User Reviews

This is a very funny little comedy. Bebe and Bud are running a spiritualist racket and take a break. Bebe sees Harold and Snub running the 'gold ring' con: Snub shows up, looking for his valuable ring, and then after he's gone, Harold shows up, produces a ring and sells it to a mark. Bebe observes this, recognizes the short con, and then takes Harold and Snub's bankroll.

Harold and Snub wind up at Bebe's place of business and start making a mess.... but Bebe still wins. Atypical and the available print from Grapevine Video is poor. It's also badly chopped at the end, but there are smiles aplenty before you get there.

I found a fuzzy print of "Going! Going! Gone!" on YouTube. The problem is that it was with French intertitle cards. My French isn't too bad, so I watched it anyway....and frankly, you really don't need to understand French as, like most silent comedies, it's all about action.

Harold Lloyd was a HUGE comedy star in the 1920s. However, he was very, very prolific in the 1910s and appeared in almost 200 films from 1913-1920. However, very few of these were classics. The earlier ones featured Harold in all sorts of mostly supporting roles. A bit later, he developed a character named 'Lonesome Luke' who was generally brash and unfunny. By the late 1910s, he came up with the guy in the glasses persona...and at least superficially looked like the Harold of the 1920s. However, most of these comedies were low on humor and high on car chases and slapstick...enjoyable but hardly the sophisticated and subtle sort of movies he made during his prime period of 1920-1930. "Going! Going! Gone!" is an average sort of film for 1919....worth seeing for die-hard fans but far from his best work. Like most of the films of this period, this one co-starred Snub Pollard and Bebe Daniels.

When the story begins, Snub and Harold are on a bicycle built for two. Two crooks who just robbed the train station see them and trick them out of the bicycle and soon the posse mistakes the pair for the crooks. Sadly, the final portion of the film is missing...something sadly all too common of these early silent movies.

There aren't too many laughs in this one....so my suggestion is instead try one of Harold's later comedies...you'll be glad you did.

The review that appears here is not for Going! Going! Gone! but for the 1918 film Are Crooks Dishonest, which is where Harold and Snub tangle with the fake spiritualists Professor and Miss Goulash and which is one of the best of the early LLoyd-Pollard-Daniels "glasses" comedies. Going! Going! Gone! (readily available in a French version as "Une excursion mouvementée" is a much less good comedy where Harold and Snub are out for a tandem ride in the countryside, with Snub in front doing all the work while Harold eats the lunch from the lunch-pack on Snub's back. They meet up with a group of picnicking girls (troubled by a crab) which includes Bebe but, after rescuing the girl from the crab, are sent packing by a fearsome chaperone. Meanwhile two crooks have made off with a bag of gold and a car in the nearby hick-town (where Bebe turns out to be the sheriff's daughter) and, when Harold and Snub are tricked by the fleeing robbers, who go off with their tandem, they end up themselves being mistaken for the thieves by the pursuing posse and get arrested. The thieves, now on the tandem, unwisely stop to molest Bebe but she is rescued by Harold and Snub, who have easily managed to escape their arresters and the real culprits are captured.