Girl Shy (1924)

Originally posted to Facebook on 9/17/2017

Girl Shy was our second feature from 1924, and second starring Harold Lloyd (not counting 1928's Speedy, which we saw separately.) He plays a young man from a small town who has virtually no experience with women, but who is nonetheless writing a book called "The Secret of Making Love." In it he details his methods of romancing various types of women. Two in particular are dramatized: The vampire (for whom acting indifferently is the strategy), and the flapper (for whom the strategy is to be a "Cave Man.") It was a little amusing that, even this far back, this kind of pick-up artist advice was already part of the culture enough to be a target for parody. Lloyd, though, delivers his book to a publisher, where it is roundly mocked by the various readers. One woman references 1921's The Sheik, which we saw earlier this year, exclaiming, "I'd love to meet the sheik who wrote that stuff." While in the big city Lloyd meets and becomes involved with the female lead, played by Jobyna Ralston, but, later, when he feels that he won't be able to provide for her, he lies to her and tells her that he was never really interested in her. (This kind of romantic-comedy behavior always seems like sort of a strange staple to me; a good chunk of 1923's Safety Last -- the last Harold Lloyd film we saw -- also involves him lying to his girlfriend as a result of his financial situation.) In any case, she ends up getting engaged to someone else, and the last section of the film is a long chase scene where Lloyd uses a variety of different modes of transportation to travel into the city and attempt to stop the wedding. This parallels Safety Last as well, in that the climax of the movie is most characteristic of the received image that people have of silent comedy.

All in all this is a good-to-decent comedy, but it probably ranks third for me in comparison to the other two Lloyd films we've seen, just because the plot and the comedy are both a bit thin, excepting the final sequence. However, it is true that the story in this film is more cohesive and less episodic than in either of the other two Lloyd films we've seen.

Next week we see our third film from 1924, entitled Die Nibelungen: Siegfried. This is the first of a two film sequence, which together will be the third and fourth films we've seen directed by Fritz Lang. The list as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT