Girl Shy
Transportation lovers, this one is for you. The Harold Lloyd classic "Girl Shy," made in 1924, captures a unique moment in transportation, and makes the most of it. Lloyd is a classic shy nerd in love with a beautiful girl, makes a hash of it and then finds he has to make a mad Dash to the altar to prevent her from marrying a cad. This involves him hijacking practically every form of transportation available to him at the time: a car, a motorcycle, a horse cart, a streetcar. (There's a bicycle too.)
It's a lot of fun, with impressively daring stunts and plenty of humor. Lloyd is the original charming nerd, and it's funny to think that "Bringing Up Baby," with Cary Grant in a perfect incarnation of that type, was only 14 years later. When I look back at movies from 2011, they do not have a feeling of a different era. "The Social Network" hits a little differently now, but stylistically, we haven't had any big upheavals or upgrades. Between "Girl Shy" and "Bringing Up Baby," you had not only the introduction of sound but also early color - "Snow White" was the first movie with both, and it came out in 1937. Not to mention the cultural shock of the Great Depression that divides them.
I feel like we've gotten a big downgrade in transportation. There were so many options back then, many public. You could fix a car yourself because they were so basic (good luck trying that nowadays). Though they did seem to have pretty bad tires - popping tires are a recurring theme/trick in this movie. Oh, another fun relic of the era, bootlegging plays a role - "Girl Shy" was Prohibition Era in addition to streetcar era.
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