“Suffering sunfish! GIRL pirates!!!“
The 1919 silent short film, Captain Kidd’s Kids, starred silent film legend Harold Lloyd, his longtime co-star, Bebe Daniels, and two other Harold Lloyd regulars, the perpetual second fiddle (but no less of a star) Snub Pollard, and Helen Gilmore, who had a successful career in a number of projects by Kids‘ director, Hal Roach. This was the last film that Daniels and Lloyd appeared in together, with Daniels going on to have a very successful career in film, television, and radio.
In the short, which runs about twenty minutes, Lloyd portrays “The Boy,” who awakens after a bachelor party bender that left him sleeping in his chest of drawers. Mad with her future son-in-law’s partying ways, “The Girl’s Mother” (Gilmore) calls off the wedding and decides to run off to the Canary Islands with “The Girl” (Daniels) to prevent her from marrying Lloyd. With the help of “The Valet” (Pollard), Lloyd sets out to find his love…..and tries to find the Canary Islands as well, and the duo end up going overboard after and altercation with some pickpockets. Luckily for the duo, they are rescued by a pirate ship staffed entirely by female pirates, one of which looks suspiciously like Daniels and her mother, Gilmore.
The story features tons of comedic pratfalls and gags, ranging from simple a simple shaving gag to a fairly elaborate fight between male and female pirates. All of these stunts and gags are pulled off in typical Harold Lloyd fashion. Lloyd is funny as “The Boy,” but the real standouts in this particular short are Snub Pollard and Helen Gilmore. They pull off a number of gags that had me laughing out loud at times.
The film is brilliantly preserved. I watched it on HBO Max, and it featured almost no blurbs or blemishes. The music and sound effects fit the film perfectly and fans of The Big Bang Theory may recognize the use of the the old sea shanty Blow The Man Down. Overall, this was a very fun short that, while not necessarily Lloyd’s best work, it’s still worth checking out, especially since it is available for free across a number of streaming services.
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