Two Harold Lloyd Shorts: "Now or Never" and "I Do" (Hal Roach Studios, Pathé Distributors, Associated Exhibitors, 1921)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 16) Turner Classic Movies was showing a “Silent Sunday Showcase” program of three Harold Lloyd shorts from 1921, and after my husband Charles and I watched Playing with Fire on Lifetime I switched to TCM for the final two films on the Lloyd telecast. They were Now or Never and I Do, and the latter title was ironic indeed because in 1923, two years after these films were made, Harold Lloyd and his co-star, Mildred Davis, got married for real. (They stayed together until her death in 1969, two years before his, and of the great male comedians of the silent era – Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon – Lloyd was the only one who married just once.) The theme of both films was Lloyd’s character suddenly confronted with the responsibility of taking care of one or more children and being totally flummoxed by it. Now or Never takes place mostly on a train – though Lloyd and his nominal directors, Hal Roach (who also produced) and Fred C. Newmeyer, were utterly unable to create the illusion that the train was actually moving. The plot has “The Girl” (Mildred Davis), who works as a maid for a well-to-do couple, taking their daughter for a weekend trip on which she’s accompanied by “The Boy,” her boyfriend (Harold Lloyd). They’re on a train when the girl, billed as “The Lonesome Little Child” and played by Anna May Bilson, asks Lloyd for a glass of water – and in a series of grimly amusing pratfalls Lloyd keeps spilling said glass of water no fewer than four times before he finally manages to bring it to her. The Lonesome Little Child takes just one sip of it and then gives it back to Lloyd, who, feeling mocked by sheer frustration after he’d gone through the tortures of the damned to get her that cup of water, dumps it on a transparently phony floral arrangement pinned to a woman’s dress. (Fortunately the woman isn’t wearing it at the time.) There’s also one scene in which Lloyd raises his hand to strike the obnoxious brat, though before he can actually hit the girl he’s upbraided by a woman for daring to strike a child.

I Do was a considerably better and funnier film, though it was also about the turmoil faced by a man without kids when he’s suddenly forced to take care of some whether he really wants to or not. I Do opens with a quite charming animated sequence showing the wedding of the central characters later played in live-action form by Harold Lloyd and Mildred Davis. It then cuts to a title, “One Year Later” (how Lifetime!), and one year later the live-action Harold and Mildred are more or less happily married except that he’s beset by the familial demands of brothers-in-law in general and his own brother-in-law, listed in the credits as “The Agitation” and played by Lloyd stock company member Noah Young, in particular. The brother-in-law drafts Harold and Mildred to be his baby sitters for the upcoming weekend, saying, “They’re so quiet you won’t even know they’re there.” Needless to say, that proves to be less than the truth. The kids Lloyd and Mildred have to take care of in I Do are two rambunctious boys named “The Disturbance” (Jackie Morgan) and “The Annoyance” (Jackie Edwards). “The Annoyance” is still in a cradle but “The Disturbance” is not only able to walk but uses his ability to move under his own power to get into as much mischief as possible. When Lloyd enters the living room of his brother-in-law’s home, it looks like a tornado has hit it, and no sooner has he started to clean up the mess that “The Disturbance” sneaks around behind him and takes all the stuff out of Lloyd’s basket as fast as Lloyd can put it in there. Later Mildred manages to get “The Annoyance” to sleep at long last – only you just know what’s going to happen: Lloyd is going to take a noisy pratfall down a set of stairs and wake the kid up again. (It’s fascinating that even in a film without sound, you’re in no doubt about how much noise he’s making and you know it’s going to wake up the child.)

There’s also a succession of gags, similar to the ones involving water in Now or Never, in which Lloyd is obliged to fill the baby’s bottle with milk. His first attempt ends with him puncturing the seal of the milk bottle and having it splatter all over his body. Then he spills the milk bottle over the floor, and when he doesn’t have enough milk left over to fill the baby’s bottle he grabs a container of buttermilk from the icebox (back when that’s what it literally was: a box containing ice that kept food more or less cold until the ice melted, and you got home deliveries from an iceman who kept your icebox supplied) and fills it in with that. Then, in his attempt to get the rubber nipple onto the baby’s bottle, he breaks the bottle (a reminder of the days when baby’s bottles were still made of glass instead of plastic). Finally he gives up and pours the baby a glass of buttermilk, giving the kid a straw made of a pasta noodle, only he trips on the floor and breaks that, too. Midway through the film Lloyd and Mildred are scared by a report that a burglar is loose in the neighborhood, and there are a lot of fright gags as well as the sudden reappearance of a Black maidservant, Magnolia (Marie Mills), who’d left earlier because it was her night off (sticking Lloyd with the task of filling the baby’s bottle himself) but returns later in the evening. I momentarily expected that she’d turn out to be one of the burglars, disguising himself as a Black woman, but she doesn’t, and Lloyd deserves kudos for casting an actually Black actress in this role instead of using a white actor in (bad) blackface the way D. W. Griffith did in The Birth of a Nation.

I Do was directed by Hal Roach personally and the writing credits go to Roach and future director Sam Taylor (he of the infamous credit on the Douglas Fairbanks/Mary Pickford The Taming of the Shrew: “By WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Additional dialogue by Sam Taylor”), though I suspect that most of the gags were worked out collectively in a writers’ room (an institution Roach’s great rival as a film comedy producer, Mack Sennett, actually invented). Now or Never and I Do are great examples of silent comedies just below the genius level of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton (though Kevin Brownlow and the late David Gill did a documentary on Lloyd and called him The Third Genius, which is more supportable looking at his later features than his shorts). Lloyd was actually the most “normal” of the major silent comedians; he married just once, he had the longest career, he adjusted to sound quite well (Chaplin famously hated talkies and Keaton, whose love of gadgetry should have suited him for sound, lost control of his career after Joseph Schenck dissolved their production company in 1928), and kept control of his work after he retired, though for years he also kept it woefully out of circulation until its recent rediscovery through the work of his granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd.