Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site

For the final installment before our (second at-your-leisure) Winter Marathon, I decided to go for some light fare.  I settled on a film that has one of the most iconic moments in movie history – but at this point a film which few people have seen: Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor‘s 1923 silent comedy classic Safety Last!

Safety Last! is a Harold Lloyd film, and while Lloyd’s star has faded today in comparison to his contemporaries Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, in his era he was perhaps as big of a star, making over 200 films.

Safety Last! demonstrates why he was so prolific, as nearly 100 years later – though it is quite different than today’s style – it’s still hilarious.

Life is difficult on Tralfamadore…

The film opens with a classic gag – Harold, behind bars, with a noose in the background and his mother and a priest beside him, is about to “take the long journey”…

Derby, Gloucester, and Ilchester on rye?

…but of course, as the camera pans out we see that it’s not a gallows, it’s just a train station.  Harold is  heading off to the big city to make his fortune, as one is wont to do in the roaring twenties.  Harold lands a room with another young man named Bill and a job at a department store.

A cloaking robe of elvenkind/Hangs in my wardrobe behind/All those things that mother/Said were proper for a boy

Harold and Bill are not exactly hitting it big as of yet – in fact they have to resort to one of the greatest visual gags I’ve ever seen to avoid their landlady – thanks to some incredibly strong coat hooks (that’s no wall anchor in drywall!) they hide up underneath their coats and pull their feet up to virtually disappear.  I love it.  One of the reasons that Harold is having trouble making the rent is that he is spending money he doesn’t have to send jewelry back to his girlfriend Mildred at home.

Right hand red!

But it’s not all work – Harold and Bill manage to get themselves into mischief as well.  In one instance, Harold runs into an old friend from home who is now walking a police beat in the big city, and in an attempt to convince Bill he’s got pull with the cops, convinces Bill to pull the old push-the-policeman-over-backwards prank.  Harold knows that his old friend will take it all in fun, but unfortunately while Harold is plotting his scheme, his friend and another officer switch places.  Hilarity ensues!  Bill pushes over the wrong cop, and becomes a wanted man.  Harold manages to escape notice, but Bill is forced to climb up the side of the nearest building to escape, exposing to Harold and the audience his great talent in being the Human Fly.

Harold’s humble home of haberdashery

In the meantime, Harold is doing his best as a fabricshearer at the department store, though he does have to go through an exciting scene where he accidentally carted off in a van just before work begins and has to struggle desperately to get back on time – and failing that, has to sneak back onto the storeroom floor without being caught by his overbearing boss.

Matching salt and pepper shakers – a handsome addition to any executive desk!

Of course, things can’t stay simple, as Mildred is convinced that Harold must be rich due to the gifts he is sending her, and she makes her way to the big city to visit him at his place of employment, where she thinks he’s in management.  Rather than let Mildred down easy, Harold instead pretends to be his own boss, taking Mildred into “his” office and avoiding disastrous detection every step of the way for what seems like a ten-minute scene.  At the end of it all, Harold overhears his boss telling another manager that he would offer a $1000 bonus to anybody who could find a way of attracting more business to the department store, and Harold has a plan!

He arranges for a stunt where an anonymous person (Bill) is to climb the entirety of the 12-story building housing the department store – the spectacle is sure to attract business.  However, in advertising the event, the policeman prank victim suspects that the building climber will be the scurrying rat who got away up the side of a building – and right he is.  He arrives at the scene of the stunt, and Bill, seeing him approach, runs into the building telling Harold to climb up to the second floor, offering to swap places with him there.  Unfortunately, various slapstick circumstances including a pursuing policeman cause them to delay their swap several more stories until, obviously, Harold is stuck climbing the building by himself.

One Point Twenty-One Jigawatts!?!

This, of course, leads to the iconic scene I have mentioned, with Harold hanging off the building clock.  You’ve seen it.  Everybody has.  But of course, Harold survives not only this peril but a few more less-iconic ones to reach the top of the building in safety, where Mildred meets the newly-made thousandaire.  The End.

Safety Last! is just a delight of a film.  It has a simple plot, of course, but the gags and the tension are clever and first-rate.  I hoped to enjoy it; I did much more than that.  I laughed out loud for most of the film – more than I have for most modern comedies, despite it being thoroughly G-rated.  I can only imagine how uproarious it would have been in the theater 100 years ago when the comedy style was a bit fresher!