best movie i've ever seen.

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Sturges made so many great films. This one falls somewhat short of his best, but is still entertaining in its own right. I recommend d_fienberg's review because it is very insightful. Briefly, this is a standard Preston Sturges plot with one of the icons of early Hollywood.Lloyd was much better than I was expecting (maybe I was thinking of Norma Desmond's assessment of silent film stars, "We didn't need dialog! We had faces," or the difficult transition depicted in Singing in the Rain). Lloyd had terrific facial expressions and maintained his impeccable physical comedy from his earlier days; some of the early stars who did their own stunts were pretty beaten up in their later years. However, he also executed his dialog like a true comedian.It's too bad that this film wasn't commercially successful because the copies are in poor shape. The audio is pretty good, though.

Harold Lloyd, in his last hurrah, is Harold Diddlebock, an inept clerk who has spent twenty years on the job. The boss calls him in, gives him a gold watch and a few thousand that Lloyd has save in the company account, congratulates him on his good work, and fires him.The disconsolate Lloyd is talked into having his first alcoholic drink -- a concoction of majestic authority. He's also talked into betting the horses, and he wins. He wakes up a few days later to find his money gone. He's wearing a garish checkered suit and a silly cowboy hat. He now owns a horse-drawn cab and its driver and a moribund circus with ruinous upkeep.How does he get out of it? Watch it and see. It's kind of funny.What impressed me most was that Harold Lloyd could still play the kind of young man he had played a quarter of a century before. Some people don't show their age. I happen to be one of them and it's because I've never thought anything but pure thoughts. Lloyd's love interest is Frances Ramsden -- pretty but most notable for a glorious mane of fluffy dark hair. You can barely see her face. It's the kind of fleecy cascade that any normal man would want to run his toes through.As a whole, the plot is kind of silly in the way that Laurel and Hardy comedies could go overboard. Two men wind up hanging by a leash from a forty-story ledge, with a lion on the other end of the leash. There's a lot of shouting and screaming. After the gloomy introduction it gets mighty fast.It's funny without being challenging in any way, and worth catching.

Hearing that this film was a disaster at the time of its release, I was not expecting much from it. I was surprised that it was a delightful 90 minutes with a marvelous farewell performance by Lloyd that showed him at top of his game.I haven't seen any other talking films by Lloyd, so I only have his silent films to compare this with. I thought this was as good as most of the silents I have seen. The silents generally contain a few slow but amusing exposition parts mixed with great 10 minute sequences of 30 or 40 memorable gags. That is pretty much what you get here. The football beginning scene, the drinking scene and the lion on the ledge scene are the great sequences. The lion on the ledge scene is as good and funny as anything in Lloyd's silents.Lloyd did this film when he was 55. While Keaton did lots of amusing and good stuff after age 40, nothing came close to this silents. Chaplin also faded after 50. "The Great Dictator," which he did at age 50 was his last great film. "Monsieur Verdoux," "Limelight" and "A King in New York" are good films, but aren't Chaplin at his best. Lloyd looks fit and youthful here and we watch him intensely in every scene without thinking about any of his earlier films.Preston Sturges knows how to make even the smallest character actor shine and that is his contribution here. The character actors like Margaret Hamilton or Edgar Kennedy might only get six or seven minutes of screen time but they are fresh and delightful, not relying on their past work, but creating new and hilarious characters.The bit about Lloyd falling in love with seven sisters who all worked in his office is pure Sturges. Some people are going to find it silly rather than funny, but I laughed.I understand that it was not released for two years and then flopped. As often happens, the quality of a work is not necessarily related to its appreciation in its first showing. Sixty years later, it is easier to see it as an odd and charming little masterpiece.

An interesting if ultimately unsuccessful combination of two clashing comedy styles (overseen by humorless mogul Howard Hughes no less), this film turned out to be Harold Lloyd's swan-song - and, as such, it ended on a somewhat positive note (even though the film was made during Sturges' period of decline).It opens with a reprise of the climactic football game from one of Lloyd's greatest successes, THE FRESHMAN (1925), eventually bringing that same character (albeit renamed!) up to date. Still, in the end, the film is more Sturges than Lloyd: even if the star plays one of his trademark roles of a patsy (though not without the occasional display of ingenuity), there is little of the star's characteristic slapstick here. Instead, the comedy is in Sturges' typical frantic (and, mainly, dialogue-driven) style - with which Lloyd isn't entirely comfortable; the film also features Sturges' stock company of character players in full swing. That said, it's climaxed by yet another of the star comedian's thrilling set-pieces which finds him overhanging from a building-ledge - hampered this time around by a myopic Jimmy Conlin and an understandably disgruntled circus lion! While a disappointing whole (it was re-issued in 1950 in a shortened version renamed MAD Wednesday), the film does contain a number of undeniable gems: his romantic attachment to every female member of one particular family (all of whom happen to work for the same firm over a 20-year period); his first encounter with Conlin, with the two of them exchanging wise sayings (the optimistic Lloyd had kept a handful nailed to the wall behind him at his former workplace) in order to explain their current dejected state-of-mind; and, best of all, the unforgettable scene in which Lloyd takes his first alcoholic beverage (an impromptu concoction by bartender Edgar Kennedy and which he names "The Diddlebock") that invariably provokes an unexpected yet hilarious reaction.