Safety Last

In my ongoing quest to be a more informed movie spectator, I’ve moved into the 1920s, the time when cinematic language started to coalesce and the American movie industry as we understand it really took shape. Of course, the films of this period are silent and black and white, and to modern viewers, they often look too ancient and foreign to possibly be funny or relevant today. But what I have found each time I have watched work by the silent stars of the day is that they are surprisingly funny and engaging, despite being nearly a century old.

I’ve seen my share of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies, but I had never seen a film by the other third of the great silent comedian holy trinity, Harold Lloyd. Chaplin, of course, is famous for his mustachioed little tramp character, and Keaton was known for his stone-faced stoicism in the face of his remarkable physical stunts, but Lloyd, with his round glasses and slicked back hair, often played the optimistic, ambitious, but naïve boy pratfalling his way to success in a tough world. 

Lloyd started in movies while still a teenager and had roles in several Keystone comedies. While under contract with Universal, he met Hal Roach, the aspiring filmmaker, who gave him some of his biggest breaks and who helped introduce him to Mildred Davis, the woman who would become his co-star and his wife. Around 1918, Lloyd developed the character with which he is most closely associated, the one he just referred to as “glasses.”

It’s this character who is the star of the comedy that really cemented Lloyd as an A-list actor, 1923’s Safety Last. It’s a love story, a workplace comedy, and it features some hilarious and iconic stunt sequences.

Safety Last is the story of the Glasses character leaving his small country town and the girl he loves to move to the big city where he intends to earn his fame and fortune. He can’t marry his sweetheart until his financial future is secure. Instead of making a fortune, however, he ends up sharing a room with a buddy, avoiding his landlord and the overdue rent, and trying not to earn the wrath of his boss at the department store where he works at the fabric counter. Instead of paying rent or buying food, Harold buys expensive jewelry and sends it home to his girlfriend, telling her all about his great success in the city.

Problems ensue when his sweetheart decides it’s not safe for a young, unattached man with that much money and success to be alone in the city. She comes for an unannounced visit and the sequence featuring Harold showing her around the department store while trying to convince her that he’s the boss without alerting his actual bosses is very funny. The film is at its best during sequences like this. Complication after complication builds the tension as Harold nimbly finds inventive, usually visually funny ways of getting out of trouble.

 Harold’s efforts of earn a fortune lead to the film’s most iconic moment. He overhears the department store owner offer a thousand dollars to anyone who can draw a lot of customers to the store. Harold offers half to his roommate if he will scale the outside of the building as a publicity stunt. The friend agrees but runs afoul of the law and so Harold has to climb the building himself while the friend checks in every other floor or so, assuring him that he’ll go the rest of the way just as soon as he ditches the cop chasing him. Harold clinging to the hands of the clock on the side of the building has been recreated many, many times. It’s a virtuosic sequence and worth seeing, but so is the rest of the movie. Safety Last and Harold Lloyd as a performer absolutely live up to the hype.