Never Weaken 1921

The story

The Boy works in an office next door to The Girl. She is a secretary to an osteopath who has no patients and plans to let her go. The Boy saves her job by a trick: he knocks a man down in the street, "treats" him, and hands out the doctor's business card. Trade picks up.

Then he sees her in the arms of another man, and takes the worst. In despair he sets up his own end, one scheme after another, each more elaborate than the last. In the best known, he rigs a gun to go off when the office door opens, and blindfolds himself. A light bulb bursts, and he decides it is over.

It is not. A steel girder from the building site next door swings into the office, and his chair carries him out with it. By one account he takes a statue for an angel, until a jazz band on a roof shows him how high he is. He works his way down through loose beams and hot rivets. On the ground he learns the truth: the other man is her brother, a newly ordained minister, and the two of them can be married.

The suicide plot is the film's device and nothing more. It exists to put a man where he cannot be, and the comedy begins when he is in real danger and finds that he would rather live.

The last short

The film was made at the Hal Roach studio and released by Pathé on 22 October 1921. The credited director is Fred Newmeyer, and some listings add Sam Taylor, who wrote the scenario with Roach. Walter Lundin was the cameraman. Mildred Davis plays The Girl, Roy Brooks the other man and Mark Jones the acrobat.

It runs to three reels, which is about twenty to twenty-eight minutes depending on the source and the speed of the projector. It is described as Lloyd's last short before he moved permanently to feature-length films, and it is usually counted among his thrill comedies, the films in which the danger is the joke.

Lloyd and Davis married on 10 February 1923, and she left the screen that year. They stayed married until her death in 1969.

How the height was made

The high gag is usually traced to Look Out Below (1919), shot over a Los Angeles tunnel. A tunnel is not a skyscraper, but from the right angle the camera cannot tell. Accounts of the thrill comedies describe the method: careful framing and false perspective to make low set-ups look high, mattress platforms and safety nets just outside the picture, and Lloyd doing much of his own stunt work, with doubles for the most extreme wide shots. Much of the action was not faked.

Never Weaken was shot among the streets of Bunker Hill, and uses the corner of Olive and 3rd above the Angels Flight railway. The building-site finale rests on the same logic as the later climb: the real city lies behind and below the actor, and the camera is placed so that the safe ground under his feet stays out of the picture.

The lessons carried over. By most accounts the crew refined these stunt techniques in the short and used them again in Safety Last!, two years later. There the wall was a set on the roof of 908 South Broadway, and the distant shots of a climber were made on a taller building.

Eight fingers

In August 1919 Lloyd was posing for a publicity photograph with what he took to be a prop bomb. It had a real charge. The explosion took the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and part of his palm, and he was blinded for a time. The date usually given is 24 August 1919; one account places the accident during the making of Haunted Spooks (1920). Sources differ on the details, not on the injury.

From then on he wore a tightly fitted glove over a false thumb and finger. He also staged scenes to favour his left hand and used doubles for some close-ups. So when the Boy hangs from a girder in 1921 he is holding on with eight fingers, and audiences generally did not notice.

Why it matters

It is the short that leads to the clock. The gags climb the same ladder as Safety Last!: one danger after another, with a street far below, in the shorter form that Lloyd was about to leave.

It marks the end of a stage. After it, Lloyd and Roach made features. Lloyd later left Roach and formed his own company, and kept close control of his films.

It shows how a thrill comedy is built. A hero who is plainly in the wrong place, a real drop behind him, and a camera that hides the safe ground. The comedy lies in how far he will go before he admits he is frightened.

It can be shown freely in the United States. Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain states that works published before 1923 are clearly in the US public domain. Protection elsewhere may differ, and a restoration or a newer score can have rights of its own.