Girl Shy: Difference between revisions
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'''''Girl Shy''''' is a 1924 comedy [[silent film]] starring [[Harold Lloyd]] and [[Jobyna Ralston]]. The movie was written by [[Sam Taylor (director)|Sam Taylor]], [[Tim Whelan]] and [[Ted Wilde]] and was directed by [[Fred C. Newmeyer]] and [[Sam Taylor (director)|Taylor]]. |
'''''Girl Shy''''' is a 1924 comedy [[silent film]] starring [[Harold Lloyd]] and [[Jobyna Ralston]]. The movie was written by [[Sam Taylor (director)|Sam Taylor]], [[Tim Whelan]] and [[Ted Wilde]] and was directed by [[Fred C. Newmeyer]] and [[Sam Taylor (director)|Taylor]]. |
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==Synopsis== |
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The plot concerns Harold Meadows (Lloyd), who works as a tailor's apprentice for his uncle in the small town of Little Bend, California and is so shy around women that he stutters and can barely speak (to stop his stuttering, his uncle has to blow a whistle). From his fantasies, he writes a "how to" book for young men entitled "The Secret of Making Love" (detailing how to woo different types of young women, such as "the vampire" and "the flapper", in scenes that parodied other popular films of the time) and takes it to a publisher in Los Angeles by train. |
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The same day, a rich young socialite named Mary Buckingham (Ralston) has her new automobile break down in Little Bend and has to take the train back to L.A. She is accompanied by her [[Pekinese]] dog, who is not permitted on the train. Harold rescues her dog from being left behind and helps her hide the dog from the conductor during their trip, which they spend talking about his book, as he overcomes his shyness under Mary's questioning. They become so absorbed in each other that neither realizes that the train has reached its destination and everyone else has departed. Upon returning home, Mary promptly rejects a proposal from her [[smarmy]] suitor Ronald, who then proposes to her repeatedly with the same result. |
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Mary detours through Little Bend several times to look for Harold. On her seventh such trip, with Ronald, her car runs off the road near a river and gets stuck. While Ronald goes to town for a tow, Mary serendipitously runs into Harold at the river, and they agree to meet when he goes back to the book publisher's office, where he will present the idea for a new chapter about her. In Little Bend, Ronald runs into a woman who asks if he's finally come back for her, but he stalls her and goes back to Mary's car with a tow crew. |
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At the book publisher's, the readers find Harold's book hilarious. However, the publisher rejects it, leaving Harold broke and downcast. When he then sees Mary, instead of telling her the truth, he pretends that all of his attention to her was part of his book research, and that he really wasn't interested in her. Heartbroken, she agrees to marry Ronald. Afterward, though, one of the publisher's employees convinces the publisher that, if the staff liked the book so much, there must be a market for it, and he decides to publish it after retitling it as "The Boob's Diary." |
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Back at the tailor shop in Little Bend, Harold rips up a letter from the publisher, expecting it to be a formal rejection notice. Instead, his uncle finds the pieces of an acceptance slip and an advance royalty check for $3,000. At that point, Harold sees a story (with photos) in his uncle's newspaper about Mary and Ronald's wedding that same day at her family's estate. Just after that, the woman that Ronald saw in town earlier walks in and exclaims, upon seeing the story and photos, that she is Ronald's actual wife and that someone should protect Mary and stop the wedding. She shows Harold a photo locket engraved "to my wife" that Ronald gave her two years ago (1922). |
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In one of Lloyd's most famous sequences, Harold then races to town to stop the wedding, in a trip involving bootleggers, car chases and multiple changes in the mode of transportation (from missing the train to various cars to [[Pacific Electric Railway|trolley]] to motorcycle to horse-drawn carriage to horseback) through the streets of Los Angeles and Culver City. He arrives just as the minister is about to conclude the ceremony but cannot stop stuttering long enough to explain Ronald's [[bigamy]]. Instead, he carries Mary off, with the groom and others trying to stop him. He successfully escapes with her and then tells her about Ronald, at which point Mary coerces Harold to propose (with an assist from a mail-carrier's whistle), and she accepts. |
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==Production== |
==Production== |
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Revision as of 09:58, 2 April 2010
| Girl Shy | |
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| File:Girlshy4sheetmusic.jpg | |
| Directed by | Fred C. Newmeyer Sam Taylor |
| Written by | Thomas J. Gray (titles) Sam Taylor (story) Tim Whelan (story) Ted Wilde (story) |
| Produced by | Harold Lloyd Suzanne Lloyd Hayes (video release) Jeffrey Vance (video release) |
| Starring | Harold Lloyd Jobyna Ralston |
| Cinematography | Walter Lundin |
| Edited by | Allen McNeil |
| Music by | Don Hulette (1974) Don Peake (1974 - additional music) Robert Israel (2002) |
Release date | April 20, 1924 (USA) |
Running time | 82/80 min |
| Country |  United States |
| Languages | Silent film English intertitles |
Girl Shy is a 1924 comedy silent film starring Harold Lloyd and Jobyna Ralston. The movie was written by Sam Taylor, Tim Whelan and Ted Wilde and was directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Taylor.
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Production
This was Lloyd's first independent production after his split with Hal Roach. It is what Lloyd called a "character story" (as opposed to a "gag film"), and is notable for containing fewer of the stunts which characterize Lloyd's other films throughout most of its length, and instead focusing more on the relationship between Lloyd and Ralston. However, the lengthy finale of the film is one of the most exhilarating, non-stop action sequences of Lloyd's career. Some of the traveling shots with horses had a strong influence on MGM's silent version of Ben-Hur (1925) the following year, and the famous final scene at the chapel was copied 44 years later in another MGM classic, The Graduate (1967).
This movie was one of the first romantic comedies to be filmed. It was also the second of six consecutive movies pairing Harold Lloyd and Jobyna Ralston, who left Hal Roach Studios as well to continue working with Lloyd. Unlike the normal style for filmed romances prior to Girl Shy, both Ralston and Lloyd were featured in comedic scenes.
The exterior shots of the "Buckingham" mansion and gardens were filmed at Lloyd's own enormous estate in Beverly Hills.
Cast
- Harold Lloyd as Harold Meadows, The Poor Boy
- Jobyna Ralston as Mary Buckingham, The Rich Girl
- Richard Daniels as Jerry Meadows, The Poor Man
- Carlton Griffin as Ronald De Vore, The Rich Man
Renewed interest in Harold Lloyd
In 1962, the scenes of Lloyd rescuing the dog, riding on the train with Ralston and breaking up the wedding were included in a compilation film produced by Harold Lloyd himself entitled Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy. [1] The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and created a renewal of interest in the comedian by introducing him to a whole new generation.
Notes
- ^ Harold Lloyd's World ov Comedy, imdb.com.