Harold Lloyd stars in what many consider his best comedy. He plays a naive college freshman who thinks university will be just like what he saw in a movie.To make himself into a "big man on campus" he carelessly spends money treating his classmates. Despite this, the only one who really likes him is his landlady's daughter, the sweet, innocent Peggy. When his generosity doesn't lead to him becoming any more popular, Harold joins the football team, undeterred by his complete lack of athletic ability. To his utter humiliation, he is made the team's waterboy. But when most of the team are injured during the big game, Harold is pulled out of reserve. Can by some miracle Harold score the winning touchdown - and win the beautiful Peggy to boot?

The Freshman was Harold Lloyd's most financially successful movie during the silent era, and would be one of the few of his films to still be available after he pulled most of them from circulation following the advent of sound. It started a craze for "college movies" that lasted for the rest of the 1920s. (Not to be outdone, Buster Keaton did his own, 1927's College.) The football scenes were later reused by director Preston Sturges in his pseudo-sequel The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947), which turned out to be Lloyd's last picture. This film has no connection to the later The Freshman (1990) with Matthew Broderick and Marlon Brando, though it does bear striking similarities to the Adam Sandler-starring The Waterboy (1998), leading to a lawsuit in the year 2000.

BONUS: The Relay (1927): The Freshman inspired a series of two-reel campus comedies from Universal called The Collegians, most of which were filled with risque humor. In The Relay, resentment builds on campus when the freshman girls beat the sophomores in the big relay. At the big dance, tension between the classes erupts into an all-out melee that won't end until nubile young coeds are hurled into swimming pools!