the letter
by Douglas Messerli
Alfred J. Goulding (director) Hey
There / 1918
At a fast food stand the Boy (the
Harold Lloyd character who we all most love) runs into a woman (Bebe Daniels)
with whom he flirts, and when she turns to leave, drops a letter from her
purse.
Picking it up, the Boy runs after her to return it, but she enters the
taxi before he can catch her, and is forced to hang on to the back bumper. The
taxi lets her off at a film studio, and thus begins an adventure that is quite
similar to Charles Chaplin’s Behind the Screen of two years earlier,
featuring a series of comical events as he first tries to enter the studio in a
long line of extras, and then, once he has made his way in, the problems
presented by the “rude mechanicals”—the prop and costume bearers who mistake him
for being one of them.
A long sequence occurs while he is asked to raise the other side of a
heavy piano, another as he is asked to carry various props to different sets,
the voyage of which causes chaos in the filming of everything from epics and
westerns to domestic dramas.
On the run again, he dresses for a few moments in a female costume that
he discovers in the room in which he’s taken refuge, suddenly being cast as a
woman in a movie scene, only to be found out the moment he removes his coat.
For a few moments, accordingly, the Boy appears on film and in drag, the latter
role of which performed in only a handful of films.
Finally, when he reaches the leading lady, presenting her the letter,
she thanks him so profusely that he kneels ready to propose to the woman of his
dreams, she meanwhile asking him to read the letter which is a love letter from
her beau. Embarrassed and about to again be chased from the studio, the Boy
quick-times it on his knees to reach the safety of the street.
Los Angeles, November 20, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (November 2022).
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