Harold Lamb is so excited about going to college that he has been working to earn spending money, practicing college yells, and learning a special way of introducing himself that he saw in a movie. When he arrives at Tate University, he soon becomes the target of practical jokes and ridicule. With the help of his one real friend Peggy, he resolves to make every possible effort to become popular.
O Calouro, Der Sportstudent, 프레쉬맨, Bäste man på plan, Viva lo sport, Vive le sport !, El estudiante novato, 신입생, On zázračným studentem, 新生, Heja! Heja! Heja!, Первокурсник, Niech żyje sport!
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I swear every time Harold Lloyd steps on screen I can hear Homer Simpson yelling NERRRRDDD.
harold lloyd was low key thick and it sucks that i’m the only one with the guts to say it.
“Lloyd was outstanding even among the master craftsmen at setting up a gag clearly, culminating and getting out of it deftly, and linking it smoothly to the next. Harsh experience also taught him a deep and fundamental rule: never try to get “above” the audience.”
-James Agee, Comedy’s Greatest Era
Chaplin is a saint, Keaton a bit of a devil (at least according to the laws of physics). Lloyd is us. In The Freshman especially, all he is trying to do is fit in. Lloyd’s plots are broken up into sequences in the same way as Chaplin – you could mix and match scenes pretty easily without too much interruption of rhythm or flow – but within the scenes, he…
It’s super awkward and cringe-worthy to watch Harold Lloyd (or Lamb, I guess) pretend to be cool during his first semester as a freshman in college. Lloyd’s sense of comedy still feels both timeless and modern, which I feel greatly separates his caliber from Chaplin and Keaton. I don’t necessarily think this is as strong and inventive as Safety Last!, but The Freshman is still delightful, energetic, and thoroughly enjoyable.
I'm a simple man. I see a hot and goofy nerdy hunk playing with kitties, I give 4 stars instantly.
"There's the man to model yourselves after! He's worth more than the whole bunch of you put together!"
After the candy-coated cynicism of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lola, it's comparatively lovely to step back in time for my personal favorite of the many silent gems starring Harold Lloyd, The Freshman. It's a film that has been known to lift my spirits when I’m down, but even now, in a brighter mood, it's just as sweet. His Harold Lamb is a real go-getter, a scrappy (and "Speedy") underdog who'll do anything to win the affection of his classmates at Tate University, where football is king, socializing is secondary and no one even heard of schooling. So much of…
Cupcake Curated Cinema - #13
Harold Lloyd, a treasure preserved in the amber of celluloid.
Freshman have always had it bad. Even tawdry photo auteur, serial womanizer and silent cinema icon, Harold Lloyd. (Thank you, theironcupcake, for this enlightening information contained within your review of this!)
In what seems like a basic and broad comedy for the time, Lloyd manages to makes himself the butt of many a joke here (though perfectly done, I always have trouble with that kind of embarrassing, cringe comedy), while providing ample gags at every single flip of the reel (the tailor following him to the party to finish sewing him up in hiding had me in *bad da bum tss* stitches), but somehow manages…
i've been continuously saying how bullyable harold lloyd is and how much i want to push him into a locker so i felt really targeted by this movie. also, i've said it before, but we need to make sock garters mandatory for men
A naive freshman arrives at Tate University and instantly becomes a subject of ridicule by older students. He remains undeterred though and continues to pursue his dream: a place in the school's renowned football team.
"The Freshman" finds Harold Lloyd's career at its apex and is the perfect showcase for his famous character: a clumsy, shy, but indomitable guy who will stop at nothing before achieving his goals, usually in the funniest way possible. Despite being almost a century old, most of the film's gags are as fresh as ever and will make even the most curmudgeonly viewer laugh his heart out. The students' ball and the training session scenes are models of comic timing and elaborate choreography that are…
Part 8 of the May Film Challenge
1st Fred C. Newmeyer, 1st Sam Taylor
My first Harold Lloyd feature and certainly not the last! Whereas I’ve found Chaplin to be overly sentimental, Lloyd strikes the right balance (to me) between precious and genuinely affecting. Perhaps it’s due to his everyman act, or maybe the fact that he looks like a version of me but with much more athletic skill. Whatever the case, his comedy of endless hard-charging and unflagging enthusiasm makes him incredibly endearing, almost painfully relatable at times. I know what it feels like to be innocently, naively different and to laughed at for it. Even more than that, I know what it’s like to blindly not see the…
"Do you remember those boyhood days when going to College was greater than going to Congress... and you'd rather be Right Tackles than President?" - Opening Text Card,
They got a trained cat! A trained cat. Keaton never did that.
So I remember getting ready for college and how exciting it was to me that I would be going to a new place where I didn't know anyone and I could kind of reorganize my identity and that was appealing to me. Sometimes you just want to make a change, meet new people, experience new things and it's healthy. Watching young Harold walk around practicing his jig he will do when he meets new people is sweet and cringy and…
“Peggy, the kind of girl your mother must have been.”
Such a big critique to the concept of popularity in colleges by the hand of our regular fellow, Harold Lloyd.
It’s about a college freshman, in other words a rookie, a newcomer, a student who wants to become a popular guy, in order to reach that high status position, he starts being like a popular teenager from a movie he had recently watched.
The Freshman is an entertaining movie that makes you travel to an old version of High School Musical, surrounded by a big old vibe of colleges of that time.
It’s full of gags and a couple of stunts executed by our “innocent”, funny and insightful pal, Harold…
