SAFETY LAST! (1923)
Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
Pathé Exchange, 73 minutes, Not-rated.
★★★★
Even if you know little about silent movies, chances are good you’ve seen a still from Safety Last! of Harold Lloyd hanging from the hands of a clockface 12 storeys above Los Angeles. A hundred years later and all manner of f/x notwithstanding, it is one of the most dazzling scenes in cinema history.
Safety Last! is a Hal Roach comedy. Roach was the mastermind behind Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang, though he specialized in romantic comedies. Because there was no dialogue other than what was printed on intertitles, silent film scripts are pared to the bone. Neither Lloyd nor his love interest, Mildred Davis, have names; he is The Boy and she The Girl. Lloyd is a bit of a braggart who exaggerates his job to impress his girlfriend. She thinks he’s a manager of some sort; he’s actually a clerk who is bullied by the store floorwalker. (That job is almost extinct. It’s a person who supervises the sales staff on behalf of upper management.)
Lloyd’s bragging gets him into trouble on another level. He has a good friend in the police department he has known for years and the two like to prank each other. When Lloyd runs into another friend, a steeplejack named “Limpy” Bill (Bill Strother), Lloyd convinces Bill to give the cop on the corner a kick in the pants. Problem! It’s not Lloyd’s friend. The enraged policeman chases Bill all over town–being chased by cops was a staple of silent movies–and gets away, but the policeman vows he’ll find Bill and arrest him.
The Boy (Lloyd) realizes that if wants to hold onto The Girl he needs to come up with some serious money. When he hears that his department store is offering a $1,000 prize–overly $14,000 today and a small fortune in the 1920s–for the best idea to attract people to the building, he hatches a harebrained scheme. He asks Bill to scale the outside of the building to the roof, all 12 storeys of it. The ultimate plan is that Bill, dressed as The Boy, will climb to the roof and Lloyd will pop out and take credit for the ascension.
Things go wrong from the start. As Bill prepares for his climb, he is spotted by the cop he booted. He has just enough time to tell Lloyd he will have to start the climb himself and that he’ll meet him at a window on the first level and trade places with him. Tell that to the cop who observes Bill entering the building. As you would anticipate, each time Bill shows up on a floor to take Lloyd’s place, the policeman shows up to chase Bill. I guess the moral of this tale is that people will do strange things for love. Lloyd does the entire perilous climb, one made even more difficult by his own ineptitude. Several times, including the famous clock sequence, Lloyd is nearly knocked down to a certain death, but manages to stagger to safety. The people on the ground are enthralled; they believe everything they see is part of a choreographed act.
The use of long shots makes for a really tense sequence. It was all the more so if you know that Lloyd did his own stunt work. I was biting my nails wondering how he had the moxie to attempt such thing. After Lloyd’s death, his stunt coach revealed a key part of the illusion. Buildings of varying heights were used and each time a façade was constructed to mirror that of the department store. It was still a difficult accomplishment, but Lloyd was probably not in mortal danger. (Of course, someone could die just as easily falling from one or two floors as twelve.)
I was gobsmacked when I found out about the trick, because the matching in the movie is so good that there are no visual clues that Lloyd isn’t climbing a very tall building. It remains a remarkable achievement and one that earned its iconic status. I highly recommend that you watch Safety Last! to appreciate what can be done via fortitude and cleverness outside of the digital world. You probably won’t be enraptured by the narrative, but the climb—oh, my goodness!
Rob Weir
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