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Harold Lloyd, the most popular comic of the silent age, in Safety Last.
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If you don’t know silent comedy, then maybe you’ve only heard of Charlie Chaplin. If you took a Film Appreciation course in college, you might also know Buster Keaton. But when Safety Last was released in 1923, Harold Lloyd was by far a bigger star than either of his better-remembered competitors.
Lloyd’s masterwork follows a Midwestern rube to bustling Los
Angeles. He promises to send for his
naïve fiancée when he makes good. But he
can’t afford married life on the hourly wage of a dry goods clerk. When his manager offers $1000 to anyone who
can dramatically increase the store’s visibility, Lloyd concocts a public event
with his roommate, a “human fly” known for scaling skyscrapers. Only the roommate never quite does his share
of the climbing, leaving Lloyd to navigate twelve stories of obstacles without
a net.
I don’t care that the film is more than ninety years old. I don’t care that the effects are simple
tricks of camera placement and composition.
I only know that’s Lloyd’s brand of thrill comedy twisted me in
knots. I could hardly look at the screen
as Lloyd scaled the DeVore Department Store – but I certainly couldn’t look
away. I was nearly apoplectic by the
time he created one of cinema’s most iconic images, that of the bespectacled
everyman dangling from the hands of a clock.
Even the less perilous scenes were tense with comic anticipation. Gag elements came together, paying off in
ways that seldom seemed contrived.
