80 Years Ago: Harold Lloyd and Old Gold Comedy Theater

Here’s an even more obscure pocket of an already forgotten cul-de-sac of show business history!

While there was nearly a decade between Harold Lloyd’s last starring comedy Professor Beware(1938), and his cinematic return Preston Sturges’s The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947), Lloyd had not actually retired from show business in the interval. A man of many hats, in the early ’40s he initially opted to wear just one of them: producer.

Lloyd had been producing his own starring comedies since the mid ’20s after leaving Hal Roach, and had also produced some comedies with other stars, such as Edward Everett Horton. When Professor Beware proved a critical and box office disappointment he decided he was washed up as a star. He remained one of the richest men in Hollywood however, and could still call his own shots. He decided to keep a hand in as a producer. The first of those efforts was the RKO comedy A, Girl, A Guy, and a Gob (1941), starring Lucille Ball, Edmond O’Brien, and George Murphy. The O’Brien role, a shy executive might have been a good role for Lloyd, and the picture might have benefitted from the magic of his his presence if he had decided to play it. As it is, it proved a lackluster offering, and quickly disappeared. His second one for RKO, My Favorite Spy (1942), a parody of The 39 Steps starring bandleader and radio personality Kay Kyser. This one proved arduous to produce. The U.S. army kept requesting changes, requiring numerous rewrites and reshoots. Lloyd seems to have lost his taste for producing films after this.

Then in 1944, Lloyd was suggested by Preston Sturges to host and direct the radio show Old Gold Comedy Theatre, sponsored by Old Gold Cigarettes. The job had initially been offered to Sturges, but he was obviously too busy making films. The concept of the show was very much like that of Lux Radio Theatre (adaptations of screen classics and recent movie hits), only focused exclusively on comedy.

32 episodes were broadcast, including adaptations of Sturges’s The Palm Beach Story and The Lady Eve, Lloyd’s The Milky Way and A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob, and other such vehicles as Room Service, The Show Off,Brewster’s Millions, and My Favorite Wife. Guest stars included Milton Berle, Fred Allen, Randolph Scott, Edward G. Robinson, Lucille Ball,George Murphy, Dick Haymes,Robert Walker, James Gleason,Eve Arden,Nat Pendleton, Frank Sinatra,Alan Young, Frances Langford, Dick Powell, and many others. And the novelty of Lloyd as host, making the one major silent comedy star to tackle radio, if only for a short time.

Unfortunately, the show’s half-hour time slot meant that episodes were over just as they were getting started. Compressing 90 minutes stories into a third their length seriously compromises the storytelling. It has also been claimed that Llord was an awkward and uptight host, although most of the episodes are extant and available to listen to and he sounds just fine to me. Still, Lloyd was a perfectionist and I’m sure he sought to be as great a radio performer as he had been a screen comedian. But now that he was a rich, powerful, and mature guy, he wasn’t about to invest the time it would have taken to develop such an ability. At any rate, the show was canceled after one season, and Lloyd saw no reason to repeat the experiment. Shortly after this, he and Sturges went to work on The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.

Thus, we see that (contrary I’m sure to the assumptions of many) that Lloyd didn’t retire with his last silent in 1929, or his last Paramount feature in 1938, but with the re-release of The Sin of Harold Diddlebock as Mad Wednesday in 1950.

For more on the great comedian Harold Lloyd please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube — and please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.