Safety Last! - 1923
Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer & Sam Taylor
Written by Hal Roach, Sam Taylor
& Tim Whelan
Starring Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis
& Bill Strother
Those images have had a life of their own, leaping out of the film and liable to pop up anywhere - from television to posters and books everywhere - Harold Lloyd clinging onto the minute hand of a deteriorating clock, or any of his other near-shaves climbing the fictional Bolton building. I've been seeing them for my entire life. For that alone,
Safety Last! has entered a worldwide cultural consciousness since it's release. Harold Lloyd himself entered my consciousness very slowly. Charlie Chaplin I knew going back all the way to my conception, it seems. Buster Keaton more slowly, but as I saw some of his shorts he became a fast favourite of mine - and cemented that place when I saw
Steamboat Bill Jnr. But if I approached Buster Keaton from the right end, I approached Harold Lloyd from the wrong. The first film of Lloyd's I saw was his disastrous final feature,
The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, which was re-edited into a version called
Mad Wednesday - the former was released in 1947, the latter 1950. Both versions use footage from Lloyd's
The Freshman as a kind of prologue. I was doing a series on the worst and most troubled comedies ever released, which gives you some idea as to
The Sin of Harold Diddlebock's quality and conception.
Safety Last! (I never know how to deal with punctuation when it becomes part of a film's title) was released in 1923, and I almost regret getting to it on it's 99th anniversary - although, if it at all comes up next year I can confidently claim to have seen it and know about it. This film is the peak of Harold Lloyd's career, which was tremendously successful all throughout the silent years, and slowly became less so when sound was introduced to films. His added element to comedies was the introduction of danger, and they're often cited as "thrill pictures". They're all the more impressive when you consider that Lloyd lost the thumb and forefinger from his right hand - in an incident which sounds like it comes straight from a silent comedy : the actor was holding what he thought was a prop bomb which was lit and exploded. From that moment on he wore a glove which gave the impression of a whole hand, with a finger that bent when his other fingers did. It's noticeable if you really examine some of the images of him hanging onto those clock hands. He'd started out with a character known as Lonesome Luke, which was an imitation of Chaplin's little tramp until coming into his own with his own persona - the bespectacled "Glasses character".
Lloyd goes large on the very first gag in
Safety Last! He creates the illusion that he's on his way to the gallows, with him, a priest and what looks like a jail warden behind bars, and his mother and would-be wife on the other side. In the background there's a hangman's noose that appears to be on a gallows. But when the shot is reversed we see that he's really at a train station, and that the 'noose' is in fact a coil with a note attached that the train engineer cheerfully grasps as a train passes. Obviously, a lot of stretching is done to pull this off, and the set designers had to use a lot of invention for this brief joke. There follows the usual series of mistakes, as Lloyd grabs a baby in it's crib thinking it's his luggage, and gets on a wagon instead of the train. The film as a whole was a lot better than this opening, and I almost felt like it was a bit much a bit too soon. Basically, a simple plot is set out : Lloyd is off to the big city to make something of himself before his sweetheart joins him there - presumably to marry him. Of course, he struggles as most would, but his letters home paint a portrait of someone tremendously successful and almost instantly wealthy. This leads to his sweetheart immediately racing to join him - and Lloyd having to pretend to be better off than he really is. His overnight solution to this problem will involve a stunt of epic proportions.
The humour gets better as the film gets into it's stride, and many gags have multiple pay-offs, which is the kind of cleverness you always hope to find in a comedy. One-note jokes that come and go and have no relation to the story are cheap - but humour that has a bearing on the plot and plant seeds for further laughs pay much larger dividends. Much also depends on Lloyd's character using his wits to try and solve problems - such as when he's locked in a truck and taken miles from where his place of employment is, making him late for work. After attempting to take a (very) crowded streetcar and get a lift from a passing motorist, he discovers an ambulance sitting nearby that will surely get him back there in no time at all if he feigns injury. He also devises a devious way of clocking in and avoiding detection when he gets there. All of this involves the usual amount of slapstick and pratfalling we've come to expect from 1920s silent comedies. The whole shtick had been greatly refined since the early one and two-reelers from the 1910s, but I usually find that some of it amuses me and some of it just passes me by with a kind of resigned expectation.
Where Lloyd's films, and especially
Safety Last! really differs is in the "thrill" aspect that made them somewhat unique. The second half of the film involves Lloyd climbing that Bolton building - having to take the place of real human fly Bill Strother, who has been diverted from this task by a somewhat determined policeman. This climb will involve all manner of near-disaster and setback that actually had me on the edge of my seat, despite the fact that it was so ridiculous. It's said that audience members used to scream during these portions of the film, and I have no trouble at all in believing that. During the climb he'll be distracted and have to overcome such things as pigeons, a badminton net, a mouse that climbs up his trouser leg, hanging onto a clock that's quickly starting to fall apart, electric shocks, a savage dog, a man with a pistol posing for photographs that he thinks is real, a metal coil that becomes entwined with a foot and other such moments of ill-fortune. He's always close to losing his grip or his balance, and when he does lose his grip he's usually saved at the very last moment by some hasty contrivance. He's doing this for love - with the prize money for all of the attention for the store he's attracted he can get married with financial security (and perhaps his new bride might forgive him for pretending to be general manager.) The risk and the reason compliment the daring work done by all during this fraught segment of the film - and for 1923 it's absolutely incredible.
The actual trick of the illusion doesn't involve rear-projection, but instead the filmmakers actually built facades on top of smaller buildings, and shot the footage from an angle which made it look like the façade was that high off the ground. It was still dangerous work, and for some long shots an actual stuntman was climbing a building at a daredevil height. Close-up though, eight-fingered Harold Lloyd was climbing the façade with the aide of fake bricks which had inner grips to them which allowed him to get a better hand-hold. The realism can't be beat, and must even have been the envy of the stunt-happy Buster Keaton. These days,
Safety Last! would have been considered an 'action' movie along with being a comedy, and with this inclusion my opinion of the film was much higher than it would have been if we'd gone straight down the road of a broad comedic outing. There had been an earlier climb by Bill Strother, with Lloyd looking on and crushing a hapless man's flowers in fright - and in real life Strother had a broken leg at the time (note that at the start they call him 'Limpy Bill'.) In real life, Lloyd had come across Strother performing the very same stunt.
Along with Strother and Lloyd is Mildred Davis as the 'girl' in this story - she'd been Lloyd's leading lady for a while now, ever since replacing Bebe Daniels. The two would get married shortly after making this film, and Daniels would only appear in three other non-Lloyd related films before retiring from the acting business. She has that typical 20s silent leading lady look and style in her performance - with a slight tendency to overact, perhaps to make up for the fact she couldn't use her voice. The humour is focused solely on Lloyd, whose best scenes are when he's trying to convince his girl that he's more important than he actually is. Comedically, the scenes inside the department store he works in worked the best for me - and there are plenty of films going around these days purporting to be 'funny' that don't come close to the invention and cleverness on display here. Nevertheless, certain parts have aged to the extent where they're more curiosities than something to be related to. Surrounding the lead cast are mostly members of Harold Lloyd's troupe that would appear in most of his films, such as Noah Young as 'the law' and Wally Howe. Much of the film was shot in downtown Los Angeles, which gives us an interesting snapshot of what life was like in a big city in the 1920s.
Although Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor are credited as the directors, most of the work was done by Lloyd himself, and much the same goes as far as Hal Roach and Tim Whelan as writers. During this era, many of the Keatons and Chaplins would spread credit around despite their ventures being very much dependent on the star performer. Much of the crew, such as camera operator Walter Lundin, were part of a large organized family of filmmakers dedicated to the one man. They paint a much different picture to what we are used to these days, and as such films such as these are simply referred to as "Harold Lloyd pictures" or "Buster Keaton pictures" with production, direction and other aspects all under some kind of control by the lead star. These days, the more control you cede to an Eddie Murphy or Bruce Willis the more bloated, ungainly and misguided a film results. The process had been more or less organic to the early days of making films, and the Chaplins and Lloyds of the day had first-hand experience with most aspects of the flimmaking process.
I have to admit I enjoyed spending time with Harold Lloyd's
Safety Last! - and despite watching it twice I could see myself watching it again in the future without any other reason than to just enjoy the show it puts on. Even when it doesn't quite work as was intended at the time, it's a fascinating look at early cinema - with the added advantage that more often than not it
does work as was originally intended, especially during the more tense moments of Lloyd's famous climb. The 1990 score by Carl Davis is my very much preferred option, and is a terrific addition to this classic. Silent comedies aren't the easiest kind of film to slip into so far from their original place in time, and I find it hard to compare, contrast or judge them in any other way than how I see them hold up to today's films. In that regard,
Safety Last! does surprisingly well during it's second half, and I found myself completely forgetting this was nearly 100 years old as I watched Lloyd's long climb. He's been dangling from that minute-hand for nearly a century now - and I still worry he'll slip off (no doubt onto a trampoline on a passing truck.)
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I mean I get that scene should take place in the movie but I would've liked it if it was resolved much quicker and without reveling in the brutality of poor Patricia Arquette.