{"id":50520,"date":"2023-12-19T20:56:33","date_gmt":"2023-12-20T02:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=50520"},"modified":"2023-12-19T20:56:33","modified_gmt":"2023-12-20T02:56:33","slug":"hark-how-harolds-angels-sing-a-repost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2023\/12\/19\/hark-how-harolds-angels-sing-a-repost\/","title":{"rendered":"Hark! How Harold’s angels sing (a repost)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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David’s health situation has made it difficult for our household to maintain this blog. We don’t want it to fade away, though, so we’ve decided to select previous entries from our backlist to republish. These are items that chime with current developments or that we think might languish undiscovered among our 1094\u00a0entries over now 17 years (!). We hope that we will introduce new readers to our efforts and remind loyal readers of entries they may have once enjoyed.<\/em><\/p>\n

Movie fans may want something a little offbeat relax with at home, so we thought that in these turbulent times, classic comedy would be welcome. We’ve picked a 2017 entry to revive (and slightly revise): “The Boy’s Life,” devoted to Harold Lloyd. (He certainly had the holiday spirit; he’s said to have kept a Christmas tree up, complete with presents, all year round.) We still think he rewards our interest, and families and cinephiles ought to find his films fun. This entry introduces\u00a0Girl Shy<\/strong>, still running on The Criterion Channel<\/a>, with DB’s discussion included there. The blog entry refers to other Lloyd movies, all of which are on the Channel and some of which are also available on the TCM wing of Max<\/a> (but not, alas, Girl Shy<\/strong>). <\/em><\/p>\n

Warm holiday wishes from the two of us!<\/em><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

On 9 September 1917, film history changed for the better. That was when we got the eyeglasses.<\/p>\n

Their circular, horn-rimmed frames stood out as wire rims would not; besides, horn rims had become fashionable for young people. These specs held no lenses, but so much the better. Reflections from studio lights would have hidden the eyes of the winsome, earnest, clueless young man usually called the Boy.<\/p>\n

In Over the Fence<\/em>, the film introducing him, he’s already amiable, a little vacuous but delighted to be talking to his girl on the phone and watching himself doing it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Harold Lloyd had already featured in some sixty-five short comedies from 1915, playing characters called Willie Work and Lonesome Luke. Even after introducing the Boy, Lloyd continued with a few Lukes before phasing out this sad sack. No one expected that in a few years the glasses character would become world famous. Lloyd’s films were more lucrative in aggregate than those of any other silent comedian, and he became one of the central figures in Hollywood.<\/p>\n

When our comrades at Criterion announced their plan for a centenary Lloyd celebration this month on FilmStruck<\/a>, I suggested we devote an installment of our series to one of the films. Kristin and I have been Lloyd fans for decades. Fans and collectors kept his work alive. Kevin Brownlow had to remind people with his Lloyd documentary, The Third Genius<\/em> (1989), that, well, Lloyd was <\/em>a genius. The more you get to know his work, the better it looks, and the less plausible seem many of the clich\u00e9s that have clustered around it.<\/p>\n

One of the very best films to get to know is\u00a0Girl Shy<\/em> (1924). That\u2019s the one analyzed in the latest Observations on Film Art<\/em> episode<\/a> on the Criterion Channel.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Man into Boy<\/b><\/p>\n

For decades after sound came in, American silent comedies dropped mostly out of sight. Some 16mm copies were available in cut-down rental versions, and a few were circulated by the Museum of Modern Art Film Library. (Of Lloyd\u2019s work, that included only The Freshman<\/em>\u00a0of 1925.) The MoMA canon became the<\/em> canon. In the 1970s, thanks largely to piracy, the films of Keaton were added, and still later we came to recognize Charley Chase, Max Davidson, and other talents.<\/p>\n

Throughout these years Lloyd\u2019s films were almost invisible because he controlled the rights to them and limited their circulation. Kept in vaults in his rococo estate Greenacres, they would not reemerge until the 1960s, in cut TV versions distributed by Time-Life. Until fairly recently, most critics relied on memory of the films and the received image of the Boy dangling helplessly from the clock face.<\/p>\n

Most of the sixty-one shorts featuring the Boy languish in archives, and some were lost in a fire on the Lloyd estate. But several two-reelers are readily available, as are all the longer films. What we have gives the lie to most clich\u00e9s about this filmmaker.<\/p>\n

Take the most persistent one. Socially conscious critics of the 1930s saw Lloyd\u2019s work as naively reflecting the go-go 1920s. The Boy’s resolutely middle-class aspirations made him a crass avatar of complacency before the Crash. Chaplin seemed to stick up for the little guy, but Lloyd seemed to celebrate the striver; he compared himself to Tom Sawyer. It was all very neat. The Boy\u2019s climb up the skyscraper in Safety Last<\/em> could symbolize the heedless ambition of the white-collar worker, while the his efforts to fit in at college in The Freshman<\/em> suggest desperate American conformity.<\/p>\n

Those interpretations played down the fact that just as often Lloyd played hayseeds humiliated by city folk and con artists. In Girl Shy<\/em>, the city slicker who wants the girl is a weasel, and Harold has to rescue her. Here, as often, the film is largely a procession of social humiliations. Lloyd, a predecessor of cringe comedy, in turn provided a model of embarrassment for Ozu’s silent films. Those films often feature students wearing the Boy’s glasses (below, Days of Youth<\/em>, 1929). This isn’t mere imitation or homage; the glasses became a Japanese fashion item, called roydo<\/em>, named after Lloyd. (Below, a photo from a student ski trip in the 1930s.)<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

More edgily, Lloyd also played foppish idlers, louche one-percenters who glide obliviously through the lower orders and need to learn humility. The original title of For Heaven\u2019s Sake<\/em> (1926) was to be The Man with a Mansion and the Miss with a Mission<\/em>, a phrase retained in an intertitle. Here as elsewhere, the coddled Boy learns to help his social inferiors. If you\u2019re after class-based critique, Lloyd films come out pretty well.<\/p>\n

Likewise, there were the complaints that Lloyd\u2019s comedy was mechanical. Chaplin was the poet and dancer. Keaton, in both concept and execution, showed himself a geometer, the dogged engineer of monumental effects more awe-inspiring than hilarious. Though granting that Lloyd, foot for foot, yielded more laughs than any of his peers, critics worried that he was only merely funny, a relentless gag machine. Here is James Agee, in one of the subtlest appreciations of silent cinema ever written:<\/p>\n

If great comedy must involve something beyond laughter, Lloyd was not a great comedian. <\/strong><\/p>\n

But immediately, as an honest man, Agee must add:<\/p>\n

If plain laughter is any criterion\u2014and it is a healthy counterbalance to the other\u2014few people have equaled him, and nobody has ever beaten him.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Still, Agee admits that Lloyd\u2019s films pass beyond laughter in one respect. They offer harrowing suspense. What his audiences called \u201cthrill comedy\u201d remains chilling today. His antics on skyscraper ledges and girders still induce vertigo, and his car chases risk catastrophe on a scale that would worry Jackie Chan. Agee seems to grant that inducing shrieks as well as guffaws is no small accomplishment.<\/p>\n

If Agee could have reviewed all the feature films, though, maybe his judgment wouldn\u2019t have been so absolute.\u00a0For example, Lloyd\u2019s features take us beyond laughter in serious ways\u2014into regions of vulnerability and inadequacy. The Boy is typically given a fault: cowardice (Grandma\u2019s Boy<\/em>), self-absorption (as hypochondria in Why Worry?<\/em> and as self-indulgence in For Heaven\u2019s Sake<\/em>), lack of confidence (The Kid Brother<\/em>), neurotic extroversion (The Freshman<\/em>). In several films, the seriousness undercuts the comedy.<\/p>\n

In Grandma’s Boy<\/em>, Harold can\u2019t drive away the tramp, but Granny can do it easily, with some swipes of her broom. Our laughter is cut short when, in the space of a cut, as she calmly returns to the porch, we see the Boy slumped over, his head in his hands.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Soon he will admit that he\u2019s a coward. Lloyd films switch their tone on a dime, shifting between comedy and drama breathlessly. In Girl Shy<\/em>, the Boy not only dumps the girl he loves but does so by cruelly laughing at her trust in him. (Agee: “He had an expertly expressive body and even more expressive teeth.”) Wobbling and shifting his weight, Harold breaks the laugh with a gulp before carrying on his bluff.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/a>\"\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Nothing in Keaton or Chaplin makes us as ashamed of our hero as we are right now. Soon he will do something worse.<\/p>\n

This passage reminds us that Lloyd worked his face for all it was worth. Keaton had more expressions than he’s usually credited with (bewilderment, concentration, doggedness); it’s just that he doesn’t smile. Chaplin inherited the white-face clown tradition and often favored deadpan. He limited his facial reactions to squiggles and flashes, often no more than a skew of the mouth or hauteur in the brows, with an occasional embarrassed giggle. With Chaplin, the body expresses nearly everything, as befits an aesthetic predicated on the long shot.<\/p>\n

But Lloyd, relying on medium shots, performs as a dramatic actor, with a wide repertory of expressions. Agee refers to his “thesaurus of smiles,” but he had other resources, as this Girl Shy<\/em> scene attests. His producer Hal Roach is said to have remarked: “Harold Lloyd was not a comedian. But he was the finest actor to play a comedian that I ever saw.”<\/p>\n

Another nuance: Comic laughter comes in many varieties. Like Keaton, Lloyd celebrates winning through tenacity and resilience. If we gasp at the geometrical audacity of Keaton\u2019s humor, we\u2019re buoyed by Harold\u2019s righteous settling of accounts. It\u2019s reported that audiences actually leaped up and cheered at the climaxes, when bullies and rascals were punished at delectable length. These are comedies of comeuppance and payback, outcomes universally enjoyed and still much in demand today.<\/p>\n

Point the last: Neatness of construction. Chaplin\u2019s films are lovably episodic; I still marvel that films that took so long to make are so loosely put together. Keaton by contrast is a metronome-and-protractor director, aiming to make every shot and sequence and reel sit in meticulous order. No one but he could have conceived the marvel of symmetry that is The General<\/em>, or, on a lesser scale, Our Hospitality<\/em> and Neighbors<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Lloyd\u2019s films are no less finely put together, as many recognized at the time.\u00a0A Film Daily<\/em> review<\/a> of The Kid Brother<\/em>\u00a0(1927) noted: “Lloyd and his gag-men again have devised a corking set of comedy situations that fit consistently into a well-joined plot and laughs keep building from little chuckles to hilarious roars.” Orson Welles praised “the construction of Safety Last<\/em>, for instance. As a piece of comic architecture, it’s impeccable. Feydeau never topped it for sheer construction.”<\/p>\n

To get a little more specific, I think that Lloyd’s model was the well-made dramatic film, the tight classical plot.\u00a0This is the argument I make in the Girl Shy<\/em> installment. I try to show that in this, his first film as an independent producer, Lloyd applied the emerging model of Hollywood narrative to feature-length physical comedy. Fairbanks had moved in this direction, and Lubitsch would achieve something similar with social comedy in The Marriage Circle<\/em>\u00a0(1924)<\/a> and the masterpiece that is Lady Windermere\u2019s Fan\u00a0<\/em>(1925)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Lloyd was a pioneer in showing how everything that worked for serious dramaturgy could work for comedy too. Girl Shy<\/em> gives us a goal-oriented protagonist who has a serious flaw. Going beyond the figures of slapstick, we get access to his psychological yearnings and frustrations. His loneliness and fear of women fuel overwrought fantasies of domination. The Boy is caught up in the characteristic Hollywood double plot, involving love and career\u2014two lines of action that usually block and deflect one another.<\/p>\n

This linear action is deepened by a series of motifs. They\u2019re simple in themselves (a stammer, a Cracker Jack box, a dog biscuit box), but they\u2019re worked out with a pictorial and dramatic intricacy that\u2019s rare at the time. And it\u2019s all topped off by a two-reel chase that is simply one of the greatest ever put on the screen. At a time when every superhero blockbuster ends with a big action sequence, it’s worth seeing one that’s both graceful and hilarious, and it owes nothing to special effects.<\/p>\n

Girl Shy<\/em>\u00a0shows how rewardingly complex silent Hollywood storytelling could be. It\u00a0<\/i>reveals Lloyd as a master craftsman of cinematic resources\u2014dramatic, pictorial, emotional. He saw how to make a movie that would be engrossing even without the gags. The comedy deepens a powerful dramatic premise that moves forward with an organic, not mechanical, energy, and it\u2019s developed in funny or poignant detail at every instant.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Filling the format<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the arts, form often follows format. The fourteen-line sonnet, the tondo painting, the twenty-two-minute sitcom, the nine-panel comic-book page: all provide the artist with a set framework within which to create. When Lloyd started out, film reels in the US were standardized at 1000 feet, which typically ran between twelve and fifteen minutes, depending on projection speed. Short films, particularly comedies, were either one or two reels, while features–dramas, mostly–ran four, five, or more.<\/p>\n

The task of the filmmaker was to build a story that would fit the format. The temptation was padding. Griffith, for instance, often filled out his shorts with \u201cgoings and comings,\u201d shots of characters leaving one place and making their way to another, sometimes across several shots. But once padding was inserted, filmmakers could make it engaging. Griffith did this by embedding the goings and comings in suspenseful situations, so that the travel shots served as dramatic delays. Mack Sennett needed scenes to lead up to a big chase (the \u201crally\u201d), but those scenes could themselves have a linear logic, as with romantic rivalry or street quarrels.<\/p>\n

Lloyd became very sensitive to film length. He knew that his initial popularity depended on the fact that Path\u00e9 and producer Hal Roach spit out a Lonesome Luke every week or two; he saturated the market. Even after Luke appeared in two-reelers, Lloyd wanted his new character, the Boy, to start in one-reelers. He recalled telling Roach, in sentences as breathless as the pace of a one-reeler:<\/p>\n

Now, I\u2019m getting started in a new character and you want people to get used to the character, you want them to see the character; and besides, if you make a poor, or mediocre, or moderately good, or even a bad picture in a two-reeler, it\u2019ll kind of tend to sour the people on you because they won\u2019t see another one for a month. But if I make one-reelers, we\u2019ll get one out every week, so if a couple of them are not so good, and the third one is, it will cover up the other two, and besides it will keep you in front of the public.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a result, Lloyd spent two years turning out an astonishing eighty-two one-reelers. Not until Bumping into Broadway<\/em> (2 November 1919) did he launch a two-reeler featuring the Boy.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s evidence that Lloyd\u2019s awareness of the niceties of running times went beyond a concern for building the brand. He understood that form and format had to mesh. His early one-reelers relied largely on the standard episodic knockabout. We\u2019re given a defined situation, such as a modernized hotel (The City Slicker<\/em>, 1918), a western saloon (Two-Gun Gussie<\/em>, 1918), or a vaudeville theatre (Ring Up the Curtain<\/em>, 1919). In this situation, the characters quarrel, pull pranks on one another, engage in fistfights, kick each other in the pants, and usually wind up in a chase. A string of gags might emerge, as when a stray snake terrifies the theatre troupe in Ring Up the Curtain<\/em>, but the gag is quickly exhausted, and we go on to the next bit.<\/p>\n

Once Lloyd settled on two-reelers, he built them up more carefully. He scaled, we might say, his plots and gags to a fairly tight, logical development in the fuller format. Part of that development involves what we might call nested gags. In Captain Kidd\u2019s Kids<\/em> (1920), the first part (roughly one reel) sets up Harold as a playboy recovering from a bachelor party. In his elaborate bathroom, he tips back his chair, leading us to expect him to fall in. But no: instead his butler, Snub Pollard, dumps ice in the pool.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There follows a string of shaving gags here and in the next room. Early in this series, Harold drips shaving cream in his morning tea; but after other gags he comes to drink it and finds it foul-tasting. Then he returns to the bathroom, tips back the chair again, with results we’d expected several minutes before.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now we get some elaborate efforts to rescue Snub. The gags are simple, but by setting up one and then moving to set up and pay off others before returning to the first, Lloyd and his team avoid the start-stop-restart pattern than we find in many one-reelers.<\/p>\n

The real plot action, of course, doesn\u2019t get going until the second reel of Captain Kidd\u2019s Kids<\/em>, but Lloyd has provided some lively padding to start. Now or Never<\/em> (1921) shows the same gag-braiding, with the recurring appearance of two drunks on the train ride that constitutes the bulk of the film.<\/p>\n

Lloyd moved toward longer films cautiously\u2014first to three reels, then four (A Sailor-Made Man<\/em>, 1921), then five (Grandma\u2019s Boy<\/em> and Dr. Jack<\/em>, 1922). He always said that most grew organically, beginning as two-reelers and then expanding when the story premises and gag sequences developed. To keep things in proportion, he tested the results on preview audiences, then reshot and recut his footage. The preview responses to one three-reeler, I Do<\/em> (1921), convinced him to lop off the entire first reel.\u00a0Although he had increased confidence in his ability to scale up, when he signed a new contract with Path\u00e9 in early 1922 he insisted that the company publish a notice to exhibitors<\/a> declaring that film length would be<\/p>\n

strictly governed by the character and quality of the material evolved in the production development of each subject\u2014which means that the Lloyd standard of excellence is to be maintained first of all; a given story that turns out to be adequately filmed in two reels will be confined to two reels, and so released. This is a principle cherished by Lloyd himself.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lloyd could be so confident because even his shorter releases were becoming the top-billed item on programs across the country. He was, in effect, returning the idea of \u201cfeature\u201d to its original meaning\u2014not simply a long film, but rather a movie that could be \u201cfeatured\u201d in publicity. He was also announcing his unusual concern for tight form.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Comic architecture<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Grandma’s Boy<\/strong> (1922).<\/em><\/p>\n

Lloyd moved to features in synchronization with his peers. Keaton was the first, with The Saphead<\/em> (September 1920), though it\u2019s less a comedy than a light drama; and Keaton returned to making two-reelers for three years. The Round-Up<\/em> (October 1920) gave Fatty Arbuckle a comic role in what was basically a serious drama. Arbuckle starred in The Life of the Party<\/em> (December 1920), another light drama with almost no physical comedy. Chaplin\u2019s The Kid<\/em> (February 1921), at a bit more than five reels, might be considered the first slapstick feature since the one-off Tillie\u2019s Punctured Romance<\/em> (1914, six reels). The \u00e9migr\u00e9 Max Linder got into the act with two 1921 features, Seven Years\u2019 Bad Luck<\/em> (May 1921) and Be My Wife<\/em> (December).<\/p>\n

It might seem that Lloyd was a bit late with the four-reel\u00a0Sailor-Made Man<\/em> (December 1921). But that film capped his most extraordinary year to date, with four earlier films released in spring, summer, and fall. Along with six two-reelers released in 1920, Lloyd was now a major comedy star, and the Boy could carry a longer story.<\/p>\n

But how to do that? His peers explored some options. In Arbuckle\u2019s two features, it\u2019s his physical presence that matters, not consistency of character; in one he\u2019s a genial sheriff, in the other a lawyer inclined toward crookedness. Chaplin retained the Tramp persona in The Kid<\/em>, but the film is a rather episodic affair. Once the main plot is resolved, a reel pads out its length with a dream sequence set in heaven. The Linder films are lively but digressive, with plots propelled by casual pranks and lovers’ misunderstandings.<\/p>\n

By contrast, Lloyd\u2019s features moved toward tight construction. Despite his claim that his films just grew longer accidentally, they were shaped in ways that make them seem through-composed. His comedy sequences are deftly prolonged, building and topping themselves with great speed. Gags are embedded and interwoven in ways that yield surprises, and motifs set up early in the film pay off later. We may have forgotten about them, but Lloyd hasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Lloyd’s obsession with overall form can be seen in his use of the “Lafograf,” a kind of EKG of viewers’ response at previews. Coders sat in the audience with pencil, paper, and stop watches to note every bit of amusement, from a titter to a screech. Once graphed, the entire movie displayed laughs big and small throughout, with most of the big ones spiking in the last reel.<\/p>\n

A powerful demonstration of Lloyd’s skill came in his first five-reeler, Grandma\u2019s Boy<\/em> (1922). Chaplin called it \u201cone of the best constructed screenplays I have ever seen on the screen.\u201d Lloyd began it as a two-reeler, but after expansion it had become more drama than comedy. Roach urged him to add more gags, and the result is a remarkable balance between humor and pathos.<\/p>\n

That mixture is given from the start in a prologue showing a baby Harold, glasses and all, bullied by another baby. Then the Boy as a boy is picked on and made to put a chip on his shoulder.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This last bit will pay off fifty minutes later. The rival, the little bully grown up, taunts Harold, not knowing Harold has captured the prowling tramp and proven his courage.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The upshot is a fight that knocks the stuffing out of the Bully. In the course of that fight, another moment calls up a contrast with an earlier scene. The day before, the Bully has pitched Harold into the well; now, after the Rival tries a foul blow, Harold administers payback.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

These distant echoes can be very satisfying.<\/p>\n

The organization of gags is likewise remarkably sustained. Walking home from his well dunking, Harold finds that his one suit has shrunk grotesquely. But the Girl has invited Harold to her home for an evening, so he needs another suit. Granny digs out his Grandpa\u2019s suit, 1862 vintage. (The peddler said it was unique.) It still has mothballs in it. Granny also finds there\u2019s no shoe polish, so she uses goose grease instead. These bits become the basis of a steadily building gag situation in the Girl\u2019s parlor.<\/p>\n

But not right away. First Harold arrives and discovers that his vintage outfit is matched by that of the butler. Another echo, when he mutters: \u201cThat peddler lied to Granny!\u201d He sits to listen to the Girl play the piano, and gets his finger caught in a vase. Only now does one of the earlier gag setups start to pay off. A cat comes to lick his tastily greased shoes.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The grown-up Bully was introduced throwing a stick at a cat, but Harold is more gentle. He nudges the Girl\u2019s cat away, but soon a troupe of cats enters to converge at his feet.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

He has to dispose of them without the Girl\u2019s noticing. Finally, when the couple move to the settee, the cats reconnoiter and the gag sequence pays off: Harold uses a statuette of a bulldog to scare them away.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Cozying up to the Girl, Harold ought to be in clover, but now she smells something\u2014his suit. Investigating, he finds mothballs that he and Granny failed to remove. I\u2019ll spare you more description. You can watch what happens next, including a new confrontation with the Rival. And again, Harold gives us an unforgettable suite of facial expressions.<\/p>\n