Mon 16 Feb 2015
A Movie Review by Dan Stumpf: PROFESSOR BEWARE (1938).
Posted by Steve under Films: Comedy/Musicals , Reviews[5] Comments
PROFESSOR BEWARE. Paramount, 1938. Harold Lloyd, Phyllis Welch, Raymond Walburn, Lionel Stander, William Frawley, and Montagu Love as Professor Schmutz. Written by Delmer Daves. Directed by Elliott Nugent.
Not a completely successful film, nor a consistently funny one, Professor Beware flopped at the box office, leading to Lloyd’s retirement (until Mad Wednesday anyway) but I find it a charming thing, with a screamingly funny wrap-up.
This starts off with a creepy pastiche of The Mummy (Universal, 1932) as a star-crossed Egyptian Romeo gets entombed alive, the result it seems of a misunderstanding involving a vestal virgin or some such. Flash forward to 1938 and we find the ancient swain reincarnated as our Egyptologist Hero and launched on a cross country chase with a madcap heiress in true screwball-comedy fashion.
The problem here is that the resulting escapades ain’t all that funny. There’s a clever line here and there, a fleetingly funny bit of business now and then, and Phyllis Welch, in her one and only starring film, has the requisite cute-and-perky act down pat, but the story lacks sustained comic momentum, and Lloyd’s best and most athletic days were now behind him.
Instead of the cheerful ballet of Harold at his best, we get some rather dire back-projection and a faintly unfocused odyssey as he tries to escape the curse of his ancient progenitor, the heiress and cops chase after him, and a slew of comic character actors do what they can in brief bits — my favorite being Montagu Love as Professor Schmutz; he doesn’t do anything funny, I just like the name “Professor Schmutz.â€
But I said early on that I liked this film, and I do. There’s a certain eerie mood hung on the theme of Harold trying to cheat his fate that sustains the story in spite of itself, and it comes together in a thoughtful moment when our hero figures out that if risking a horrible death is the price of true love…. Well, maybe it’s worth it.
Of course it helps that Professor Beware wraps up with a full ten minutes of delightful sight gags, wonderfully conceived, and beautifully shot and edited as Harold storms a yacht and we get that wonderful feel of his Silent Movie days, that this guy can sweep a football field or climb a skyscraper and take us right along with him.
February 16th, 2015 at 1:47 pm
I am a longtime fan of Harold Lloyd and once wrote him a fan letter. I bought the Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection a number of years ago and was disappointed that ALL his sound features were not included. Among those NOT included was “Professor Beware.” Thank you, Dan, for this review so that I can see what I missed and what I may not have missed. If you are a true fan you want the failures as well as the successes.
February 16th, 2015 at 5:33 pm
Lloyd’s talkies are a mixed bag, Most have good bits in them and he is always worth watching, but only a few of them are anywhere near total successes.
That dogged quite a few silent comics, especially Keaton who they teamed with Jimmie Durante and Andy Devine looking for a way to utilize him. With the exception of Laurel and Hardy Lloyd did better than most in the talkie age, but never recaptured his silent status.
I’ll look this up, but it sounds as if it suffers from the same problem his other talkies tend to have.
February 16th, 2015 at 6:23 pm
I’m intrigued by the fact that this was the one and only film that Lloyd’s costar, Phyllis Welch, was ever in.
Turns out that she has her own Wikipedia page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Welch_MacDonald
and was a fairly big success on Broadway before trying to make it in the movies. After making this film, she decided to get married and said goodbye to the film-making world. She died in 2008 at the age of 95.
All this, plus the photo I came up with, makes me want to see the movie all the more.
February 16th, 2015 at 6:28 pm
All of this is extremely subjective. I remember really liking THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK before learning it was probably his worst film. (He hated it too.) You know what? I still enjoy it.
February 17th, 2015 at 6:10 pm
For those who may not know, MAD WEDNESDAY and THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK are the same film under different titles.