In 1929, Harold Lloyd was the number one comedy star in America…and determined to remain that way. He had made a silent comedy feature called Welcome Danger and was readying it for release when he became aware of a seismic shift in his business: Talking pictures. Suddenly, that's what the public craved and Lloyd wanted to be at the forefront of talkies.
So at considerable personal expense (he financed his own films), he decided to scrap the silent version of Welcome Danger and to immediately remake it with sound. He recast the actors who couldn't talk well with actors who could and rushed right back to what were mostly the same sets to redo the feature.
It may or may not have been worth the expense. Lloyd was never as good nor as popular once films began to talk. The sound version of Welcome Danger was a decent film but far from his best. The following year, he made Feet First, which was another one of those films in which he dangled on window ledges…to much less comedic impact than when he'd done the same kind of material silent. Demand for Harold Lloyd movies decreased from that moment on and he only made a few more films before his last picture, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, in 1947.
Technically, that was the last Harold Lloyd movie to be released apart from some compilation films. But next month, that changes. On September 15, the silent version of Welcome Danger will be rescued from the vault and screened (with musical accompaniment) at the Motion Picture Academy in Beverly Hills. Only a few film scholars have seen it so it is, in effect, a "new" release. If it gets a few more screenings before the end of the year, it might even be eligible for an Oscar…not that I'd bet real money on its winning one.
I'm looking forward to it, if only for the comparison with the talking version. And also because it's been something like thirty years since I saw a Harold Lloyd movie I hadn't seen before. I also think it's funny that the man has been dead since 1971 and he has more new movies coming out than Chevy Chase.