Dan Navarro's Movie Reviews

Harold and the clock. Harold Lloyd in horn-rimmed glasses, dangling from the arm of a giant clock high above the ground—it's one of the most indelible images of silent comedy. As seen in Lloyd's 1923 comedy Safety Last, that image is part of one of the most spectacular physical stunts in all of cinema, silent or sound.

Lloyd's daring crawl up the face of a 12-story building, from the street all the way to the roof, is so sensational that it sometimes seems this is all there is to Safety Last. It certainly inspired the film title. So it may surprise some to learn that the climb is merely the climax, lasting about 20 minutes. Indeed, the film is 53 minutes old before Lloyd begins the ascent that would make him one of the most durable of all silent screen icons.

The early scenes set the stage. Harold—and here he is apparently playing himself, for in the film he is referred to as Harold Lloyd—is an earnest, ambitious small-town boy in love with Mildred (Mildred Davis, who would become Lloyd's real-life wife). They want to marry, but first he determines to go to "the big city" (no one ever says which city) and make his fortune.

Harold gets a job as a clerk in a downtown department store, where he is paid the not-so-princely sum of 15 dollars per week. He writes to Mildred every day, but something must get lost in translation, because she gets the idea that he's landed an important position, not simply a job. She goes to the city to pay him a surprise visit. Now Harold is on the hook, and in several inventive comedy sequences he tries to establish himself as an important store manager before Mildred, all the while keeping his fellow employees in the dark about his intentions.

Safety Last, directed by Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, moves at breakneck speed, even for a silent comedy. There is barely a moment to catch one's breath between gags. Harold and his roommate (Bill Strothers) go to hilarious lengths to evade the landlady seeking their delinquent rent payments; late for work, Harold manages to sneak into the store beyond the floorwalker's suspicious glare by posing as a clothing dummy; and while manning a yardage counter, he is besieged by so many rabid female shoppers that he finds himself fencing one of them, he with his yardstick, she with her furled umbrella.

The great climbing sequence comes about when the store's general manager offers to pay $1,000 to anyone who can draw huge crowds to the store. Lloyd, eager for a big payday, suggests the climb as a publicity stunt to be performed by a real-life "human fly," Bill Strothers, who would play Lloyd's friend in the movie. Management accepts, but just before the climb is to begin, Strothers finds himself on the lam from the law... so, Harold has to scale the building himself, before the huge crowd that has assembled to witness the stunt.

No trick photography was used during the climbing sequence, but it did require a specially-constructed fake building exterior. The faux building was erected on a hill overlooking downtown Los Angeles, so that at just the right camera angle it appeared that Lloyd was really clambering up six, seven, or eight stories above the ground.

Although Lloyd was not as high off the ground as it appeared to the camera, nevertheless he was at times about three stories above his safety platform. It is not recorded whether or not, while filming, he ever lost his grip on the building and fell to the safety platform; but Lloyd himself posed the rhetorical question, "who wants to fall three stories?"

Remember, this was in the early 1920s, well before the days of computer graphics that can make today's film super-heroes seem to defy gravity. During his climb, Lloyd was just as subject to gravity as he seems. Despite the optical illusion that meshes seamlessly with the surrounding landscape, he was in real danger during the entire sequence.

And, lest we forget, the man performed this daredevil stunt with only three fingers on his right hand. While posing for publicity shots for a Hal Roach two-reeler, Haunted Spooks, in 1919, Lloyd was handed a prop bomb and asked to use its fuse to light his cigarette. He complied—but terrifyingly, the bomb turned out to be real. It exploded, temporarily blinding Lloyd, and severing the thumb and forefinger from his right hand.

Displaying the indomitable pluck of the character he usually played on screen, Lloyd made the decision to continue acting. He had a prosthetic "glove" made that would simulate the missing thumb and forefinger, and went on with his career. If the great climb in Safety Last is an indication, he was even more daring with his handicap than he was before.