Fireman Save My Child (1918) Poster

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6/10
Lloyd and Pollard with their variation on the famous Keystone Kops.
planktonrules4 February 2019
In the late 1910s, Harold Lloyd, Snub Pollard and Bebe Daniels were very frequently paired together at the Hal Roach studio. The combination made a lot of money and they were quite popular. however, Lloyd was not nearly as popular in these days before he hit it big in the early 1920s. His everyman character was around as early as this period (when he wasn't doing the violent Lonesome Luke character) but he didn't act like the sweet and naive guy everyone loved in the 1920s. Instead, although looking much the same, this Lloyd character was mostly selfish and prone to stealing and hitting! Is the guy he played in "Fireman Save My Child" any better?

The story begins at a fireman's ball. Lloyd is a guest and soon a fire alarm rings...the men have to leave the party to put out a fire. Oddly, one of the men refuses to go...quitting on the spot. So, they make Lloyd a fireman. What follows is a lot like a Keystone Kops entry....with a huge number of firemen mounting a vehicle much like the Kops' car. As for Lloyd...he seems in no hurry to get to the fire...just to rescue the pretty girl!

This film does offer a few laughs, though none are huge and the number of laughs is only fair. Not a bad film but one that is nothing like the more subtle and likable Lloyd films of the 1920s.
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6/10
Harold Burns for Bebe
boblipton12 January 2011
Warning: Spoilers
One of the reasons, as Mr. Lloyd told it, that he abandoned his reasonably successful Lonesome Luke character and went with the Glasses character for which he became famous is because it was less limiting. He could tell a love story with it, while the grotesque Luke would just be ridiculous.

Well, he can't tell much of one in a one-reeler, but he can demonstrate that it's possible, and he and Bebe Daniels make a very cute couple -- fine actors, both of them.

Lloyd has, by this time abandoned the hard-knock slapstick that he used in even his early Glasses shorts -- or if he used it in some, he uses a more situational gag here. His gags are relatively sedate here: a seltzer bottle to put out a man whose clothes are on fire, a gag of mistaken identities. I suppose he and the crew figured that the violence of a fire was enough. Quite right, too.
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