a little too old to play the young twenty-something go-getter of "Safety Last" by this time.

The script was based on a then-hit play, and director Leo McCarey handles the right mix of the play's Front Page-esque late-20's rapid-fire wisecrack snark, and Lloyd's own physical comedy, as a "fighter" with an amazingly developed personal talent for ducking punches. (And, like all Lloyd characters, his embarrassingly ambitious delusions of grandeur once a few fixed fights go to his head.) I may only have a few to judge from, but if you had to see ONE Harold Lloyd talkie out of curiosity to see how the sound era treated him, this is one that will relieve the most worry. He had been making sound films for seven years by now, and although the first one , "Welcome Danger", was just awful, Lloyd improved quickly in the new medium.