The Freshman (College Days) (1925)
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88% of critics liked it
(8 reviews) -
76% of users liked it
(178 ratings)
One of Harold Lloyd's best feature-length comedies, The Freshman, features the bespectacled regular guy as Harold Lamb, a naïve young man who heads off to college believing campus life will be just as it is in the movies; he even learns a little dance he saw one of his favorite actors do in a… More One of Harold Lloyd's best feature-length comedies, The Freshman, features the bespectacled regular guy as Harold Lamb, a naïve young man who heads off to college believing campus life will be just as it is in the movies; he even learns a little dance he saw one of his favorite actors do in a film. However, Harold soon discovers that real life isn't all that much like the pictures, and he quickly becomes the laughing stock of the university. Determined to prove himself, Harold tries out for the football team, but he serves as water boy and rides the pine until he finally gets a chance to redeem himself at the big game. Along the way, Harold also tries to woo a lovely co-ed, Peggy (Jobyna Ralston). 22 years later, writer/director Preston Sturges used the climactic football game as the opening for his collaboration with Harold Lloyd, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- Directed By
- Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor
- Genres
- Classics, Comedy
Unrated,
- In Theaters
- Sep 20, 1925 Wide
Critic Reviews
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Edmund Wilson, The New Republic
Lloyd has never been a very good actor; he has been a dummy for comic devices. And we are not much moved by the scene in The Freshman in which he learns at last that he has been the butt of his fellow students, instead of, as he has believed, their hero.
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, TIME Magazine
Mr. Lloyd could be funny playing an undisturbed mummy. Simply this: The Freshman is not so funny as earlier of the comedian's adventures.
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J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader
Lloyd can't compete with Chaplin and Keaton, but he perfectly embodied the can-do energy of the 1920s, and few things are quite as funny as his bespectacled, apple-pie face twisted by a panic that was always justified.
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Mordaunt Hall, New York Times
This is a regular Harold Lloyd strip of fun, which is made all the more hilarious by introducing something like suspense in the sequences on the football field.
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Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
Lloyd's films are prose where Keaton's were poems, but gag for gag, Lloyd was the funniest screen comic of his time.
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Cast
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Harold Lloyd
as Harold "Speedy" Lamb
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Jobyna Ralston
as Peggy
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Brooks Benedict
as College cad
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James Anderson
as Chester A. "Chet" Trask
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Hazel Keener
as College Belle
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Joseph Harrington
as College tailor
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Pat Harmon
as The Coach
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Charles Farrell
as Student (bell ringer at Frolic)
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Gus Leonard
as Waiter (takes Harold's pants)
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Mike
as Mascot Dog
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Oscar Smith
as The Dean's Chauffeur
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Grady Sutton
as Student who goes to dean
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Charles E. Stevenson
as Assistant Coach
