SnoopyStyle Pop Dillon operates the last horse-drawn trolley in New York. His loving granddaughter Jane has boyfriend Harold 'Speedy' Swift (Harold Lloyd) who is constantly changing jobs and dreams of being a baseball player. A railroad is trying to buy Pop's track. Pop negotiates a price but Speedy torpedoes the negotiations when he reads that the big railroads need Pop's run. Speedy takes Jane to Coney Island. He next gets a new job as a taxi cab driver. It goes badly until he picks up Babe Ruth. At Yankee Stadium, he overhears a man scheming to steal Pop's track by stopping the run for 24 hours.This is famed silent era star Harold Lloyd's final silent movie. It's great to see Coney Island at its heights and the old rides. Babe Ruth makes a solid cameo. Harold Lloyd driving the Babe around is harrowing and kinda infuriating. It actually made me not like Speedy as much. There is quite a bit of action. I love the old Coney Island rides. The car chases are sometimes interesting with one shocking crash. It looks like it really hurted. The plot rambles around a bit. This has some fun and it's an easy watch.

rdjeffers Monday April 11, 7pm, The Paramount, Seattle "New York, where everybody is in such a hurry that they take Saturday's bath on Friday so they can do Monday's washing on Sunday." A soda jerk takes his girl on a date, then saves her granddad's horse-trolley from crooked businessmen. Harold "Speedy" Swift (Harold Lloyd) could hold down a job if it didn't interfere with baseball. During a stint as a cabby he drives Babe Ruth to work, nearly killing them both and gets fired when he sits behind his boss at the game. Pop Dillon can't work and laments, "The folks at City Hall said that as long as my car runs once every twenty-four hours, the car n' track is mine." Speedy and the neighbors step in to save the day in the hair-raising finale.In his eleventh and final silent feature, Harold Lloyd made the most of bustling New York locations, including Coney Island's magnificent Luna Park and Yankee Stadium. Cutie-pie Ann Christy plays Jane, with Bert Woodruff as the gruff-but-lovable old man, but the dog nearly steals the show! "The House of Hits!" Starring Harold Lloyd, "The fastest, Funniest Feller in the Films," Speedy opened at Seattle's United Artists Theatre (formerly the Liberty) on 1st Avenue, Thursday, April 5, 1928 for the "First Showing Anywhere in the Wide, Wide World!" Jan Sofer and The United Artists Orchestra provided live musical accompaniment and performed an overture of popular tunes, "In the Song Shop." "Grab a seat in Harold's snicker special. He guarantees a laugh in every bump and a thrill in every rattle!"

brimon28 The National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, Australia, has a beautiful clean print of this very funny classic. At this week's showing, there was accompaniment on a grand piano by Mauro Columbis, who recently did such a superb job in the dark with DeMille's The Godless Girl. It is a truly marvellous experience to view these old movies as they were shown in the 'twenties. To those of us who were around then (but couldn't afford the ticket!), and who have become cineastes, Speedy is educational, as well as funny. At this showing, it was mentally stimulating to listen to some great piano work so well matched to the action. Clichés, yes, but well done. Has anyone else noticed that the Babe Ruth home run in Speedy is the same as a short video available on the net? This viewer, not being a baseball tragic, was unaware that Ruth batted left-handed.

Snow Leopard Besides providing plenty of entertainment from Harold Lloyd and the rest of the cast, this silent comedy classic is also quite enjoyable as a time capsule from 1920s New York, with wonderful footage of Coney Island and other sights, plus the amusing appearance by Babe Ruth. Even more so than most movies of its era, it gives you a very good feel for its time and place.The plot has Lloyd, as perpetual job-seeker and job-loser "Speedy", trying to save the city's last horse-drawn streetcar, which is driven by the father of his girlfriend. The David-vs.-Goliath conflict gives Lloyd a lot to work with, and it is used to good effect both for gags and for character development. There are a number of good sequences, including a hilarious and detailed street donnybrook between the transport company's hired goons and Lloyd's ragtag neighborhood stalwarts.The lengthy digressions from the main story also work very well. The taxicab sequence with Ruth is probably the best-remembered, and there is also a delightful sequence at Coney Island's Luna Park. Ann Christy and Lloyd work together well, and they make an especially pleasant and sympathetic couple in this sequence."Speedy" is a good showcase for Lloyd, since it combines action sequences that advance the story with other sequences that simply entertain and give you a feel for the characters. Overall, it has quite a lot to recommend it.