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1[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/img_0807_3.JPG]]
2[[caption-width-right:300:EndearinglyDorky!]]
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4->''"My humor was never cruel or cynical. I just took life and poked fun at it. We made it so it could be understood the world over, without language barriers. We seem to have conquered the time barrier, too."''
5-->-- '''Harold Lloyd''' in 1970, shortly before his death
6
7Harold Clayton Lloyd (April 20, 1893 – March 8, 1971) was an American comedian, actor, and filmmaker, and one of the biggest stars of UsefulNotes/TheSilentAgeOfHollywood. Along with Creator/CharlieChaplin and Creator/BusterKeaton, Lloyd dominated silent comedy in the 1920s, leading British film historian Kevin Brownlow to dub him the "Third Genius" of the genre.
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9Born in Nebraska, Lloyd moved with his father to San Diego after his parents' divorce, and started acting in high school. He made his film debut in 1913 and soon became partners with another up-and-comer, producer Hal Roach. Lloyd first achieved fame with "Lonesome Luke", a fairly obvious imitation of Chaplin's Tramp character that nevertheless proved popular. However, Lloyd grew more ambitious and created his own persona, the "glasses" character that would be a movie fixture for twenty years. The "glasses" character, unlike Chaplin's tragicomic outsider and Keaton's somewhat cynical [[TheStoic stoic]], was more of an everyman, a determined, go-getting all-American type who usually got both the girl and the happy ending.
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11In 1923, following the tremendous success of ''Film/SafetyLast'', (the one with the "clock dangling" scene that became Lloyd's SignatureScene) Lloyd left Creator/HalRoachStudios and became his own boss during his period of greatest success, during which he produced more feature films than Chaplin or Keaton. Unlike those rivals, he never took credit as a writer or director of his films despite closely controlling all aspects of production. His films during these years became famous for thrilling, elaborate stuntwork and long chase sequences, all of which were performed by Lloyd himself. Even more impressively, he did this after losing the thumb and forefinger on his right hand when a prop bomb exploded too early.
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13Lloyd attempted to adapt the "glasses" character for talkies but met with gradually diminishing returns and was essentially retired by 1938. He held the copyright to most of his features and was reluctant to show them in revivals or on television, and consequently his reputation diminished over the decades in comparison with his contemporaries'. Some of Lloyd's features were released on VHS in the early 1990s, and a DVD collection of features and shorts was finally released in 2005. Creator/TheCriterionCollection currently has the rights to Lloyd's films and is releasing them on DVD and Blu-ray.
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15Not to be confused with Creator/HarryLloyd.
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17----
18!!Lloyd films with their own TV Tropes pages:
19* ''Film/ThePatchworkGirlOfOz'' (1914; uncredited)
20* ''Film/AskFather'' (1919)
21* ''Film/FromHandToMouth'' (1919)
22* ''Film/NeverWeaken'' (1921)
23* ''Film/ASailorMadeMan'' (1921)
24* ''[[Film/GrandmasBoy1922 Grandma's Boy]]'' (1922)
25* ''Film/SafetyLast'' (1923)
26* ''Film/WhyWorry'' (1923)
27* ''Film/GirlShy'' (1924)
28* ''Film/HotWater'' (1924)
29* ''Film/{{The Freshman|1925}}'' (1925)
30* ''Film/ForHeavensSake'' (1926)
31* ''Film/TheKidBrother'' (1927)
32* ''Film/{{Speedy}}'' (1928)
33* ''Film/MovieCrazy'' (1932)
34* ''Film/TheMilkyWay'' (1936)
35
36----
37!!His other movies provide examples of:
38
39* AlcoholIsGasoline: Exaggerated. In ''Get Out & Get Under'', Harold needs gas for his car when he sees a man shoot heroin in the corner. Striking an idea, Harold steals the needle and pours the drug into the car's tank. It not only starts the engine, but suddenly causes the car to speed off by itself, sending Harold on a wild out of control ride.
40* AllJustADream / ButYouWereThereAndYouAndYou: In ''Captain Kidd's Kids'', Lloyd goes on a cruise after his girlfriend's pushy mother has forbidden marriage. He falls off the cruise boat and is picked up by a band of lady pirates, including his girlfriend as a particularly fetching pirate and her battleaxe mother as the pirate captain. TheReveal is that it was all a dream.
41* BananaPeel: ''The Flirt'' (1917).
42* CaptainErsatz: Lonesome Luke.
43* ClarkKenting: Lloyd found that his prop glasses hid his identity so well that typically no one recognized him when he took them off.
44** Apparently he was the TropeCodifier for this one -- Siegel and Schuster used this trait of his as a model for Clark Kent's being able to pass as different from Kal-L.
45* CobwebOfDisuse: On the office telephone in ''High and Dizzy'', demonstrating that young doctor Harold's medical practice is not prospering.
46* DeusExMachina: In ''Bumping Into Broadway'' (the first Glasses Character short), Harold is a young aspiring playwright trying to sell his script for a musical comedy. Bebe Daniels is the actress in the room next to him; they are both late on their rent and facing eviction. Are their problems solved when Harold sells his play? No, they're solved by Harold hitting on #13 three times in a row when playing roulette at an illegal casino.
47* DidNotGetTheGirl:
48** A rare example in ''The Big Idea'', see TwistEnding below.
49** Actually not ''too'' uncommon during the Bebe Daniels era (1915-1919). Even rarer in the Mildred Davis era (1919-1923); ''Number, Please?'' is the only one of the 15 Harold/Mildred films where the former loses the latter (when the purse he's spent the whole movie trying to bring back to the girl is eaten by a goat).
50* DodgyToupee: Harold is riding in a roller coaster in ''Number, Please?'' when another passenger's toupee flies off and hits Harold (in the last car) in the face.
51* EndearinglyDorky: His "Glasses" character was probably one of the earliest examples. This is actually a pretty good illustration of the effect of the glasses. Without the glasses, he wasn't "adorkable", he was just a [[http://photos.famousfix.com/ctf_13439562/harold-lloyd/ctn_13439562 very handsome man]].
52* FakeOutOpening: Many of his films start with a misleading opening as a gag.
53* FunWithSubtitles: To a far greater extent than Keaton or Chaplin, Lloyd used the title cards for gags.
54** To the point that's it's almost overwritten, like Creator/WoodyAllen (who was clearly influenced by Lloyd).
55* [[GoGetterGirl Go-Getter]]: Usually played this type of character or IdleRich.
56* GrievousBottleyHarm: In ''An Eastern Westerner'', the heroine whacks a beer bottle over the bad guy's head. It shatters, but he has no lasting ill effects.
57* HandicappedBadass: He pulled off a ton of incredible stunts while missing a thumb and index finger.
58* HangoverSensitivity: In ''Captain Kidd's Kids'', Harold wakes up after a wild bachelor party, and puts an enormous block of ice on his head.
59* HappyEnding: Almost all of them.
60* HongKongDub: ''Welcome Danger'' was already finished as a silent film when Lloyd decided to ride the talkie wave and remake it as a sound film. Some of the material was re-shot with synchronized sound, but other scenes featured dialogue and sound effects dubbed onto silent footage. The dubbing is egregiously bad.
61* IconicOutfit: The horn-rimmed glasses, to the point where Lloyd could walk around unrecognized when he wasn't wearing them (they were [[PurelyAestheticGlasses strictly a prop]], he didn't need them to see; they also had no lenses, as the glass would have reflected the stage lighting).
62** Usually, though not always, accompanied by a straw hat.
63** When he finally needed to replace the old frames, he wrote to the manufacturer, who sent him 20 pairs for free, as he was their best advertisement.
64* KingIncognito: Mildred Davis's princess character in ''His Royal Slyness'' likes to dress like a peasant and leave the castle to see how the people live. That's how she meets Harold.
65* LoveAtFirstSight: Happened with Lloyd and his female co-star on a regular basis. In ''High and Dizzy'' he asks Mildred Davis's character if she believes in love at first sight.
66* TheMagicPokerEquation: Played with in ''An Eastern Westerner''. Harold sits down to play poker and naturally is dealt a full house in true Magic Poker Equation style. However, this is subverted when the guy sitting next to him is dealt a pair of twos--and surreptitiously switches out his hand for Harold's.
67* MeetCute: In ''Take a Chance'', Bebe Daniels is mopping up a porch and the sidewalk in front of it when Harold slips and falls on said sidewalk.
68* MirrorRoutine: ''The Marathon'' (1919), after Harold shattered the mirror. His brother Gaylord Lloyd played his lookalike in the film.
69* NitroBoost: In the short ''Get Out and Get Under'', Lloyd gives his car cocaine to make it go faster. As in, he literally snatches a needle from a junkie and then injects the contents into his engine.
70* NoNameGiven: When his characters weren't called "[[TheDanza Harold]]", they were usually called "The Boy".
71* NotSoFakePropWeapon: RealLife. In 1919 Lloyd was posing for photographs with a prop bomb. Unfortunately the not-prop bomb exploded, blowing off the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand. For the rest of his career, including all of the intricate action sequences that were such a hallmark of his 1920s films, Lloyd performed while wearing a specially-made glove designed to hide his injury.
72* OnOneCondition: In 1917 short ''Bashful'', Harold inherits $2 million from a deceased aunt, but only if he has a wife and baby. His girlfriend agrees to pretend to be the wife, but the search for an infant to be their fake baby leads to a lot of comic business.
73* RacialFaceBlindness: In ''The Cat's-Paw'', Lloyd's character Ezekiel Cobb, who grew up in China as the son of a missionary, observes that white girls all look alike.
74* RealVehicleReveal: In one Harold Lloyd film, Harold is seen relaxing in the back of a rather luxurious car. Then he shifts position, the car pulls away, and it's revealed he's riding a ''bicycle.''
75* RevealShot: Harold Lloyd loved using this for gags and did it many times.
76* RomanceOnTheSet: After appearing as Lloyd's LoveInterest in fifteen films, Mildred Davis married him in 1923, whereupon she retired from the screen (save for one more role in the 1927 non-Lloyd comedy ''Too Many Crooks''). They remained HappilyMarried until her 1969 death.
77* {{Ruritania}}: "Thermosa" in ''His Royal Slyness'' (Harold impersonates the Prince of Razzmatazz; his rival is the Prince of Roquefort).
78* ScarpiaUltimatum: In ''An Eastern Westerner'' the bad guy takes the heroine's father prisoner and demands that she marry him. Harold intercedes and rescues them before the girl has to make a hard choice.
79* {{Sequel}}: After several years in retirement Lloyd attempted a comeback with ''The Sin of Harold Diddlebock'', a 1947 sequel to ''The Freshman''. For this movie he teamed with one of the greatest comedy directors of TheForties, Creator/PrestonSturges, the maker of razor-sharp satires like ''Film/SullivansTravels'' and ''Film/TheLadyEve''. It was a disaster; Lloyd retired from filmmaking for good, and Sturges's career never recovered.
80* ShoutOut: The scene in ''An Eastern Westerner'' where a gang of riders on horseback wearing white hoods charge into town is strongly reminiscent of the Klan on horseback in ''Film/{{The Birth of a Nation|1915}}''. Happily, in this film the riders in white hoods are the bad guys.
81* ThiefBag: See TwistEnding below.
82* TwistEnding: In ''The Big Idea'' (1917), one of his earlier Glasses Character shorts, Lloyd's girlfriend works at an antique shop. She faces losing her job when her boss says he's going to close for lack of business. Harold elects to go on a ViralMarketing campaign in which he goes around town spreading the rumor that there's $10,000 hidden in one of the artifacts at the antique shop. After the store has been cleaned out, the last customer buys the last item, a vase, breaks it open--and finds a sack marked "$10,000". Harold's girl goes away with the customer.
83* VicePresidentWho: ''His Royal Slyness'' ends with Harold, who earlier was impersonating a prince, accidentally start a revolution and get made president (ItMakesSenseInContext). Harold has fallen in love with the princess. When he tells her "I'm only a president now" she says "I'd love you if you were only a Vice-President."
84* WagTheDirector: Lloyd was in charge of his movies. Of course, since many of them went down as classics, this is an unusually happy example of this trope.
85* WhatDidIDoLastNight: In ''The Sin of Harold Diddlebock'', Harold, who's been fired from his job, hits on a longshot racehorse, and then goes on a spree of drinking and debauchery. Much of the second half of the film involves Harold finding out all the crazy stuff he did over a drunken Wednesday, including buying a coach and driver, buying a circus, and getting married.
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87----
88!!Harold Lloyd {{Shout Out}}s in fiction:
89* The main character in the animated ''WesternAnimation/AtlantisTheLostEmpire'' was a mix between Harold Lloyd and Creator/JimmyStewart.
90* ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheBraveAndTheBold'': In the episode "Emperor Joker!", one of the Joker's {{mook}}s is a [[http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/2443740.html huge, muscular version of Lloyd]], [[ShownTheirWork with a prosthetic hand]] (he tries to punch Batman with it. Blink and you might not realize it's prosthetic).
91* ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'': Zoidberg's uncle Harold Zoid (voiced by Hank Azaria), a former silent film star, is a reference to Lloyd. Also in one episode there's a scene with Fry dangling from a ''digital'' clock (the numbers being apparently physical 3-D objects).
92* Creator/{{Martin Scorsese}}'s ''Film/{{Hugo}}'' includes the famous ''Safety Last'' scene pictured above, and in a later scene Hugo dangles from a clock.
93* Creator/JackieChan also copied the clock scene from ''Safety Last'' in ''Project A'', as well as scenes from Creator/BusterKeaton's ''Sherlock Jr.'' and ''Film/SteamboatBillJr'' and Creator/CharlieChaplin's ''Film/ModernTimes''. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdiNGHL99YM Compare the scenes here]].
94* The plot of the film ''WesternAnimation/CatsDontDance'' borrows heavily from Harold Lloyd's 1932 talkie ''Movie Crazy''.
95* ''Film/BackToTheFuture1'': The climax with Doc Brown hanging from the Hill Valley clock tower. At the beginning of the movie, one of Doc's clocks is a ''Safety Last'' clock, with a Harold Lloyd silhouette hanging from the hands.
96* ''WesternAnimation/ThePowerpuffGirls'': In the episode "Silent Treatment" the girls get sucked into a silent movie and quickly pass by Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin.
97* The opening credits for ''Film/OnHerMajestysSecretService'' uses time-themed graphic elements, including an hourglass and someone hanging from a giant clock hand, Lloyd-style (which anticipates a scene with Bond trapped in a cable car machine room).
98* Will Smith's cop character in ''Film/IRobot'' mentions that the name of the driver that [[spoiler:was killed in the same accident that left his daughter Sarah and the cop slowly drowning as they were trapped in their cars underwater]] was "named Harold Lloyd. Like the film star, but no relation." Notable since the film is supposed to take place in 2035, showing how people still remembered his career even over a hundred years after some of the films were made.
99* ''Film/DumbAndDumber'': The protagonists are Harry Dunne and Lloyd Christmas, named after Harold Lloyd.

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