Sandwiched between such classics as Safety Last (1923), Girl Shy (1924), and The Freshman (1925), Harold Lloyd’s seventh feature-length comedy, Hot Water, tends to be an overlooked gem in his filmography. Following exhibitor complaints that his feature films had grown too long and complex, Lloyd responded with this breezy hour-long episodic comedy built around a sequence of gags, not character development. In fact, all the character development happens in the first three minutes, when Harold suddenly evolves from confirmed bachelor into a married man after a chance meeting with his dream girl. The rest of the film is devoted to Harold as the henpecked “Hubby” attempting to navigate the mayhem of married life. Similar in structure to his earlier gag-driven feature, Dr. Jack (1922), the story spools out in three “day-in-the-life” episodes: the first details Hubby’s misadventures aboard a crowded streetcar with an uncooperative live turkey; the second involves a disastrous drive in a brand-new car with his disagreeable in-laws; and in the third, he is haunted by the apparition of his formidable mother-in-law.
Hot Water was Jobyna Ralston’s third co-starring role with Lloyd, having taken over from Mildred Davis after the latter became Mrs Harold Lloyd. Ralston, who had previously worked in one-reel comedies for Hal Roach, would co-star in six of Lloyd’s feature productions before appearing in Wings (1927) alongside future husband Richard Arlen. Josephine Crowell, who plays the antagonistic mother-in-law, previously had character parts in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), and would later play memorable roles in Mantrap (1926), The King of Kings (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928).
While Hot Water is not usually ranked among his most popular works, the fact that Lloyd included two of the three episodes in his 1962 anthology film Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy speaks volumes about its quality – and its enduring ability to make audiences howl with laughter.

Steven K. Hill

This wordless rendition of Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene captures feted Shakespearean John Gielgud in both his West End debut and his first appearance on film. He made his first silent feature later this year: Walter Summers’s Who Is the Man? Gielgud was a recent graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art when his agent sent him to audition for the Regent Theatre, saying: “Here is an opportunity to become a London Star in a night.”
Stardom would have to wait, with critic Ivor Brown castigating the young lover as a “niminy-piminy” who was “scant of virility”, with “the most meaningless legs imaginable”. Gielgud himself complained that his Romeo costume transformed him into “a mixture of Rameses of Egypt and a tetchy Victorian matron”. Nevertheless, Gielgud’s more experienced and acclaimed Juliet, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, a protegée of his great-aunt Ellen Terry, helped settle his nerves, especially in the love scenes. Afterwards, the two actors, both gay, formed a lifelong friendship.

Pamela Hutchinson

Fourteen fiction feature films were produced in Colombia between 1922 and 1928. Of these, only two exist in (almost) complete form, six are considered lost, and six survive incomplete. The remaining fragments of Aura o las Violetas, and the famous novel on which it was based, are enough to reconstruct the film’s melodramatic plot. After a few years away, a student returns home to discover that his childhood love, Aura, has become engaged to a rich man in an attempt to rescue her family from poverty. Deeply shocked, he tries to stop the marriage but arrives too late. He writes to Aura, but she refuses to pursue their forbidden love. A key scene set in a theatre was shot in the Gran Salón Olympia in Bogotá, where the film later premiered. This was the first movie theatre built in Colombia by brothers Francesco and Vincenzo Di Domenico. The Italian-born film producers and distributors, who made Aura o las Violetas and four other films, are considered pioneering figures in Colombian film history.

Lorena Bordigoni

In 1924, during a period of economic revival in the Soviet Union brought on by Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP),actor Vladimir Lebedev-Schmidthof made his directorial debut with this satirical comedy, critiquing the era’s speculative frenzy. N+N+N (an abbreviation of “Nini, taxatioN, Nuisance”) tells the story of speculator Bezzabotov and his wife Nini, who exploit unemployment benefits and tax evasion to maintain an extravagant lifestyle – only to get their comeuppance after they are caught by an undercover tax inspector (played by director Schmidthof). This morality tale, blending early Soviet cinema’s political satire and eccentric acting, is sheer fun.

Schmidthof, who also penned the lyrics to the popular pioneers’ march Ekh, khorosho v strane sovetskoy zhit! (It’s good to live in the Soviet country!, 1935), later endured torture at the hands of the NKVD on false charges of espionage for Germany.

Natascha Drubek