Girl Shy (1924)

(On Cable TV, October 2021) While Harold Lloyd is not as well-known these days as fellow silent comedians Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, he was a comedic force then, and is still very entertaining today. While Girl Shy doesn’t have the madcap rhythm and invention of some of his other films, its romantic comedy still holds up decently well today. Eschewing rapid-fire gags in favour of more character-based moments until its more frantic climax, Girl Shy reprises Lloyd’s “Glasses” character—a young man with a good heart but crippling shyness in presence of girls. His problems begin once he gets a crush on a high-class beauty, all the while writing a book purporting to reveal the secrets of seduction. His book is predictably hilarious, which doesn’t play as he’d like in the publisher’s hands. There’s the usual number of complications, but it culminates in a suddenly madcap sequence in which a wide variety of transportation methods are used in order to make it from one town to another. That’s easily the comic highlight of the film, but (as with Safety Last!), the rest of the film, setting up the stakes, is not uninteresting.