More delicious moments from Why Worry

A great pratfall with obvious sexual connotations. Note that she doesn't get up for a long time. Though he tries to ignore it, she has a certain effect on him that has him reaching for his heart pills.

These two are such a great team, with a dynamic force between them that works perfectly. Jobyna Ralston combines sweetness with intelligence and fire.  Harold has met his match.

He berates her for neglecting her duties, running around in boy's clothes when he should be looking after his health! The argument will soon escalate into something more.

Things are reaching the boiling point. . .

She's had it - had enough of his selfishness, his ridiculous imaginary ills, and she lets him have it. And he likes it.

Some nice stunt work here, which I am sure was NOT done by a double.


The thing about Why Worry is that beneath all that absurdity and comedy and charm, there's a cleverly hidden Lloydian message. This movie is all about a selfish, self-absorbed boy becoming a man. And how does this happen? LOVE! Love is always the motivation in every Harold Lloyd movie, for everything. By the end of the story he actually has a man's job and responsibilities, but when he finds out his wife (Jobyna, of course) has just had a baby, he leaps over the desk and begins to run like crazy to the hospital. Harold is telling us, without laying it on too thick, that it's possible to grow up without losing any of your natural exuberance.

A lesson he must have learned through experience.

Johnny Depp: the ultimate swinger

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ecWQO4RtcM


I can't embed this for reasons unknown, but watch it, DO watch it, it's magical! I first saw this movie in 1993, and though it has some highly improbable plot twists (i.e. a young woman who just had a major psychotic episode suddenly being well enough to live in her own apartment ), Johnny Depp's performance, innovative and charming, holds up well and reminds us why he is the working-est actor in Hollywood.

The movie (Benny and Joon) came on again last night, with a very young Depp looking like a Botticelli angel, and I was reminded of how cleverly his character, Sam, had incorporated elements of the Big Three silent screen comedians: Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd. He saved the best for last, climbing up a brick building and swinging from a window washer's rope with all the grace and style of Harold's character in Safety Last.

The scene where his schizophrenic girl friend, recovering from hallucinations and delusions in the hospital, sees him swing past her window (apparently she's the only one who can see him) is priceless. This performance presages his Don Juan de Marco turn, a wacky Fairbanks stunt that lands him, painfully, in the bushes.

I couldn't find a good clip of the Safety Last scene, the last few minutes of the movie where Harold swings like a pendulum,  but I did come up with a few still pictures. About this picture: what would Harold say (WWHS?). You know, based on everything I've found out about him, I think he would really like and admire and be entertained by Johnny Depp. He appreciated actors who could play it straight as well as funny, and his quirkiness, bold risks and leading-man good looks are very Harold-esque. Harold loved Jack Lemmon, who also easily moved back and forth between comedy and tragedy. Johnny does it just as gracefully, and still makes us sigh.

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Do you call that thing a book?

The novel, the novel! Why do I set myself up like this? Why don't I just let it go?


I'm like a person who has had seventeen failed relationships, but keeps trying for more, keeps hoping for that one, elusive, "right" man who will change her life.

For more than a year now I've been trying to get someone in the publishing field interested in my novel about Harold Lloyd, The Glass Character. It occurred to me yesterday that I've been going about it all wrong. Why am I acting as if I've never been published before?

Here is a small sample of the reviews I got for my first two novels. This represents maybe ten per cent of them. Only one was strongly negative.

                            

Reviews of Better than Life (NeWest Press, 2003)

and Mallory (Turnstone Press, 2005)

"Gunning manages to illuminate that which is dark and secret with that which is rich and riotous in colour. She is an author able to open up the world of a fractured but seeking people and bring them into light, healing and hope." - Edmonton Journal

"As Anderson-Dargatz did with her town of Likely and Stephen Leacock did with Mariposa, Gunning has created a fictional place that's recognizable to anyone who ever lived in a small town. This delightful novel looks like a contender for the Leacock Medal." - Vancouver Sun

"Margaret Gunning writes with uncanny grace and unflinching clarity about what it is to be a young girl forgotten by the world. The ominous feeling that underscores much of of the novel is remeniscent of the best work of another Canadian author, Ann-Marie MacDonald, whose girl heroes seem to inhabit this same dark world." - Montreal Gazette

 

"Her expressive turns can spur shivers of pleasure. There is a contagious energy to Gunning's prose which often - and accurately - delineates Mallory's intense emotional improvisation, child-like perspicacity and surprisingly mature realizations." - Globe and Mail

"Better Than Life is fiction at its finest." - Edmonton Journal

                              
One of my editors phoned me after this outpouring and claimed it was "a miracle". She saw all this praise as some sort of supernatural event, not as the result of years of hard work, persistence, trudging along, heartbreak.

I sent out queries this time and did not even get responses, or else the response was no (a form letter, always) without even wanting to see the novel. The larger presses will not even consider submissions from the likes of me: you have to have an agent. The response from agents was even more miserable: nothing, or form letters, or even (the worst one yet) my own query letter back, in my stamped self-addressed envelope, with a rubber stamp on it that said LIST IS FULL.

In no case did anyone actually read my novel. It was dismissed out of hand.

I should have done it differently, but didn't even realize it until yesterday. I have two novels out already, for Christ's sake.  I'm not a novice. I'm not starting at the beginning. Why can't I jump over some of those early, sieve-straining steps?


So I've started to. And nothing definite has happened yet, but the energy seems to have changed.

I will never, NEVER learn how to do this, how to hawk my wares. I love to write - somehow it has survived the wars - but after 30 years of attempts, I still can't seem to figure out the elaborate, paradoxical, ever-changing games I must play to get my writing noticed.


If it weren't for you, Harold, and my love for you, I would have given this up a long time ago.

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The most romantic kiss in screen history!

The most romantic kiss in screen history. . . not Scarlett and Rhett. . . not Rick and Ilsa. . . not Bonnie and Clyde. . . but. . .

HAROLD AND JOBYNA!

Having written a novel about his life, a novel which I hope will find wings in the year 2013, I feel like I know Harold Lloyd personally sometimes, and I certainly know the course of his career. He probably made a couple hundred movies all-told, starting in 1917, but his classic films came out in the early-to-mid '20s. In rating his best pictures, most silent film buffs would probably name The Freshman (which is about . . . a freshman, a nerdy overaged college boy desperate for popularity) and Safety Last, in which safety comes last as Harold climbs up the side of a dizzyingly-tall building and hangs off the hands of a huge clock.

I like those, yes, love them in fact, and never tire of watching them (in fact I may watch them again tonight), but there is more pain and poignancy in The Kid Brother, and more still in Girl Shy, in which his characters are passive, even downtrodden youths who haven't yet discovered their manhood. This revelation/transformation always happens through love: Harold Lloyd's films are among the most romantic ever made, and none more romantic than my personal all-time favorite. . .

Why Worry?

This movie has the best title ever written, since it essentially means nothing and signals the fact that we are about to watch the very first screwball comedy. Never mind that the actual first screwball comedy would come out more than ten years later.

Against type, Harold plays a wealthy idler with all sorts of imagined ills who escapes to a tropical island with his gorgeous nurse (played by the sad-eyed, kewpie-lipped Jobyna Ralston). Said nurse is madly in love with Harold, who doesn't even seem to see her except in moments of unexpected contact: i.e., when she trips and falls into his lap as he sits in a totally unnecessary wheelchair. The slow-blooming smile on his face before he dumps her onto the ground communicates a subtle but very real sexual tension that will permeate the whole film.

She pines for him, he ignores her: it's the antithesis of practically every other Lloyd film, turning everything on its ear and releasing a madcap energy that outstrips anything in his other comedies. To add a little excitement, a dangerous anarchist plans a revolution on the island, causing all sorts of feverish violence that makes Harold exclaim, "You fellows must stop this. I came here for my health."

This shot illustrates one of the best Harold Lloyd gags ever: mountain-climbing up the side of a giant to try to remove his rotten tooth. (Never mind, you had to be there.) Wacky gag follows on wacky gag as Lloyd reaches a sort of fever pitch of brilliance and mad originality. At one point his nurse, dressed as a boy (a most unconvincing disguise) becomes furious with his self-centredness and hypochondria and begins to cuss him out as only one can in a silent movie. She's standing up, he's sitting, in the passive position, and once again that dreamy smile begins to play across his face before he tells her she has very beautiful eyes.

This comedy breaks every convention of the era, including the rule of the silent screen kiss: almost always quick, comedic, and preferably behind a screen. When Harold suddenly realizes he is madly in love with Jobyna, he doesn't just peck her but seizes her in his arms and kisses her with ferocious passion, something I've never seen in any other silent film, not even The Sheik. She resists for a second, then melts into his arms with a subtle leg-pop that conveys complete surrender.

How many takes were required to capture that volcanic kiss? I wonder. In any case, I envy Jobyna. There are murmurings that they were "involved", as he was involved with so many women in his lifetime. There was something seductive and bedroomy about his eyes (along with the canny intelligence and a touch of wildness) that was there for a lifetime.

And so: today, after literally years of searching, I've found a picture of that kiss! I can't find a video of it, I'm sorry, so you'll just have to watch the whole movie. Better yet, buy the DVD set, The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection, superbly remastered with charming, energetic scores by Robert Israel and Carl Davis.

Harold, Harold, you have basically ruined my life! I have probably gained 25 pounds because of you, due to all my fretting, my unproductive fuming. I need to tell your story so badly I ache with it. I KNOW I can do this, I feel it! I have it in me, I have the goods. And I'm not always this confident about my work. 

What is it about a person who has the power to wreck your life from this distance? We were alive at the same time, yes, but he died when I was just a teenager. We were on the same planet together at the same time. Aieeeeeee! My heart! When will this hopeless yearning end?

SYNOPSIS: THE GLASS CHARACTER  by Margaret Gunning

I would like to introduce you to my third novel, The Glass Character, a story of obsessive love and ruthless ambition set in the heady days of the Jazz Age in the 1920s. This was a time when people went to the movies almost every day, living vicariously through their heroes: Valentino, Garbo, Fairbanks and Pickford. But comedians were the biggest draw, and broad slapstick the order of the day - with one very significant exception.

 

Standing beside Keaton and Chaplin in popularity and prowess was a slight, diffident man named Harold Lloyd. He hid his leading man good looks under white makeup and his trademark black-framed spectacles.  Nearly 100 years later, an iconic image of Lloyd remains in the popular imagination: a tiny figure holding on for dear life to the hands of a huge clock while the Model Ts chuff away 20 stories below.

With his unique combination of brilliant comedy and shy good looks, Lloyd had as many female followers as Gilbert or Barrymore. Sixteen-year-old Muriel Ashford, desperate to escape a suffocating life under her cruel father's thumb, one day hops a bus into the unknown, the Hollywood of her dreams.  Though  the underside of her idealistic vision is nasty and fiercely competitive, she quickly lands extra work because of her Pickford-esque ability to smile and cry at the same time.

When her idol Harold Lloyd walks on the set, her life falls into a dizzy whirl of confusion, attraction, and furious pursuit.  Muriel tries on and sheds one identity after another: bit actress, waitress in a speakeasy, "girl reporter", script writer - while Lloyd almost literally dances in and out of her desperately lonely world, alternately seducing her and pushing her away.

While researching this book, I repeatedly watched every Lloyd movie I could get my hands on. I was astonished at his subtlety, acting prowess and adeptness at the art of the graceful pratfall. His movies are gaining new popularity on DVD (surprisingly, with women sighing over him on message boards everywhere!). The stories wear well and retain their freshness because of the Glass Character's earnest good nature and valiant, sometimes desperate attempts to surmount impossible challenges.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Buy The Glass Character from Amazon NOW!