During the 1920s, Harold Lloyd was the most successful film comedian...with ticket sales surpassing Keaton and Chaplin. His 1920s movies were amazingly well crafted, funny and often quite sweet. However, during the 1910s, Lloyd made tons of film...shorts which were incredibly different from his 20s films. Instead of being sweet, Lloyd's characters tended to be jerks and the film tended to rely on a lot of slapstick. These earlier films just don't hold up so well today. And, while Lloyd adopted the everyman look in the late 1910s which would be so familiar to his 20s bespectacled look, the films were often a bit mean-spirited and less fun to watch. "I'm on My Way" is no exception to this 1910s Lloyd, though it still is quite watchable.
When the story begins, Lloyd is about to get married. But his wife insists on picking up a few small things from the store....and they leave with HUGE stacks of boxes. In order to help carry them, Lloyd torments and briefly enslaves a small man and forces him to do the carrying!
Later, his neighbor (Snub Pollard) wants to encourage him to marry and enjoy married life....and so he introduces Harold to his loving family. However, the family ends up being god-awful and the kids misbehave is a ridiculous fashion that simply is more slapstick than anything else. In fact, so much of the film isn't story or character driven...it's all a lot of violence and heartlessness...some of which is funny, some of which isn't.
