The Freshman (1925)

[troisoiseaux]

I've gotten really interested in silent movies from the 1910s-20s lately - Harold Lloyd's and Charlie Chaplin's, mostly - and while I've not been intentionally approaching their filmographies in chronological order, by watching the shortest ones first and then moving into the feature films (which are still shorter than an episode of, say, BBC's Sherlock), I've been more or less getting the same effect.

Most recently, I watched The Freshman, a sweetly earnest comedy about a college freshman (Harold Lloyd) who desperately wants to be popular, but all of his efforts - adopting the mannerisms of his favorite movie character, hosting parties, and trying out for the football team - leave him the campus laughingstock. At the same time, he falls in love with his landlady's daughter, Peggy (Jobyna Ralston, who reminds me a lot of Saorise Ronan?? or visa-versa, I guess??), who likes him for who he is rather than who he's trying to be: in one of my favorite scenes, the student newspaper runs a piece on Harold's efforts to be popular that he greets with excitement (his plan is working!) and his bullies with amused derision (their plan is actually working); Peggy cuts his picture out of the paper and throws away the mocking caption underneath. Their romance is so adorable; every scene with them balanced out the ones that I watched through my fingers out of second-hand embarrassment.

Of course, Harold wins both popularity and the girl in the end - having "joined" the football team as the water boy after his determination (if not, unfortunately, his actual athletic skills) impressed the coach during tryouts, he finally gets the chance to play during the big game and secures the team's victory - because this is a movie, after all.

One thing that's striking about these really old movies is how everyone looks so normal— not completely like they've just wandered in off the street - you can see their screen make-up, and there's a fairly consistent Look for the leading ladies (plus, Chaplin's films, especially, often use a sort of aesthetic exaggeration for comedic effect) - but they look like real people, wearing real clothes. Honestly, I might be watching these mostly for the clothes: I love seeing the 1910s-20s fashions!

Comments

[osprey_archer]

Aw, this movie sounds delightful!

And yes, definitely, the people in older movies look closer to people you might see on the street than people in movies nowadays. I remember discussing this with a friend while we were watching the 1960s TV show Bewitched: Samantha and Darren Stevens are a beautiful couple, but they're a beautiful couple you could actually imagine having in your neighborhood, you know? Not sure exactly when the switchover to "everybody in this movie looks like an ethereal being from the faerie mound" happened.

[troisoiseaux]

Not sure exactly when the switchover to "everybody in this movie looks like an ethereal being from the faerie mound" happened.

The (very good!) essay Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny suggests that it was the early 2000s, but that seems.... very recent?

[osprey_archer]

I do wonder if as beauty standards change the beautiful people of earlier era look more normal to future viewers, because they don't fit our beauty standards? Perhaps people in the 1920s looked at The Freshman and thought everyone looked unnaturally gorgeous then, too.

But I do think it's at least partly a real phenomenon, not just a change in perception, though. If you look at, say, action sequences in 1960s TV, the actors are fit, but they aren't dehydrated within an inch of their lives to make their abs stand out like in a modern-day superhero movie.

[troisoiseaux]

I mean, both Harold Lloyd and Jobyna Ralston (and the female leads in Lloyd's other movies, like Bebe Daniels and Mildred Davis) are definitely beautiful people, by any standards! And allegedly, Lloyd's signature glasses were a result of a director (or agent?) telling him he was "too handsome to do comedy."

they aren't dehydrated within an inch of their lives to make their abs stand out like in a modern-day superhero movie

Yeah, that's basically the point of the essay I linked!

[sovay]

And allegedly, Lloyd's signature glasses were a result of a director (or agent?) telling him he was "too handsome to do comedy."

I always read that the Glasses character was exactly for that sense of normality, that Lloyd was playing a real person, neither a comic grotesque nor a rarefied star. (He was legitimately difficult to recognize without the glasses, too, which I find hilarious because in real life that almost never works.)

[troisoiseaux]

He was legitimately difficult to recognize without the glasses, too, which I find hilarious because in real life that almost never works

I just googled "Harold Lloyd without glasses" and YEAH??????

[moon_custafer]

Having seen some 1920s snapshots of people who weren’t movie bit players or background extras, I’d say the latter were still better-than-average-looking for the time. It’s possible movies and consumers got into a cycle when it came to glamour makeup and our beauty standards are now jacked way up?

[troisoiseaux]

So, I literally just finished watching another Harold Lloyd movie - The Milky Way, a "talkie" from 1936 - and, to extrapolate from a very small sample size, there was definitely a leap in actors' (or, more specifically, actresses') On-Screen Glamorousness sometime between the mid-20s and -30s??

[sovay]

So, I literally just finished watching another Harold Lloyd movie - The Milky Way, a "talkie" from 1936

I've never seen any of Lloyd's talkies! How was it?

[troisoiseaux]

It was really fun!! Definitely a different vibe from the silent films - a lot of the humor was in patter-fast witty repartee, very 1930s - and it was so weird to actually hear him speak, at first, but still classically Harold Lloyd, in other ways.

Lloyd plays a mild-mannered milkman who gets recruited into a (unbeknownst to him, fixed) boxing career when, through a series of amusing incidents, the press gets the impression that he knocked out the world's reigning middleweight champion, twice— so you can imagine the opportunities for physical humor, there.

[sovay]

It was really fun!! Definitely a different vibe from the silent films - a lot of the humor was in patter-fast witty repartee, very 1930s - and it was so weird to actually hear him speak, at first, but still classically Harold Lloyd, in other ways.

Cool!

(What does he sound like? Buster Keaton turned out to have a very good voice for his characters.)

[troisoiseaux]

What does he sound like?

Unfortunately I lack the way with words to describe it as well as you did Buster Keaton's; the best I can come up with is "mild"? The kind of voice that would not sound wildly out of place on an educational children's television show.

I did watch one (1) Buster Keaton short film - the famous one, with the house - which I found interesting, and I'd like to check out more of his.

[sovay]

The kind of voice that would not sound wildly out of place on an educational children's television show.

That's a great description!

I did watch one (1) Buster Keaton short film - the famous one, with the house - which I found interesting, and I'd like to check out more of his.

I enjoy Buster Keaton very much.

[moon_custafer]

I’ve seen that one! He can’t actually box, but he’s very good at reflexive ducking!

[moon_custafer]

IIRC Max Factor had been the main make-up supplier for Hollywood from 1914 on, but maybe he made some innovation in the late ‘20s (makeup geared for Technicolor came in the early 1930s, I think, and when the actresses kept stealing it to wear in real life his sons finally convinced him to market to the general public)?

[kore]

Hunh, Jane Fonda wasn't very thin when she was a "sex symbol" (I'm assuming they mean probably the period between Cat Ballou and Barbarella) although she had anorexia and bulimia -- that started when she did her workout tapes in the eighties, "no pain no gain" and all that. She always claimed that the fitness routine cured her eating disorders and she quit cold turkey, but I dunno -- overexercising is part of eating disorders too. From what I remember the 80s was when gyms and exercise classes became really popular (in the 70s it was jogging).

[sovay]

Not sure exactly when the switchover to "everybody in this movie looks like an ethereal being from the faerie mound" happened.

I agree there has been a recent acceleration toward the plasticized, but it's always been a factor in the movies, especially the kinds of people who are seen as beautiful.

[troisoiseaux]

it's always been a factor in the movies, especially the kinds of people who are seen as beautiful.

Yeah, I was about to add— on the flip side, vis-a-vis beauty standards, there is a theme of ""jokes"" across the short films I've watched that boil down to "lol this bit character is not conventionally attractive" (e.g., usually fatphobia, but sometimes it's also racism). :(

[kore]

Harold Lloyd is so great! And very hard to recognize without the glasses, WTF.

I remember people in 80s blockbuster films still looking relatively normal (apart from Sylvester Stallone or whoever) -- the women weren't scary thin and the men weren't swole fit to burst. I want to say that started happening in the 1990s? I remember people really wondering if Calista Flockhart had an eating disorder. (Spoiler: she finally admitted last year that yeah, when filming Ally McBeal, she had anorexia.) I think that was when "heroin chic" came in with the stick-thin models, too -- models have always been thin, but those women looked actually starved.

[chestnut_pod]

Interesting observations all around! I hope you've been continuing to enjoy this little self-created project.

[troisoiseaux]

I have! My most recent was Charlie Chaplin's The Circus (1928), which might be my favorite so far. I've been watching some of Buster Keaton's, as well.