The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947)

From roughly 1940-1944 writer/director Preston Sturges had an almost unheard of period of creative cinematic output. Classic screwball comedy's with Sturges unique flavor just kept pouring out of him, The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, all classics, and the occasional lesser but still good film like Hail the Conquering Hero and Christmas in July made Preston about the safest bet in the industry. This prompted Millionaire Howard Hughes to put in with Sturges in 1944 and launch their own studio, California Pictures. At first they had a number of projects in percolation but only one was ever released, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, a box office underperformer that all but spelled the end of Sturges career (he would release one more significant film, Unfaithfully Yours in 1948), as well as California Pictures (Hughes would later buy and later liquidate RKO Studios).

Sturges's idea with Diddlebock was to team with an ideal of his, silent comedy legend Harold Lloyd, who he managed to coax out of retirement. The film even begins with a slightly altered, sound added version of the famed 'football match sequence' from Lloyd's class 1925 film The Freshman, for which Diddlebock serves as a kind of sequel. After winning the football match Lloyd is hired by a university alum to serve as an accountant for his advertising firm, Lloyd spends the next 20 plus years wasting away at that job until his boss fires him for lack of initiative. Diddlebock, a life time tea-totaler then proceeds to get drunk, become very lucky at betting on horse races, and then spend that money on a failing circus. When Harold comes out of his drunken stupor he has no memory of what he's done with the last several days and comedy ensues.

Sturges was known for his witty dialogue which makes a teaming with Lloyd seem kind of odd, but the silent screen legend does a pretty good job delivering Prestons words, he also gets to play to his old strengths, particularly with a  prolonged sequence involving a lion loosed on the ledge of a New York City high-rise. The film however is an uneven one, alternating between long talkie bits, the setups seem to take way to long (which is perhaps way Hughes would later cut 13 minutes from the film an re-release it in 1950 as Mad Wednesday), and the physical comedy bits aren't what they would have been had Lloyd made them at the top of his game, and in fact what physical comedy there is in the film is highly derivative of stuff he'd already done. So the two creative minds feel like they are jockeying for control of the picture which ends up not a bad movie per say, but not a great one, more on par with Christmas in July then with The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. The film does boast a great 'topper' however and is about worth seeing for that alone. Interesting as a creative artifact, an experiment that didn't quite work out as imaged, likely because the parties involved seem to have been imagining different things. **1/2