The unlikely combination of Howard Hughes, Preston Sturges and Harold Lloyd produced this very funny film (which was released in only a few cities in 1947, and then in 1950 put out in a shortened version entitled Mad Wednesday). Taking off from the last reel of Harold Lloyd's silent classic The Freshman (1925), Sturges brings the life of that dubious hero up to date (and brought Lloyd himself out of retirement for the occasion). After his big football coup, The Kid is offered a job by an admiring alumnus as a minor clerk. This niche remains his for some twenty-two years until his boss reconsiders and fires him. The jolt inspires Harold to take his first drink, and that, in turn, "arouses the artist" in bartender Edgar Kennedy, who concocts the potion that initiates Harold Diddlebock's metamorphosis. During one "mad Wednesday," amid a band of stock Sturgean philosophers (Kennedy, Franklin Pangborn, Lionel Stander, et al), he comes to realize that his former existence was a useless existence. The venom with which he turns on himself, and on his harridan sister with whom he has lived lo these many years, is a cynic's delight. The film also pays homage to a giddier age in zany slapstick more typical of the twenties than the forties; in particular, the sequence in which Lloyd dangles from a leash 80 stories above a sidewalk where a nervous lion is pacing, the other end of the leash tied to him, rivals the celebrated skyscraper caper of Lloyd's Safety Last.