O Maricas

The great Harold Lloyd has a total triumph in 1924's Girl Shy. This films is jam-packed with wit, slapstick, and old-fashioned sweetness. Lloyd found his perfect leading lady in Jobyna Ralston, who had just the right amount of prettiness and comic timing. Lloyd, of course, was the master of comic timing in everything from set pieces to still-spectacular chases across Los Angeles downtown streets. I especially liked the daydream scenes where the shy Harold conquers 2 great 1920s stereotypes: the Vamp, and the Flapper. I'd love to know who plays theses women in this film. I think she also appears as the girl with the hole in her stocking. This actress is a hoot as the parody of the vamp and flapper..... Altho I admire Chaplin, Keaton, and Harry Langdon as master comics, Harold Lloyd may have been the most complete of these star performers. His acting range was the broadest and his characters were never quite as vaudevillian--Harold Lloyd's everyman persona still rings true 80 years later. Bravo, Harold Lloyd!

Although painfully GIRL SHY, a tailor's assistant uses every ounce of strength to keep the young woman he adores from an unwise marriage.

Harold Lloyd produces another winning entry in his series of silent screen comedy classics. This time there is a healthy dose of old-fashioned romanticism, as Harold and beautiful Jobyna Ralston yearn & commune alongside a bucolic stream.

Such tenderness never cloys, however, as Lloyd makes sure to leaven it with healthy helpings of hilarity. His attempts to hide a small dog on a passenger train are uproarious, as are his demonstrations on how to make love to vamps & flappers. And when the viewer thinks Harold can't possibly top himself, he ends the film with one of his marvelous chase scenes, in which he uses every sort of conveyance (train, jalopy, horse, fire truck, trolley, motorcycle & sand wagon) to stop Jobyna's marriage to a cad.

Throughout, Harold displays the remarkable athleticism for which he was celebrated, made even more astonishing when one remembers that he had lost half of his right hand a few years before in a freak studio accident, a disfigurement he disguised with a prosthetic glove.

Movie mavens will recognize some OUR GANG kids in uncredited roles--Fat Joe Cobb & Jackie Condon in the tailor's shop and Mickey Daniels as a newsboy on the street.

Jim Parker has composed an excellent film score which perfectly complements Harold's antics on the screen.

Harold Lloyd's latest may well be called his best. There is so much action jammed into this picture that when it once gets under way one forgets the opening is rather slow. The last two reels move along so fast, with so many thrills, that the average audience is going to stand up and howl. It's a wow of a comedy picture!

The story is by Sam Taylor, Tommy Gray, Tim Whelen and Ted Wilde. Taylor, together with Fred Newmeyer, directed.

Lloyd is a small-town tailor's apprentice, frightfully girl shy and prone to stuttering. In secret, however, he fancies himself as an author and feels the urge to write a book on girls and women, with himself figuring as the heroic character in a series of romances that are 16 in number.

It is this script that brings him in contact with the rich girl. He is on his way to the city with the script when he meets her on the train. There is a lot of good laugh stuff in the train scene, the first wow coming when he rescues the toy dog belonging to the heiress. The hiding of the dog to get past the conductor and the subsequent complications are also good for laughs.

The biggest of the picture, however, is the chase stuff that runs through both of the final reels. It starts off with Lloyd becoming aware his book has been accepted and he is the receipt of $3,000 advance royalties, this followed by the discovery of the fact that "the girl" is going to be married to his rival, who already has a wife, starts him off hotfoot for the scene of the wedding. What he goes through to get there is beyond the mere power of a typewriter to describe. It is a chase that caps anything else that has ever been done on the screen.

Playing the lead opposite Lloyd is Jobyna Ralston, who proves herself considerable of an actress in addition to being decidedly pretty. The heavy is Carlton Griffith. No one in the cast other than four characters are mentioned, and, as a matter of fact, no one except Lloyd and the girl remain in one's memory.

The chances are that with "Girl Shy," Lloyd is going to run up bigger sales gross than he has had with any of his previous productions.

Harold Lloyd, "third genius" of silent comedy, made his independent debut with Girl Shy after years at Hal Roach studios, Hollywood's premier comedy factory. He chose to take with him his leading lady Jobyna Ralston and his directorial team Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor. However the resulting picture is something of a departure from his earlier work – or, at least, it is a development of it. Girl Shy is less about knitting together gag after gag, taking instead the "story first" approach of Charlie Chaplin's full-length movies.

And as with Chaplin, the story though emotionally sincere is never allowed to smother the comedy, and quite often a quick joke is used great effect, puncturing a romantic moment before it becomes too sentimental. The story is a little illogical at times – the flashbacks to Harold's "research" for his book seem at odds with the lack of confidence after which the whole picture is named. But those little vignettes offer some great satire on the romantic melodramas of the era, and generally the whole thing is put together with such a fine balancing of romance and humour that it moves along without the deficiencies ever becoming too apparent.

Directors Taylor and Newmeyer have a great dynamic, it seems trying to make their styles match even though they handle different sections of the movie. Sam Taylor, (who did most of the comedy) uses a lot of close-up gags here, such as the business with the mousetrap, where some little detail will lead to some larger scale shenanigans. And similarly Newmeyer is putting in a lot of discreet close-ups for his non-comedy scenes, such as the shots of the crackerjack box that serve as a symbol for Ralston's memory of Harold. Together the two directors give the whole thing a kind of visual coherence that makes it all seem smooth and flowing. Newmeyer is on particularly fine form here, directing with a subtlety that allows the entire river meeting scene to be played out with no intertitles.

Lloyd's features typically have a fast-paced editing pattern, largely to facilitate the often breakneck pace of his comedy sequences. The dash to the church which forms the finale of Girl Shy is perhaps the most brilliant of any Lloyd picture, mainly because of the rapidity with which it moves from one gag to the next. The way Harold leaps from, say, the back of a car onto a horse is funny in itself – as well as an impressive stunt. And yet, unlike his previous feature Safety Last!, which had quick edits throughout, Girl Shy also features a few longer takes in the romantic scenes, allowing the camera to linger over a facial expression.

Which brings me onto Harold himself. He really makes the most of these close-ups. When he receives the bad news over his book, the camera holds him for a lengthy moment, and he really acts. He stays within the parameters of that comical character, but he emotes with complete dignity. Ultimately, Girl Shy is the complete realisation of the Harold Lloyd comedy character that would stick with him in future features (barring one or two deviations). Even though the story may be a little inconsistent as to exactly how "girl shy" Harold really is, this is the first movie to show him not only as a familiar, sympathetic figure, but one who is at risk of being hurt emotionally, not just by the dangers of his cliffhanging slapstick.

I initially went to the Film Forum's presentation to experience what going to the movies might have been like 80 years ago. To have an experience like my grandmother had (she used to rave about Harold Loyd). I thought the film was going to be OK. I was astonished at the wit of the film, its emotional content and the joy it brought to the audience. The gags were plentiful and quite clever, the action kept everything moving and the audience enjoyed themselves immensely (obviously a self selected group). The entire experience was enhanced by a live piano player and I think by the communal experience of seeing this film at the movies.

I highly recommend the film.