Chop Suey & Co. (1919) User Reviews

Is Bebe Looking For Thrills??

[kidboots · 6/10 · 30 June 2014]

Not all Harold Lloyd shorts were winners. This was pretty patchy on gags and quite a few seemed to rely on the language barrier between the Chinese community and Americans. There is the old gag (or was it new then??) of Harold being given a verbal spray by a shop keeper and it was only when he looked it up in his Chinese phrase book that his reaction took over.

Snub Pollard seems more of an after thought - like Harold, he plays a policeman transferred to Chinatown but he doesn't have much to do. Bebe though looks gorgeous here with a wardrobe of the latest 1919 styles!! She plays an actress who along with a fellow thespian is researching a role for her next movie - Harold sees her as a sweet girl being lured to Chinatown's opium dens by a city slicker!! There is a funny gag to do with the hazards of eating with chopsticks but the laughs are few on the ground!!

They forgot to make it funny

[planktonrules · 3/10 · 4 January 2016]

This short is sort of a transitional one for Harold Lloyd. While he's no longer playing Lonesome Luke and looks much like his character of the 1920s, he doesn't act like him. Instead, Lloyd's character is pretty much a dull and obnoxious cop. When he's not behaving like a masher towards a young woman he keeps meeting, he is getting into one scrape after another...none of which are funny. And this gets me to the serious problem with "Chop Suey & Company"...there are no laughs...at least when you see it today. Instead, the cop is reassigned to Chinatown and many of these folks run around shooting and hanging out in opium dens--all negative stereotypes of the day for the Chinese immigrants but not funny. Sadly, Lloyd's occasional partner of the day, Snub Pollard, is there also but neither have much of anything to do. This Hal Roach film seems pretty plot less and uninspired and both Lloyd and Pollard have done much better films.

The New Harold Lloyd

[Single-Black-Male · 12 December 2003]

To bring Harold Lloyd into the 1980's he was re-packaged in double bill portions in 'Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy'. This short film was far more accessible in this new format with commentary than it was in its original state because the commentator acted as a bridge to the story.