Girl Shy Notes

Early American silent film comedians primarily relied on amateur cameramen and timeworn theatrical gags. The filmstock would pick up gradations of blue and green but not red, so performers used exaggerated expressions, pantomime, and heavy makeup to insure that they shared everything important on film. Most of the action remained relatively stagebound. The newer films progressed quickly from shorts built around a single theatrical gag, to series of old and new gags strung along a minimal plot. The best comics had very high marquee value and nearly everything they created sold well. By the early 1920s, top artists like Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd were able to control the whole film process from developing the scripts to maintaining their own crew of gag-writers, technicians, and actors.

Though one could argue that Chaplin and Keaton were better at pantomime and personal invention, Lloyd was best of all in trying new techniques and milking the process. He was among the first to sift out the best gags by showing previews to audiences and eliminating bad scenes before the film was completed. His thrill pictures like Safety Last required an extraordinary amount of planning and invention. He was a meticulous filmmaker and tested everything to insure that what was released was of the highest quality. The makers of Ben Hur developed some of their final chariot race around stunts developed by Lloyd in Girl Shy.

He also had a gentle middle-American insider mentality, which was in sharp contrast to some of the more brutal or strident outsider jokes used by others. There was no filter to normal American life in Lloyd’s films. He was as likely to play a rich man as a poor man. Where Chaplin would use caricature, Lloyd focused on the value of self-confidence and drive. He lived what he created. By 1928, Variety hailed him as the richest actor in Hollywood. Lloyd married the one woman he loved, built a home, family, and bevy of friendships he never abandoned, and remained a kind-hearted accessible man all of his life.

Girl Shy was the first film Lloyd created as an independent and illustrates all his best features. The comedy focuses on a boy working in a tailor shop who is so afraid of girls that he stutters uncontrollably whenever one appears. He lives in a fantasy where he is an expert on women and he has gone so far as to write a book of advice for other men. Lloyd respects the feelings and hopes of his female character as much as he does his young male dreamer. He is at his best exaggerating the benefits when these characters step outside their reveries and strive for something they care about.

The best source of information about Harold Lloyd is in the set of DVDs called The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection produced by his granddaughter Suzanne Lloyd Hayes. She includes dozens of interviews with filmmakers and historians, several of whom share on camera everything they have written about Lloyd in print. The best complement to it is Harold Lloyd’s extremely frank autobiography called An American Comedy originally published in 1928. Kevin Brownlow, one of the best historians of the silent era chapter, has an outstanding chapter about Lloyd’s work in his celebration of the silent era called The Parade has Gone By.