The Boob’s Diary of the Tailor-Made Silent Rom-Com

Seen via the conclusion of the online portion of the 2024 Pordenone Silent Film Festival: www.giornatedelcinemamuto.it/en/

I would’ve preferred this slot of the online portion of the Pordenone Festival been filled by another rare treat or new restoration instead of this widely-available canonical picture offering (relatively-)only a new score—and when there’ve already been orchestral ones provided for it over the years by, well, two of the names one would likely offer if asked to name the greatest silent film composers, Carl Davis and Robert Israel, respectively. I’d love to view, for instance, an improved print of “Raskolnikov” (1923), which was part of the in-person program.

Although, it’s been many years since I’ve watched a bunch of Harold Lloyd comedies. Except that it was soon after I started taking cinema seriously, I don’t remember exactly how I got into silent films—it was that long ago—but I imagine it included the usual entry point of the big three clowns: Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. One forgets how breezy of a watch their best work remains. I’ve seen thousands of silents since, but I admit some, many of them can be a slog, especially with the learning curve required for the modern “talkie” spectator. It’s also been too long for me to say whether “Girl Shy” is Lloyd’s best film. Supposedly, his personal favorite was “Grandma’s Boy” (1922), “Safety Last!” (1923) surely remains the most famous, and I have a vague recollection of being fond of “The Kid Brother” (1927). All of that said, “Girl Shy” is a masterpiece.

“– therefore - I have written a story of my love affairs.”

“You’ve had love affairs?”

I’ve mentioned this here and there before in my reviews—usually when I’m bemoaning the mind-numbing, cookie-cutter stupidity of the modern rom-com, seeking refuge in the past when it wasn’t so, when the genre was a new innovation. That is, Harold Lloyd invented the rom-com. OK, there were others, too. Clara Bow and Elinor Glyn’s “It” and Mary Pickford’s also-Sam Taylor-directed “My Best Girl” (both 1927) especially come to mind. There’s the later “It Happened One Night” (1934) and the screwballs, as well, of course. And, really, the whole thing goes back at least as far as Shakespeare, or the Greeks or something. But, yeah, I’m going to stick with the thesis that something important shifted in film history here, and it goes beyond boy meet(-cute)s girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back. Unlike the other clowns, or even his biggest model for his glasses character, Douglas Fairbanks, all of whom also made comedies that doubled as romances and sometimes “thrill” films, Lloyd’s persona was of an everyman.

The influence is most evident if we track the climactic, last-minute-rescue, race-against-time chase to stop the wedding. It’s the admitted inspiration for the similar climax of “The Graduate” (1967). By the way, although I found Daan van den Hurk’s score for Pordenone to be only fine for the most part if a tad elevator/waiting room jazzy for my taste, I’m intrigued by what I suspect to be an intentional allusion during the appropriate sequence to the beat of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” Apt, as reportedly, Mike Nichols even invited Lloyd to observe the filming. Annette D’Agostino Lloyd (no relation), suggests a further connection from Harold having attended the filming of the chariot race for the silent “Ben-Hur” (1925). Anyways, from “The Graduate,” Woody Allen adapted the ending of “Manhattan” (1979), to suit his even-less-glamorous persona and, significantly, cementing the transition from valorizing the rural in the silent movie days to that of the urban, particularly New York, in the years since. Allen’s films are important, especially “Manhattan” and “Annie Hall” (1977), because Nora Ephron dumbed them down for “When Harry Met Sally” (1989), and thus the modern rom-com until utter hacks the likes of Richard Curtis (with vomit and self-parodic airport races such as “Love Actually” (2003)) ran the genre completely into the ground. A speedrun through the history of the rom-com

Let’s backtrack, though, to Shakespeare. I stumbled upon an article by a monk, Daniel J. Heisey (see Works Cited), who suggests “Girl Shy” as something of a reworking of the bard’s lost play “Cardenio.” A story that today is best known for surviving as a nested story within “Don Quixote.” Both involve competition over a girl and attempts to stop a wedding. The Shakespeare–”Girl Shy” connection that came to my mind, however, is an old anecdote ridiculing one of the directors and writers of the film, the aforementioned Taylor.

“By William Shakespeare with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor”

Fritzi Kramer of the MoviesSilently website investigated this myth, by the way, and it seems this might’ve been an actual screen credit from, or otherwise advertising for, the 1929 film version of “The Taming of the Shrew” starring Pickford and Fairbanks and which today only survives in a reissue print sans such a credit. Regardless, the point of the anecdote since has been to mock Taylor placing his name next to that of the bard. Just as Harold Meadows is humiliated over his book, “The Secret of Making Love,” at the publisher’s office after imagining his bust taking its place next to Shakespeare’s.

Also note that this is a film, from its opening title cards and scenes, full of puns—something Shakespeare would surely approve of. One of my favorite visual ones is that as a result of his shyness around women the “mousy” character gets his hand caught in a mouse trap, and from which he anxiously eats the cheese. In another scene where he finds his hand in a sticky situation, he ends up putting his hand in his pocket in a fashion that resembles masturbation. That one might not be much of a pun, but I thought I’d mention it. I suspect there’s something to the dog biscuits and Cracker Jacks, too, such as that the boy is the girl’s “cracker jack” prize and her his, er, dog’s biscuit. So, note that Lloyd plays an aspiring writer who’s a tailor—a Taylor, get it? A character who is a writer should always be a self-insertion of the real author of the story.

“Girls, allow me to present the author--himself.”

Beyond the rom-com and Shakespeare connections, there’s another thing I love about “Girl Shy.” Y’know, besides that although Harold is afraid of girls, he’s not a wuss, slugging the mustached city-slicker cad upon their introduction. Or, that although the hero is associated with the country, and wreaks havoc upon the metropolis, and the baddie associated with the city, the girl is also no bumpkin and unlike in some other such iterations has her own desires and personality. And, it’s well-made and well-acted hilarity, exhilaration, and sentimentality, just expert choreography and cinematography (the rowboat and bridge shot, the one under and between the running horses), and as David Bordwell put it, “the double plot” and “showing how everything that worked for serious dramaturgy could work for comedy too,” etc. Other than all that, the other thing I like is that Harold Meadows, as part of his gynophobia, is also a stutterer.

You don’t see as many speech impediments in silents as you do in early talkies, where it becomes a self-referential joke on the creaky synchronized sound technology of the day. Ditto the whistling. Here, though, it’s the, albeit circumstantial, inability to talk at all, the silence, that’s emphasized. He’s a “Silent.” His braggadocious self-help pick-up-artist book for men may remind the modern spectator (and reading modern reviews, I see it does) of some sort of “incel” phony Andrew Tate “toxic masculinity” “alpha-ness” misogyny to smugly dismiss just as they do at the publisher’s office (back then they called him a “sheik,” the Rudolph Valentino type), but Silent Harold imagines himself wooing two cinematic archetypes, the vamp and the flapper. Reportedly, a third fantasy, which was cut after going over poorly at a test screening, involved a sportscaster, and I may only speculate how that played into the audial and linguistic games at play here. Bordwell even suggests that Harold’s manuscript is a parody of another film and memoir, and by a feminist, Mary MacLane’s “Men Who Have Made Love to Me” (1917-1918). Regardless, in the end, it’s the silence that confounds his attempts at boarding a train, making a phone call, and hitchhiking—and, thus, creating a sustained and more enjoyable climax and very end. Absent speech, he requires the material, photographic proof of the locket, and Harold and “Girl Shy” are the material, photographic evidence of the effectiveness of silents.

Works Cited
Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. “Hark! How Harold’s angels sing (a repost).” 19 December 2023. Observations on Film Art. Blog. www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2023/12/19/hark-how-harolds-angels-sing-a-repost/
Also see the “Girl Shy: Harold Lloyd Meets Classical Hollywood” video essay streaming on the Criterion Channel.

Heisey, Daniel J. “Cardenio Becoming Girl Shy.” St. Austin Review (StAR). Website. staustinreview.org/cardenio-becoming-girl-shy/

Kramer, Fritzi. “Silent (okay, Early Talkie) Movie Myth: ‘By William Shakespeare with Additional Dialogue by Sam Taylor.’” Movies Silently. 19 April 2019. Website. moviessilently.com/2019/04/19/silent-okay-early-talkie-movie-myth-by-william-shakespeare-with-additional-dialogue-by-sam-taylor/

Lloyd, Annette D’Agostino. The Harold Lloyd Encyclopedia. McFarland, 2004.