By day Harold Meadows (Harold Lloyd) is a meek tailor’s apprentice at his uncle’s shop in Little Bend, blushing through every interaction with the almost-wholly female clientele. By night, Harold devotes himself to his manuscript, The Secret of Making Love, the virginal bumpkin’s portrait of the pick-up artist as a young man. When this backwoods Casanova goes to the city to find a publisher, he meets a rich girl (Jobyna Ralston) who sees the good beneath his act. But the legion of jazz baby typists in the publisher’s office ridicules Meadows’s magnetism, and the dejected boy gives up his girl to a local bigamist. That’s the windup for a climactic race to the altar, accurately described by Variety as “beyond the mere power of a typewriter to describe. It is a chase that caps anything else that has ever been done on screen.” (The Girl Shy chase was studied by the team puzzling out how to film the chariot race in Ben-Hur — which turned out well enough, but Messala is no Meadows.) The first feature made under the auspices of Lloyd’s own production company, Girl Shy was an enormous popular success in its day and remains unimpeachable entertainment a century later. 

35mm from Harold Lloyd Entertainment

Preceded by: “The Kid Reporter” (Alfred Goulding, 1923) – 21 min – 35mm from San Francisco Silent Film Festival