Safety Last! (1923) - film review

A young man named Harold sets out to make his fortune in the city but ends up as a low paid shop assistant in a large department store.  He scrimps and saves so that he can buy jewellery for Mildred, his girlfriend back home, to convince her that he is making a successful career for himself.  But Mildred becomes concerned that her beau may be corrupted by city life so she sets out to join him, forcing Harold to pretend that he runs the store where he works.  When Harold’s boss offers a thousand dollars to anyone who can attract crowds to the store, Harold has a brainwave.  He will ask his friend Limpy Bill to climb up the outside of the building, all twelve storeys.  But on the day of this incredible stunt, Bill is pursued by a policeman whom he and Harold earlier played a joke on.  Harold nervously starts the climb, assured by Bill that he will replace him once he has reached a few storeys above the ground.  But Bill cannot shake off his police pursuer and Harold has no choice but to keep climbing...

Safety Last, the third, and arguably the best, of Harold Lloyd’s full length films is the one that includes the comic genius’s most daring comic stunt – the ascent of a twelve storey building in Downtown, Los Angeles – and his most iconic image, dangling from a clock several hundred feet above a busy thoroughfare.  Lloyd had a thing about climbing up buildings – he had already done so in three previous shorts (Look Out Below in 1919, High and Dizzy in 1920 and Never Weaken in 1921) and would repeat the formula in his later sound films Feet First (1930) and The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947).

Lloyd had the idea for the film after he had seen Bill Strother, a human spider, performing the death defying feat of climbing up the side of a tall building.  Strother was delighted to appear in Lloyd’s film, playing the comedian’s sidekick and doing some of his stunts, even though, at the time, he had a broken leg.  Strother doubles for Lloyd in the long shots for the set piece building climbing sequence. 

For the shots in which Lloyd is seen climbing the building, a specially constructing façade was used, built on top of the roof of a real building, but a few feet from the edge.  Some clever camera work created the illusion that the actor was suspended hundreds of feet above the ground, whereas in fact he was never more than about fifteen feet above a pile of mattresses.  There has been much debate over the years as to the level of risk that Lloyd was taking in performing these stunts.  From some of the shots, it is evident that the actor was risking his life and could easily have plummeted to his death if he slipped and misjudged his fall.  Today, the same stunts could be performed with absolutely no risk to the actor, using the green screen process and CGI effects – but where’s the fun in that?

Here, Harold Lloyd plays his most famous character, the glasses man, an ordinary-looking pasty-faced American with trademark horn-rimmed spectacles and straw hat.  Unlike the caricatures played by Chaplin and Keaton, Lloyd’s character is intentionally someone with whom the audience could readily identify, which was a large part of his appeal.  By the time he made Safety Last, Lloyd was already a major Hollywood star, appreciated not just in the United States but around the world.  This film established him as one of the comic legends of his era, and helped make him the best paid actor in Hollywood.

This is the last film in which Lloyd appeared with Mildred Davis, who had featured in around a dozen of his earlier films.  They married immediately after completing this film.  This is also the only film in which Lloyd’s character is given the actor’s own name, as is revealed on a pay cheque.  Although he is not credited with writing or directing Safety Last, Lloyd was the main creative force behind this film, as he was on most of his films.  This was one of the last films that Lloyd made at the Hal Roach studios before he became an independent film producer.

The intoxicating cocktail of dare devil stunts and visual gags was extraordinarily popular in the 1920s, and audiences would both scream with horrified anticipation and laugh in hysterics when they saw a Harold Lloyd film such as this.  Today, the film is just as gripping and hilarious, a masterful combination of suspense and comedy, performed with consummate skill by one of cinema’s great comedy legends.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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