Critics reviews

The original title of Speedy, made at the height of Harold Lloyd's reign as American silent comedy's most profitable screen presence, was to be Rapid Transit, in order to reflect New York City's burgeoning investment in quickening the pace of public transportation. The discarded title speaks to both Lloyd and director Ted Wilde's interest in filmmaking as a tool to explore a city's construction and development in cartographic and economic terms.

As a comedy, Speedy is second-tier Lloyd, but it remains fascinating as a visual record of New York in the late 1920s—most of Lloyd's films (including a NYC-set short included on the Criterion disc, "Bumping Into Broadway") were shot in Los Angeles, and the production covers a lot of ground. There's even a fantastic view of the city's downtown skyline behind the Brooklyn Bridge, dominated by the Woolworth Building, which was the tallest structure in the world at the time.

As [Lloyd] said, each—Chaplin's final saddening aloneness and his own cheerful romantic triumph—has its place. And Lloyd had a purer sense than most of what it meant to keep audiences laughing. He was a profound student of the art of comedy, as well as one of its most ebullient practitioners.

Extended digressions on Coney Island and baseball (there's a cameo by Babe Ruth) fill out this zippy slice of zeitgeist. Those familiar with King Vidor's contemporaneous masterpiece The Crowd might note how parts of Speedy resemble Vidor's darker spin on rugged individualism. Speedy is no masterpiece—it's not even one of Lloyd's best films. But it is an engaging, fast-paced time capsule.