Hal Roach | Bumping into Broadway / 1919

a safe place

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harold Lloyd and Hal Roach (screenplay), H. M. Walker (titles), Hal Roach (director) Bumping into Broadway / 1919

Hal Roach’s 1919 half-hour short with Harold Lloyd is a delightful comedy of those who live near the Great White Way in not such glorious circumstances. Bebe Daniels as The Girl—a would-be chorus girl who puts her foot down when the others kick, and kicks when the others begin to tap their






















 heels—and The Boy (Lloyd), so poor that he has to bend down to read his finances are only a few of the down-and-out tenants at the “Bearcat” Landlady’s (Helen Gilmore) flophouse where so many boarders are in arrears that she’s hired a Bouncer just to deal with those who have received their third notices of due rent.

   The Boy is trying to write the Great Broadway Musical, but works on a typewriter whose keys resist rising to the platen and the challenge of his lyrics. With the rent due notice is slipped under his door once more, he digs up just enough to meet the $3.75 demand, only to discover his dejected next-door neighbor outside her room in tears. The always gallant fellow hands over his last few dollars and sense to her.

     Instead of immediately throwing her tenants out, the Bearcat and her Bouncer prefer to lock her unpaid renters “in” so they might torture them before they toss them into the streets. And a great deal of the early part of this film is devoted to The Boy’s attempts to simply leave the building. Lloyd is particularly adroit, even more so than Chaplin and other comedians, at evading those who chase him, often walking in tandem just behind the chaser on the lookout, bending down and crawling between their legs, and joining up with any number of inanimate objects so that he suddenly seems to blend in and disappear. But finally trapped, Lloyd climbs out the window doing a few acrobatic tricks for which he will later become famous before falling into the arms of a desperate spinster, leaning out her window at the very moment she calls out for a man (Gus Leonard in drag).

      So appreciative is this male in female dress for The Boy who has just fallen into her arms that she determines to never let him out of her sight, almost achieving what the Bearcat cannot until The Boy, locked in her arms, knocks on the door and, as she opens it slips out behind her as she wonders what other good luck might be coming her way.

      Eventually, he finds his way to the theater where The Girl has already been fired for her more than usual chorine clumsiness. The Boy slips into the manager’s office but, after a few seconds’ look at his script, is quickly tossed out, particularly since he has accidently “dropped in” upon the same Manager in his car on the way office. Despondent, The Boy returns to The Girl, but she, once again quite by accident, has been swept off by the crooked Stage Door Johnny (William Gillespie),

the gallant Lloyd on their trail just in case she might need his protection.

      Johnny takes his newest pigeon to a private dining and gambling club for dinner. And The Boy, after accidentally knocking out the code for entry, finds himself inside at the gambling table where, finding a few dollars on the floor, he attempts to return it by tossing on the table. He wins of course! And before he can even collect his roulette winnings—he’s been so busy looking for The  Girl that he doesn’t even know that he’s standing by a casino table—he wins again and again, and finally big time, unable to even stash all the cash he’s won under his hat and into his suit-coat pockets.

      Inevitably, it is at that very moment when the police decide to raid the joint. For a while the police are so very busy grabbing up the patrons on the run, including Johnny, that they ignore The Boy still busy at trying gather up all his winnings and The Girl, hidden in the booth where she had been dining.

       But once they discover Lloyd with his new-found fortune they descend in hoards upon him, and the entire last third of the film delights in his marvelous escapes as time and again they sweep room after room to find and loose him once more. He finally outwits them by hanging in a coat, clubbing another policeman into submission and putting his coat, which the police recognize, on the staggering dizzy cop, sending him off into harm’s way. Like bees to honey, the police are attracted to their prey, each evidently needing to add another few strikes of the club to his head. Having subdued one of their own beyond comprehension they leave the place, as The Girl comes out from hiding to discover The Boy alone.

       About to kiss, The Boy becomes shy and spotting a Japanese screen nearby, pulls it toward him, whereupon we discover two policemen behind it. The cops are simply sampling some of the illegal hootch, but the implication of their coupling behind the screen, given The Boy’s intentions of drawing the screen toward himself and the Girl, suggests that the men in uniform too may have been up to something beyond their wine-tasting delights. Lloyd returns the screen to the hidden policeman, while holding a Turkish rug in front of him and The Girl behind which, presumably, they share their first real kiss.

      What’s interesting about the two encounters with queer behavior represented in this film is, in a world of far more absurd and bizarre behavior, just how normal they seem. The violence of the Bearcat and her Bouncer and the Policeman on the chase stand in opposition to the everyday desires of everyone else in this film just wanting a good meal, a little extra money, and most importantly love. So what if the desirous spinster looks like a man, or in the middle of all the madness, two “special” cops have taken a little time off to fulfill their other appetites? Here they’re really no different from The Boy and The Girl who just want to kiss but can’t find a safe place in the mean world in which they exist.

 

Los Angeles, April 2, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).