482 - Harold Lloyd in An Eastern Westerner, United States, 1920. Dir. Hal Roach.

Friday, April 27, 2018

482 - Harold Lloyd in An Eastern Westerner, United States, 1920.  Dir. Hal Roach.

No shimmying on the dance floor.

Good luck telling Harold Lloyd that.  The Boy cannot seem to help himself.  He has some kind of rhythm going on inside him.  Sure, he just has to dance.  But more than that, he just has to shimmy.

Or as they say in 1920, shimmie.

So of course the Dance Hall Manager, the man whose job it is to stop dancers from shimmying, is keeping a close eye on The Boy.

This is your third warning.  Once more and you will be shimmying out the door.

He will do it more than once more, and in creatively hilarious ways.  Because he backs into the back of another man, whose body rhythm makes The Boy's body shimmy.  Because ice falls down from above and gets down inside the back of his collar.  The Boy just cannot help it.

Time for the Dance Hall Manager to grab him by the ear and remove him from the premises.

What a great job for someone to have.  To monitor, for a living, the way people are dancing.  And not for moral reasons--at least not as it is presented in this story.  Not because when stopping sitting by sidling up and stepping, by shinnying up and shimmying, while strutting, spinning, and swaying, might be seeming as some unseemly sinning by doing some silly simmering, steaming, streaming shilly-shallying shimmy sham.

No.  Not because of that.

But because it is against the rule printed on the sign hanging on the walls.

And the Dance Hall Manager has been hired to enforce the rule.

Is that an efficient allocation of capital for this business to make?

The Boy sneaks home.  Gets caught.  Gets sent West.  His father has had enough of his shenanigans.

So now he will have to make his way in the wild, wild West.  This Easterner.

So he travels from contemporary New York, 1920, to period West, 1880.

And his madcap mayhem continues.

Maybe at least they have dance halls.