Feet First (1930)

• Directors
  • Clyde Bruckman
  • Harold Lloyd(uncredited)
• Writers
  • John Grey(story)
  • Alfred A. Cohn(story)
  • Clyde Bruckman(story)
• Stars
  • Harold Lloyd
  • Barbara Kent
  • Robert McWade

  Harold Lloyd's second talkie finds The Bespectacled One playing a shoe clerk in Honolulu. Harboring dreams of becoming an executive, Lloyd passes himself off as a millionaire to heiress Barbara Kent. As the plot merrily rolls along, Harold stows away on a ship bound for the mainland, and ends up at the top of a dizzying skyscraper. In a reversal of his dilemma in 1923's Safety Last, Lloyd must find the safest way to climb down the building--with the dubious assistance of bumbling black janitor Willie Best (here derogatorily billed as "Sleep 'N' Eat"). Attempting to extend his silent-film technique into the talkie era, Harold Lloyd is successful about half the time. The climactic building-climbing sequence, though amusing, pales in comparison to Lloyd's earlier excursions into "high and dizzy" humor.