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Harold Lloyd leases his studios and has a complete staff of film-makers on his payroll. Paramount merely distributes his films. It took him four months to make the skyscraper shots in Feet First. Nobody doubles for him in high places. He uses fewer twin-exposure shots than most skeptics would suppose. He is an athletic young man and keeps himself in shape on the private golf course, tennis courts, handball courts, and in the gymnasium of his expansive house. When he is making a climbing comedy his only protection is a platform with mattresses on it, built out from the side of the building a few yards below him. During one shot his brother Gaylord Lloyd, who was watching him, became sick. Harold Lloyd says his next picture will deal with college life.
Kismet (First National Pictures Inc.). Everything that the Warner-controlled First National company might have been expected to do to a play whose principal sets are laid in the Caliph's harem in Bagdad has been done to Kismet, except one — there is no color. That, from an industrial point of view, is important and interesting, for every sequence might have been built for a color-camera. The Warners have decided that in spite of its tremendous cost color brought in nothing at the box office; for the time being they have stopped using it. The only remaining element that might give interest to Kismet is the able performance of 72-year-old Otis Skinner in the role he first acted 19 years ago. The rest of the players are indifferent and the play itself is pretty well outdated. It contains some fine Turkish architecture and one beauteous shot of girls in the palace swimming pool.