So I’ve seen Buster Keaton movies and I’ve seen Charlie Chaplin movies, but I’d never seen a Harold Lloyd movie until I watched this short (30 minute) movie from 1920.

So the premise of it is that a woman must spend a month in her dead grandfather’s old mansion in order to inherit his fortune, which is a plot I’ve seen a zillion times before, but this obviously predates any other instance of it I’ve seen. If she doesn’t stay there, her uncle inherits it all, and so he comes up with the idea to dress up as a ghost and scare her away. And he would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling— no, okay, this isn’t actually a Scooby-Doo episode, though it certainly could be taken as a template.

It’s mostly a charming little movie. The intertitles are wittier than I’ve seen in other movies, with a kind of wry deadpan tone to them that makes its comedy feel a little smarter than the Keaton/Chaplin stuff, where text is usually straightforwardly descriptive. Lloyd is charismatic and works well as a silent comedic character in a less slapsticky mode.

HOWEVER: The servants in the mansion are all Black, and there is, to quote Pete: “a lot of racist humor in it, revolving mainly around the frightened black servants in the house showing then-stereotypical behavior such as shaking knees and wide eyes. One of the servants was even played by a white actor in blackface.” Yeahhhh, not great. (The knee-shaking thing was super-weird, because obviously that’s not even a stereotype anymore, so it’s just like “what’s that guy doing?”; I thought he was running in place for some reason.)

I’m hoping that the racism isn’t a common element in Lloyd’s movies, because other than that, it was really cute, but that’s a pretty big “other than that.”