Gift guide

THE HAROLD LLOYD COMEDY COLLECTION

New Line Entertainment, $89.98

The image is as iconic as Eisenstein's pram caroming down the Odessa Steps, or Cary Grant's sprint from that faceless, unstoppable crop duster, or Welles' Rosebud charring in the great fire of oblivion. Quiet desperation was and is at the heart of the American cinematic psyche, but where some auteurs used it to construct nightmares, silent film comedian/director/actor/writer/stuntman Harold Lloyd used his pocketful of angst to construct a bodywork of laughter that rivals anything put to film by his two more famous contemporaries, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, It's a wonder Lloyd isn't as well known these days, since the famous shot of him hanging off of the hands of a department store clock face, 10 stories up without a net, in Safety Last! might as well be the Mona Lisa of American silent comedy moments; everybody seems to know it, but precious few outside the world of TMC-lurking late-night fandom have actually watched the film in all of its 73-minute glory.

This perfectionistic masterpiece of a 7-disc collection from New Line, with assistance and input from Lloyd's granddaughter, Suzanne; granddaughter Annette D'Agostino Lloyd; Leonard Maltin; and author Richard Correll, should go a long way in correcting the public oversight. Remixed and remastered from pristine new prints that put the lie to the entirely mistaken notion that early American filmmaking was, for all its Hal Roachian yuks, a scattershot affair. Watching the bespectacled and boater-hatted Lloyd run the gridiron gamut in The Freshman (recently retitled and mangled by Adam Sandler in The Waterboy), is like watching Baryshnikov in his Kirov Ballet days: every movement, every expression so finely calibrated, you can set your watch by it. Time to laugh, thank goodness. Beyond all other stars of the silent screen, Lloyd personified the triumph of decency, pluck, and romantic love over the static attrition of Modern Life. Watching these 15 features, 10 two-reel shorts, and hours of interviews, sharp commentary, and even examples of Lloyd's latter–day passion for 3-D photography (yes, Virginia, there are glasses included), you come to realize a sudden, startling truth: Harold Lloyd was the pure, shining heart and soul of the workaday American myth made flesh. And that doesn't just make you smile; it makes you laugh out loud, again and again and again.