Girl Shy (1924)

Silent Romcom - Girl Shy review by Steve

Sweet silent comedy with Harold Lloyd as a small town boy who hesitantly romances a rich girl from the big city (Jobyna Ralston). He writes a book on attracting women even though he is scared stiff of them and goes into a paroxysm of stuttering at every encounter. They meet-cute while he takes his awful manuscript to a publisher.

Most of the comedy is derived from the would-be Romeo's awkwardness. The scenes where the bashful hero imagines seducing girls of every race, nationality and creed must have occurred to Woody Allen when writing Play it Again, Sam (1972).

Lloyd wanted to develop comedies based on character, rather than a sequence of stunts. And that succeeds to a point; the stars share some romantic chemistry. But it still climaxes with one of the great screen chases as the boy has to get to a church by any means possible to prevent the girl from marrying a bigamist

Which was surely familiar to Mike Nichols when directing The Graduate (1967). It’s a spectacular 25 minute cycle of breathtaking acrobatics. Harold makes a likeable leading man in a charming, well plotted romcom where the imaginative gags always move the story onwards, towards its spectacular finale.