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The movie opens with the final reel from Harold Lloyd's 1923 film The Freshman, a slapstick and very funny sequence showing how Waterboy Lloyd made a last-minute touchdown for his alma mater. An elated alumnus (Raymond Walburn) promises the young hero a job but has some difficulty remembering who he is when Lloyd, armed with mottoes and boundless enthusiasm, reports for work. Finally taken on as a bookkeeper, Lloyd is seen 22 years later, still grinding away at the same job. After being fired in a bitterly comic scene with his employer's son (also played by Walburn), the cowed bookkeeper has another brief moment of glory: he goes on a two-day bender, wins $30,000 on the races and winds up the possessor of a hangover, a circus, a hansom cab and a wife (Frances Ramsden), the seventh and youngest of a succession of sisters he has loved in vain.
Some of the jokes in Mad Wednesday are good, but most of them are dragged on too long. Lloyd has a classic scene with Jimmy Conlin and a lion, all three teetering on the roof edge of a skyscraper. Lionel Stander, Franklin Pangborn and Arline Judge get a Marx Brothers quality into a barbershop scene, and the late Edgar Kennedy works manfully as a bartender who creates a super-cocktail in honor of Lloyd's first drink.
King Solomon's Mines (MGM) offers the year's most impressive claim to the word colossal. It has Technicolored jungles, deserts, mountains and African veldt, 8,000 native tribesmen and 6,000 wild animals, supported by Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger. To film the picture, an intrepid Hollywood troupe sweated out five months on Africa's biggest safari, traveled 25,000 miles by plane, boat, truck, ox-drawn wagon, horse and foot. All the ingredients of the picture's story, based on the H. Rider Haggard novel of 1885, have been ridden haggard by lesser jungle epics through the years. But out of 200,000 feet of exposed film (plus some additional footage reshot in darkest New Mexico), Producer Sam Zimbalist has put together the equivalent of a whopping good travelogue.
The plot has to do with a safari engaged y wealthy Englishwoman Kerr and her brother (Richard Carlson* ) to track down her husband, who has vanished into unexplored territory in search of the legendary King Solomon's mines. In the midst of hardships and hairbreadth escapes, the hostility between Deborah and White Hunter Granger ripens into true love.
Directors Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton have bolstered this lean framework with all the animals, natural hazards and tribal customs that they and their technicians could coax out of the harsh, sometimes placid beauty of varied African landscapes. A sequence that ranks as one of the most eye-bulging sights ever caught on film: accompanied by a ground-shaking roar, thousands of animals-zebras, gazelles, impalas, bushbucks, lions, giraffes—stampede into and around the camera. Of the six cameras that Director Marton set up to film the scene, one was pounded into the ground while Cinematographer Gene Polito had to dive to safety behind a barricade.