Harold Lloyd, like other top silent clowns Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, made a gradual transition from comedy shorts to feature-length films. Among Those Present (1921) was Lloyd's second three-reel film; later in 1921 he would release the four-reel A Sailor-Made Man. The year after that, with Grandma's Boy (1922), he moved exclusively into features.

In Among Those Present Lloyd plays O'Reilly, a coatroom checker who can believably impersonate a certain English nobleman. When said nobleman pays a visit to the U.S. and a "society pilot" fails to snag him as a guest for a socially ambitious family, she arranges for O'Reilly to pose as the real thing. The family's comely daughter falls for the bogus nobleman, who fabricates tall tales about his expertise as a hunter, then finds himself embroiled in comic misadventures on horseback during a fox hunt. As in many of Lloyd's comedies, the girlfriend is played by Mildred Davis, who would marry the comic in real life in 1923.

Producer: Hal Roach
Directors: Erle C. Kenton, Fred C. Newmeyer
Screenplay: Hal Roach, Sam Taylor
Original Music: Robert Israel
Editing: Thomas J. Crizer
Principal Cast: Harold Lloyd (O'Reilly, The Boy), Mildred Davis (The Girl), Aggie Herring (Mother), Vera White (Society Pilot), William Gillespie (Hard-Boiled Party).
BW-35m.

by Roger Fristoe