… only 2 years after part 1.
Once again, and I don’t quite know why, I got it into my head to find a particular silent peril scene – one I recall seeing a still from in an out of print book on silent cliffhanger serials. The scene was of a very young, pre-“glass” period Harold Lloyd, in his Lonesome Luke character, trying to extricate a girl tied to a log heading for a buzzsaw. Well, searching Harold Lloyd and Lonesome Luke didn’t work, so I wracked my memory to think of the name of the actress playing the damsel, and I thought it was Bebe Daniels.
Well, I was sort of right, in that Bebe Daniels certainly did act opposite Lloyd in several Lonesome Luke shorts. But I am no closer to determining which short film the scene comes from , let alone a clip from it.
However, that led me to looking up Bebe Daniels. Oh my goodness – no wonder she was a star. Born in Texas to a US diplomat father and an Argentine mother, Bebe to me looked better than most of the other stars of the period – certainly her film persona came across as a lot less overt than, say, Clara Bow, but to me a lot more alluring. Like all of the enduring stars of the period, she has a presence that transcends the gulf of very different conventions of glamour of the silent period and today. She looks uncannily like someone I know, in fact!
