Some honeymoons are short-lived, as Harold Lloyd and Mildred Davis soon discover in I Do (1921). In this comedy short they play newlyweds who learn about babysitting the hard way - through a night of playing aunt and uncle to a ravenous infant and a firecracker-loving four-year-old.

The screen collaboration between Lloyd and Davis would soon result in marriage (they were wed two years later in 1923) but they first started working together three years earlier, in 1919, after Lloyd found himself without a leading lady. Longtime screen mate Bebe Daniels had been whisked away to features by Cecil B. De Mille. But Lloyd's friend and director Hal Roach had a replacement in mind. He'd seen Mildred Davis in the 1916 comedy Marriage a la Carte, co-starring Bryant Washburn, and thought she'd make Lloyd a good partner. And when the director screened the film for Lloyd, the star agreed. Davis was exactly what they needed, a petite blonde whose looks would stand in sharp contrast to Daniels' dark beauty. Bebe Daniels' last Lloyd film was Captain Kidd's Kids (1919). Davis joined Lloyd for the first time in From Hand to Mouth (1919).

I Do would be the duo's tenth pairing. The film was originally slated to be a three reel picture, until it failed to arouse much enthusiasm from preview audiences. The trouble, it seemed, came down to the first reel - which created a very different prologue to the film from the final two-reel opening. In the original first reel, Lloyd's character first meets Davis' character's parents, who take to him immediately and secretly plot the kids' elopement. But, as Lloyd recalls, "it was funny, but it laid an egg at the first preview. So we junked the whole reel [and] started from reel two." And so, I Do opens with the couple already married, and the set up condensed into a short introduction.

Lloyd relied heavily on previewing his films. In fact it was D.W. Griffith who appears to have actually been first to preview a picture with The Birth of A Nation (1915). But Lloyd was definitely a pioneer in the preview process and in his reliance on audience reactions to shape a film. He also knew from the start of a film that changes would be made based on previews. The team would set to do "as well as [they] could, but without going overboard." As Lloyd put it, they knew they were going "to let the audience be the final judge."

And apparently, in the case of I Do, the audience did know best. The film finally came together after cutting the first reel. And Lloyd would remember I Do as "one of [his] most successful two-reelers."

Producer/Director: Hal Roach
Screenplay: Hal Roach, Sam Taylor
Cast: Harold Lloyd (The Boy), Mildred Davis (Wife).
BW-20m.

by Stephanie Thames