The Freshman (1925)

The Freshman is a 1925 comedy film that tells the story of a college freshman trying to become popular by joining the school football team. It stars Harold Lloyd, Jobyna Ralston, Brooks Benedict, and James Anderson. It remains one of Lloyd's most successful and enduring films.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) It's considered one of Harold Lloyd's most well-known and beloved works, behind Safety Last! as it's proved to be a lasting influence on comedians, both for its characterization and it's structure.
 * 2) The film allows Lloyd to capitalize on the increasing prominence of colleges in popular culture during the 20s and 30s while maintaining the fans he had amassed from his earlier work.
 * 3) Harold Lloyd's at the top of his game with this film as he copies the manners of various collegians, and does a crazy jig at one scene.
 * 4) Lloyd's character Harold Lamb is very relatable (as usual), as he wants to be accepted in his school, and deals with peer pressure. As the naive son of a small-town bookkeeper, he's created an imaginary version of college after reading self-help books and studying a film titled The College Hero, and had even created a catchphrase for himself.
 * 5) Jobyna Ralston and Joseph Harrington are talented supporting stars with the former playing a sensible maid and the film's love interest and the latter playing an alcoholic tailor who provides the film's strongest laughs.
 * 6) The big dance known as the "Fall Frolic" is structured like Lloyd's old two-reelers, to the point where it could be extracted intact. The humor comes from the fact that the tailor was unable to finish Harold's suit in time and onlt basted it together, which causes the suit to disintegrate piece by piece despite his efforts to make quick repairs.
 * 7) Unforgettable climax with the football game in a Pasadena stadium.
 * 8) Aside from being a comedy, it also has an important lesson about the importance of being true to one's self.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Except for Harold Lamb and Peggy, most of the characters are meant to be college stereotypes. Lloyd's character doesn't even get to interact with students much in the film. He's forced into giving a cringe-inducing speech to the student body and wasting his money treating hangers-on to ice cream and parties, but mostly the students are anonymous.

Trivia

 * In addition to appearing on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest screen comedies of all time, Sports Illustrated in 2003 named it among the greatest sports movies - calling it "the most plundered sports film ever made" for its iconic and inspiring madcap climax in "the final crazed seconds of the Big Game."
 * Known for the prowess of his physical comedy - as in the climactic football scene in The Freshman and the clock tower scene of Safety Last! - Harold Lloyd lost the thumb and forefinger of his right hand when he mistook a live bomb for a prop during a 1919 photoshoot. In subsequent films - including his most iconic - the star simply wore a glove on that hand.
 * In 1990-only the second year of films so recognized - The filmwas inducted into the Library of Congress' National Registry of culturally, historically or aesthetically significant films. The great Harold Lloyd himself was honored with a special Academy Award in 1953 for his contributions to motion picture comedy - and the AFI Conservatory's signature seminar series bears his name, the Harold Lloyd Master Seminar.

The Film
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