One year after Charlie Chaplin's The Adventurer sent the Little Tramp into the Hollywood Hills as an escaped convict on the run from police, and two years before Buster Keaton's Convict 13 found the Great Stone Face unhappily swapping places with a prisoner, Harold Lloyd's Take a Chance tries its hand at similar material. At first, the film unfolds much like a standard-issue Keystone short, with various funny people doing harm to one another in a public park. The situation quickly escalates when a fleeing convict trades clothes with Harold, leaving the befuddled young man to outrace the police in his place.

Directed by Alf Goulding, this 1915 one-reel short was one of the early experiments with Harold Lloyd's new "glasses" character. Lloyd had chosen the turtle-shell glasses carefully, but wasn't yet certain about other details of his character's appearance. The boy first appears in top hat and tails, as if playing a fatcat on the town, but we soon learn he has only one coin to his name, and drops that down a sewer drain trying to flip the coin to make a decision.

One misplaced bar of soap and a pratfall brings this unfinished young man into the orbit of Bebe Daniels, playing a Cinderella-type girl whose boyfriend is the swaggering runt Snub Pollard. These are the costars that Lloyd used throughout this period, but here he throws them together into a situation consciously modeled on the Keystone comedies where Lloyd first got his start.



By David Kalat