Woodruff operates the last horse-drawn trolley in New York City. Evil businessman W.S. Wilton and his right-hand man Brooks Benedict scheme to suspend Woodruff's service, so that Wilton can take over his route.
Meanwhile, Lloyd romances Christy at Coney Island, which proves to be a ripe setting for myriad gags. Legendary Yankees slugger Babe Ruth has a five-minute appearance midway through the motion picture.
Lloyd owned his own production company, and did a great job preserving his films. Unlike many silent films, Speedy is available for viewing today in essentially pristine condition.
How others will see it. Speedy was Lloyd's last silent feature. It earned an Oscar nod for its nominal director, Ted Wilde, in the category of Best Director in a Comedy Picture, a category that existed only for the 1929 Oscars.
Today at imdb.com, the film has a high (for a 1928 movie) user vote total of 4300 votes. The user rating is also high, 7.6 out of 10, and rises to 7.8 out of 10 among Americans. The user reviews are mostly from Lloyd fans who have seen all his features, and are predictably favorable. In fact, the 7.6 user rating is higher than the 7.5 user rating for The Freshman (1925), often regarded as the high-water mark of Lloyd's career.
Viewers appreciate that most of the movie was filmed on location in New York, including the Coney Island scenes, and provide a glimpse into how folks lived (and had fun) in the big city nearly a century ago.
How I felt about it. Silent comedies are known for their stunts and gags. Certainly, that was the case for Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd, some of the best remembered comics of the silent era.
The stunts are fun, particularly during the Babe Ruth scenes, where he is a wary passenger to Lloyd's reckless driving. The gags are less convincing (but nonetheless amusing), such as a stray dog who thinks a balloon is a sausage, and a live crab in Lloyd's pocket who pinches everything and everyone at Coney Island except Lloyd himself.
The plot works its way inevitably into a completely implausible ending where the evil businessman must pay today's equivalent of two million dollars to take Woodruff's trolley out of business.
But the viewers don't mind, since a happy ending that allows Lloyd to marry his loyal, loving girl was not only expected, but wanted. Sure, it's formula, but along the way you get Babe Ruth in his prime, and Coney Island in its otherwise lost 1928 glory. And a lot of good-natured mugging from everyman Lloyd.