Girl Shy (Harold Lloyd Corporation, Pathé Exchange,.1924)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The People vs. Dr. Kildare (a misnomer of a title since Drs. Kildare and company are only subject to a civil suit, not a criminal prosecution), TCM ran their “Silent Sunday Showcase” and showed one of the finest films they’ve ever run in that time slot: Girl Shy, a 1924 comedy starring Harold Lloyd as Harold Weathers, who works as a tailor’s assistant for his uncle in the small town of Little Bend, California, where an introductory title tells us, “Only three things happen – morning, noon and night.” Harold is so terminally shy around women that he doesn’t even dare go to the Saturday night dance, the only thing Little Bend has to anything resembling a social life, for fear of having to ask a girl to dance with him. Yet Our Hero is also writing a book in which he styles himself a great lover, and at least two of the chapters – in which he seduces a vamp (Nola Luxford) by feigning indifference and brutally wins a flapper (Judy King) by acting like a cave man – are depicted on screen and turn out to be among the funniest scenes in the film. While on a train to a big city to present his book to publisher Roger Thornby, who boasts that he’s made his authors famous and himself rich (a line of dialogue reprised in the recent film Cadillac Records), he meets and flirts with Mary Buckingham (Jobyna Ralston, who took over as Lloyd’s leading lady on screen after his previous one, Mildred Davis, quit to become Mrs. Harold Lloyd for real: it worked out both ways since Ralston was a far better actress while Davis literally stayed with Lloyd until death did them part: of all the great silent comedians, Harold Lloyd was the only one who married just once).

What he doesn’t know is that Mary is fleeing from an arranged marriage with a creepy rich guy (Carlton Griffin) who, unbeknownst to her, has a wife already but he’s unwilling to be seen with her or acknowledge her publicly. Harold and Mary are drawn together largely when he helps her conceal her dog, which she’s not allowed to have on the train, and for the next two hours he rides with her in a fog of emotions symbolized largely by his Acme dog biscuits, which he has to eat himself to conceal that there’s a dog on the train, and the Cracker-Jacks box he buys her. (A lot of people are surprised that Cracker-Jacks existed as a “thing” as early as 1924.) But their low-pressure courtship is interrupted when the train reaches the end of the line and she gets off to join her rich fiancé while Harold seeks out Thornby, who at first rejects the manuscript but then decides to publish it after all, largely because his readers all think it’s hilarious. He retitles it The Boob’s Diary and sends Harold an advance check for $3,000 (which as my husband Charles pointed out would be a large advance for an unknown author today!). Only Harold, thinking it’s just a rejection slip, tears up the envelope without opening it and it’s not until his uncle uses a back scrap to light his cigar that they actually realize it’s an advance check. Meanwhile, Harold sees a newspaper story announcing Mary’s upcoming wedding to the rich creep, and just in case he needed any more incentive to crash the wedding, the rich guy’s secret wife shows up and pleads with him to break up the marriage for Mary’s sake so she won’t be an unwitting bigamist.

The rest of the movie is Lloyd’s pretty typical thrill comedy, as Harold commandeers various vehicles and finally rides to the rescue on a horse-drawn cart that looks for all the world like an old-time chariot. Along the way he rides through a ditch being dug and the workers tumble out of it via the motorcycle Harold is riding on the chase – a gag Clyde Bruckman sold not only to Lioyd but also Buster Keaton for one of the best scenes in Keaton’s 1924 masterpiece Sherlock, Jr. Alas for Bruckman, while Keaton couldn’t have cared less about protecting his intellectual property, Lloyd was furious at Bruckman for having recycled one of their old gags and sued – and, facing financial ruin at Lloyd’s hands, Bruckman borrowed a gun from Keaton and used it, much to Keaton’s horror, to commit suicide. The ending of Girl Shy sounds amazingly like the ending of The Graduate 43 years later, as Harold drags Mary kicking and screaming out of the church and doesn’t think of asking the minister who was already there to marry them. Instead he gives her an al fresco proposal by the side of the road, but it’s still a surprisingly anarchic image for the ending of a 1924 comedy. Girl Shy was Harold Lloyd’s first independent production following his amicable break with Hal Roach, who’d produced his earlier films, and it’s a relentlessly funny movie with Lloyd at the height of his powers. It could have been even funnier if writers Sam Taylor (who also co-directed with Fred Newmeyer, though Lloyd himself was the auteur of all his films), Ted Wilde and Tim Whelan had got into it an account of how Harold’s book fared in the marketplace and done some of the obvious gags about this milquetoast man becoming an icon of male sex appeal, but even as it stands Girl Shy is a great movie and a worthwhile addition to the Harold Lloyd canon.