"The Chaplin Mutuals" have to be considered his truest and most unencumbered work of all. He was still at the beginning of his long-lasting career and he had only one thing on his mind: He wanted to be the funniest person ever to be seen on film! Looking back over all those years, it is simply amazing to see how Chaplin managed to become exactly that. Chaplin had a special sense in how to handle his co-workers and stars, which can be seen and recognized in literally any scene of any of his works. Only the dedication of his co-stars on screen allowed him to be so exceedingly funny, to take his statements so far over the top, to make his beloved Tramp almost an invulnerable cartoon character with an endless array of lives. The stories are inventive, yet always based on people’s everyday lives, carefully portraying and subliminally impeaching their problems. Chaplin was a master of satire. He perfectly contrasted social grades, mocking them, twisting them, seemingly veiling them, making people eventually laugh about themselves and the stereotypes they represent. And while some of the critical content Chaplin processed in his movies, is over 80 years old, you will be surprised at how much of it can still be applied to our modern lives. It’s not really all that different. What is different, however, is that we don’t have any more characters like Charles Chaplin and the Tramp, who dare to break their bones in idealistic acts and daring stunts while trying to make this a better and funnier world.

PART ONE:  The Floorwalker (5/15/1916) 24 minutes   Chaplin as a customer in a department store who finds out the manager is stealing money from the store. The Floorwalker was noted for the first ‘running staircase’ used in films which is used for a series of slapstick that climaxes with a frantic chase down an upward escalator where the character remains in the same position on the steps no matter how fast they move.  

One A.M (8/7/1916) 20 minutes This was the first film Chaplin starred in alone, except for a brief scene with Albert Austin playing the cab driver. In this film Chaplin plays the role of a homeowner coming home late, after too much to drink. He only wants to go to bed, but ‘everything’ around him prevents him.  

PART TWO: The Rink (12/4/1916) 23 minutes  After amusements working in a restaurant, Charlie uses his lunch break to go roller skating. It is best known for showcasing Chaplin’s roller skating skills. Easy Street (10/2/1917) 23 minutes This famous Chaplin short film takes place on a street similar to where Chaplin himself was born – a despairing world beset by gangs, domestic violence, alcoholics and a tenuous authority represented by the church and police. In the film the police are failing to maintain law and order and so it is Chaplin, as the Little Tramp character, that steps forward (rather reluctantly) to rid the street of bullies, help the poor, save women from madmen and generally keep the peace.

During the roaring '20's many comics made college comedies. Along with Harold Lloyd's "THE FRESHMAN", Buster Keaton's "COLLEGE" ranks as one of the best of this type with many funny situations and gags. College sports will never be the same after Buster tries out for nearly every event from baseball to boat racing!  Fast-paced and action-packed, "College" shows off silent film star Buster Keaton's physical talents as he plays a brainy freshman who falls (literally) for a real beauty. When her heart is stolen by a handsome athlete, Keaton closes his books and takes to the field for some hilarious athletic action. He is trampled by baseball players, nearly scalps the dean with a discus and barely makes three feet in the high jump, but he manages to pole-vault his way into the young woman's heart. 

"A beautiful little film. . . [with] some of his most startlingly inventive stunts. Despite the many pilferings from this film (it has been a gold mine for other comedians), the routines are executed so precisely and with such an air of confident innocence that they are charged with surprise -- and probably will be forever" (Pauline Kael). 

"The film is beautiful as a bathroom" (Luis Buönel).   

From Rudi Blesch's biographical study of the comedian, Keaton:
"A well-earned relaxation from the exacting major effort of The General, College is a romp, its open-faced, un-shadowed fun as old as college and as new as the freshman class. How, it may fairly be asked, does Keaton's triumph differ from [Harold] Lloyd's [in the similarly themed "silent" THE FRESHMAN?

Briefly: Lloyd wins by the divine right of the American go-getter; Keaton, not inevitably at all but by a miracle --- love suddenly releasing his powers, freeing him from all his shackling inhibitions, timidities, and inferiorities. Behind the granite face is tenderness, and behind the tenderness is a philosophical and psychological attitude.

Harold Lloyd, the comic, as Gilbert Seldes long ago observed, is 'a man of no tenderness, of no philosophy ... there is no poetry in him ... [no] overtone or image.' Seldes also remarked (in the course of a comparison of the three great silent clowns) that 'Chaplin never makes fun of himself.' Buster Keaton, on the contrary, can and does, even in triumph. A strange mixture of a man, with passivity and warmth, frozen non-communication and tenderness, doddering and determination, cowardice and courage, idiocy and brains, good luck and foul; like Everyman.’

In Girl Shy, Lloyd plays "The Boy," a tailor's assistant from the pokey town of Little Bend. Like Peter Parker, he also has a secret identity. At night, he works on his book, The Secret of Making Love, a memoir based on his fantasies. The finale is often excerpted in anthologies of silent humor: racing to the altar to prevent a marriage, Lloyd steals every kind of vehicle to get to the church on time, including a hurtling, out-of-control streetcar.

ORIGINAL REVIEW: MOVIE WEEKLY - May 17, 1924
"One can't keep on parroting 'The best thing he ever did,' and deprived of that, we never know what to say about a Harold Lloyd picture anymore. Now, while we are certain that 'Girl Shy' is not really so good a story as 'Dr. Jack' and 'Grandma's Boy,' it seems to us that we have never laughed so much at any other comedy since we have been recording our cinema sensations. And we are not one of those persons who enjoy familiar jokes more than we do new ones. The only joke that can wring a laugh from us is one which surprises us, and Lloyd certainly does this. His solution of his difficulties are never obvious.

Getting laughs these days is serious business, and a comedian has to work like the devil to appear spontaneous.  One thing that Harold did - the hero's name was Harold Meadows - was smuggle a Pom dog on the train for 'the only girl.' The conductor discovered the presence of Fifi, and a quarrel ensued with Fifi as the bone of contention. Here the train shoots into the inky blackness of a tunnel, and when it emerges, there is the conductor trying to yank a sable scarf from the shoulders of an indignant passenger, while the real bone of contention is safely hidden under the beard of a nearby Rabbi.

Harold is a tailor's apprentice and, because he is so shy, he writes a book on how to conquer women. Freud could easily explain this, but the publisher to whom Harold submitted his efforts refused to accept Freud's diagnosis as final. The scenes in the book are played out on the screen, and this is almost the funniest thing in 'Girl Shy.' Jobyna Ralston is a better actress than such a beautiful girl has any right to be. We say emphatically, "Do not miss 'Girl Shy,'" and we add a postscript to the star, 'Go on a diet, Harold. You are getting alarmingly large around the middle. Remember your girth control!'

MODERN DAY CRITICAL OPINION:

"The last two reels move along so fast, with so many thrills, that the average audience is going to stand up and howl. It's a wow of a comedy picture!" -- Variety (1924) 

"Girl Shy [was] Lloyd's longest film so far, yet the emotional involvement of the audience and the pacing of the film make it seem to go by very quickly. Except for the flashbacks, the film is extraordinarily well integrated. The plot development is simple, natural, and told with great economy. The race sequence at the end is definitely Lloyd's most elaborate, matched for excitement only by the finale in 'Speedy,' but here the variety and ingenuity of the vehicles used are incomparable." -- Adam Riley. 

"Time magazine critic Richard Schickel compared the ending of 'Girl Shy' to that in 'The Graduate' (1967), and one can trace Lloyd's cross-cutting between wedding ceremony and hero's frantic rescue efforts all the way back to the suspense montage in D.W. Griffith's 'The Birth of a Nation' and 'Intolerance.' But the editing would not be nearly as exciting at the climax were it not the culmination of a very leisurely development in the feelings of the characters." -- Andrew Sarris.