Not unlike "The Cat's-Paw," Harold Lloyd's follow-up called "The Milky Way" has exceedingly funny moments strewn along an uninspired script. The idea of Lloyd as a milkman who's mistaken for knocking out a prizefighter and then becomes a major boxer himself, fooled by his manager into thinking he's good, is ripe for laughs and inspired lunacy. It's got laughs here and there, but no real lunacy.
In the 1920's, Harold Lloyd and director Hal Roach (not to mention Sam Taylor) would have milked this (pardon the pun) for every laugh they could get. In the 1930's, mainly due to the advent of sound, this movie doesn't ever kick it up in high gear compared to the silent pictures. Lloyd's typically milquetoasty type of guy (pardon the pun), Burleigh Sullivan, is a milkman who brings milk via horse and carriage to all his customers. For some reason, his boss (George Barbier, hysterically funny in "Cat's Paw") doesn't care much for Burleigh and though we assume we know the reasons, the insight never materializes. Burleigh comes to the rescue of his sister (Helen Mack) who is bullied by two men, Speedy McFarland, the prizefighter (a forgettable William Gargan) and an uneducated fighter named Spider (a very memorable Lionel Stander). Harold supposedly knocked out Speedy and the papers report it the next day making Burleigh into an unlikely new champion. The media-obsessed boxing manager (Adolphe Menjou), who is always conjuring new newspaper headlines, takes on Burleigh with the hope the kid will fail.
It sounds like a great concept but the delivery isn't quite there. Harold Lloyd is simply not given enough to do. "The Milky Way" gets its head wrapped around the boxing minutiae when we really want to see the process by which Burleigh becomes a media sensation and, thus, we want to see Harold Lloyd giving it his best comic shot of adrenaline. We get one fight, a montage of newspaper headlines flaunting the kid's success, and within five minutes of screen time he is adored! The movie becomes sloppily written when Burleigh's sister hates all these guys for exploiting her brother and then, whoosh like the narrative wind, she's accepted a wedding proposal by Speedy! Say what? And let's not get started with Dorothy Wilson as Burleigh's girlfriend - after Bebe Daniels, Mildred Davis and Jobyna Ralston, Wilson is a sweet presence but rather weakly handled and doesn't even get a final, blissful scene with Lloyd.
Despite narrative inconsistencies, "The Milky Way" is a likable enough comedy with many moments that made me smile (especially Verree Teasdale as Menjou's girlfriend who has terrific one-liners) and a few that had me laughing uproariously (Harold mimicking a horse's laugh, the ducking contest between him and a philanthropist played by Marjorie Gateson). Still, despite being likable with one of the most likable of all physical comedians of that time, the movie never quite takes flight. It holds back too often and we are left with a reminder of how much funnier Harold Lloyd's early pre-talkie pictures were.
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