Bashful (Hal Roach Productions, Rolin Films, Pathé, 1917)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 26) my husband Charles and I got home in time to watch Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase,” featuring two films by Harold Lloyd: the early short Bashful (1917) and the mature feature Girl Shy (1924). Charles and I had already seen Girl Shy at least twice on previous “Silent Sunday Showcases” in 2022 and 2025. I posted about it to moviemagg after the 2022 screening at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/01/girl-shy-harold-lloyd-corporation-pathe.html, and I have little to add about it except that Lloyd played a character who stuttered – and through a lot of extreme close-ups of his mouth visibly repeating the same motions again and again, Lloyd and his directors, Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, were able to suggest stuttering quite effectively in a silent film. (Remember that during the 1920’s a lot of moviegoers got quite good at lip-reading, and often realizes that what the actors had actually said on set was often quite different from what the dialogue titles said they were saying. When Fox filmed Leonard Stallings’s World War I play What Price Glory? in 1926, they got deluged with complaints that the actors had uttered the expletives in Stallings’s original dialogue – even though by today’s standards they were relatively mild ones like “damn,” “hell,” and “son of a bitch” – though the titles had been appropriately bowdlerized.) Bashful was a surprise in that it was a 15-minute short featuring Harold Lloyd, already wearing the horn-rimmed glasses that became his trademark (actually just the frames because he didn’t need glasses in real life), and playing a man farther up on the socioeconomic scale than he usually did. Generally all five of the biggest male stars in silent comedy had well-established niches into which they fi their characters: Chaplin the lower-class “Tramp,” Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle working-class, Harold Lloyd middle-class, Buster Keaton upper-class, and Harry Langdon a child-man seemingly out of the normal economic strata altogether.

This time Lloyd crossed over into Keaton’s territory (though when Lloyd made Bashful Keaton was still just a supporting player in Arbuckle’s unit and he didn’t start making two-reel vehicles on his own for another three years) and played an upper-class twit who’s in line to receive an inheritance from a recently deceased aunt if only he can prove he has both a wife and a baby. Eight years after Bashful Keaton would make a feature-length masterpiece on the same premise, Seven Chances, though in Keaton’s film (based on a play by David Belasco, who’s best known today for having written the plays on which Puccini based his operas Madama Butterfly and La Fanciulla del West) he only needed a wife, not a child, to claim the inheritance. One imdb.com reviewer said that Oliver Hardy, before he teamed with Stan Laurel, had made a similarly themed short called One Too Many (1916). Bashful contains a gag that Laurel and Hardy repeated in their 1932 feature Pack Up Your Troubles: Lloyd and his girlfriend (Bebe Daniels) agree to pass themselves off as husband and wife, but the first baby they try to claim is their kid is Black. Lloyd’s butler, “Snub” Pollard (billed here under his actual first name, Harry), essentially rounds up all the babies in the near vicinity and manages to convince Lloyd’s uncle (William Blaisdell) that he deserved the inheritance because he’s got so many mouths to feed – even though the real mothers of all those babies are understandably upset that their children have literally been kidnapped. Bashful was directed by Alf Goulding, who years before had hired Charlie Chaplin to star in Fred Karno’s comedy troupe in the British music halls before either Goulding or Chaplin set foot in front of (or behind) a movie camera. It’s a minor makeweight in Lloyd’s career, but it is charming and funny, and it’s also nice to see Lloyd when he still had his full complement of fingers, before he lost two fingers on his right hand in 1919 when a prop bomb exploded as he was holding it. Lloyd made a prosthetic glove so his injury wouldn’t be noticeable on screen, and later in 1924, when he married his leading lady Mildred Davis, he had a matching glove made for his left hand so he could play a single man without having to take off his wedding ring.