Quote:
Originally Posted by laughingboy 100
That's a great find from the "Film Fun" magazine. Thanks for posting. There is a Harold Lloyd short called Off The Trolley that can be found on youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wht3LqTjLWs. But it doesn't include any scene such as this. The plot involves two thieves robbing the trolley which could explain how the women ended up in barrels. But either it was cut from the film or just a publicity photo to sell the film. Or maybe it was another film entirely! 
And, a quick clarification. The actress in Thundering Taxis is Muriel Evans, not Paulette Goddard. Ms. Evans also loses her dress in the other Taxi Boys short you mention - Hot Spot. It can be found on DailyMotion: www.dailymotion.com/video/x3n4w14 |
From the small amount of research I've done on Internet Archive, it looks like the magazine may have got the title wrong. Archive.org has a big database of searchable magazine scans, and after looking around for a while it appears that the actual release title was "The Trackless Trolley." It's from a short series of comedies starring Ben Hall called the "Harold Highbrow" comedies. The brief description seems to sync with the photo, but there's often a big disconnect between what was published in fan magazines like
Film Fun, Movie Humor and
Real Screen Fun and what actually passed the board of review.
I found this out a while back when I saw some stills promoting the first Three Stooges short,
Woman Haters.
Film Fun or a similar magazine published a photo of Marjorie White playing dice in her lingerie with the stooges holding her clothes and grinning - needless to say, there is nothing
remotely like this in the film. I kind of suspect this was the situation with the photo of Anita Garvin in her slip from the Laurel & Hardy short
From Soup to Nuts.
There were apparently some films where risqué scenes were shot and later censored out, though. Precode.com has a review of the Wheeler & Woolsey comedy
So This is Africa, which was apparently a huge censorship headache for the studio. It has a link to scans of letters between the studio and the censors, with a long list of scenes that had to be cut before it could be exhibited.