troisoiseaux (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
troisoiseaux) wrote2022-07-09 02:03 pm
troisoiseaux) wrote2022-07-09 02:03 pm
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The Freshman (1925)
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!
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!
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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.