Safety Last Harold Lloyd
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Harold Lloyd in “Safety Last!,” his classic 1923 silent comedy, which has been reissued by Criterion with three of his restored short films. Credit The Harold Lloyd Collection/Janus Films ‘Safety Last!’ Thanks to decades of high school reading assignments and a succession of big-budget movies, Jay Gatsby, the socially insecure bootlegger created by F. Scott Fitzgerald, has become the quasi-official emblem of America in the Roaring Twenties. But a more appropriate personification of the decade — and one who would have been far more familiar to those actually living through it — might be the comedian, whose life as well as his films reflected the shifting social dynamics of that transformative era. Even people who don’t know Lloyd’s name will probably recognize the ubiquitous image of the young man in horn-rimmed glasses, hanging from the hands of a clock high above a city street. The scene is from Lloyd’s 1923 feature “,” which is being reissued this week by the Criterion Collection in a newly restored and breathtakingly sharp Blu-ray edition.
The encounter with the clock is only one gag in the film’s meticulously constructed 20-minute climactic sequence, in which Lloyd, as a lowly department store clerk, finds himself forced to take the place of a professional human fly, whom Lloyd has hired to climb the store’s skyscraper headquarters as a publicity stunt. In “Safety Last!,” Lloyd plays a small town go-getter (identified in the opening credits only as the Boy) who departs for the big city in hope of finding the material success that will allow him to marry his sweetheart (Mildred Davis, as the Girl). It was a move that millions of Americans were to make during the decade, as the country continued its transformation from a self-sustaining agrarian society to a complex urban culture of buying and selling. As a clerk at the De Vore Department Store, Lloyd’s job is to sell bolts of fabric to middle-class women who are still accustomed to making clothes for themselves and their families. A sale provokes a near riot, and to restore order Lloyd has to pick up a measuring stick and deploy it like a dueling sword (a reference to Lloyd’s box office rival and great influence Douglas Fairbanks). This Darwinian scrum must be escaped; management offers the only way out, as well as the only opportunity to make enough money to support a wife. When Lloyd hears an executive offer $1,000 for an idea that will draw customers to the store, he offers the services of his roommate (played by Bill Strother, the human fly whose performance inspired “Safety Last!” when Lloyd happened to witness him climbing a building in downtown Los Angeles).
- The image of Harold Lloyd hanging desperately from the hands of a skyscraper clock during Safety Last! (1923) is one of the great icons of film history.
- The comic genius of silent star Harold Lloyd is eternal. Chaplin was the sweet innocent, Keaton the stoic outsider, but Lloyd—the modern guy striving for success—is us. And with its torrent of perfectly executed gags and astonishing stunts, Safety Last! Is the perfect introduction to him.
Harold phones his friend and offers him $500 to scale the 12-story building, quite wonderfully expressing no hesitation whatsoever in carving off a 50 percent commission for himself — exactly what an all-American go-getter would do. Harold Lloyd romances Mildred Davis in the silent 1923 comedy “Safety Last!,” perhaps Lloyd’s masterpiece. The Lloyd character’s urban struggles in the film resonated with Jazz Age audiences. Credit Criterion Collection As it turns out, he more than earns it.
When the appointed hour arrives (2 p.m., exactly, as it needs to be in order to have the clock hands aligned for the moment of truth at 2:45), Bill is being pursued by a suspicious cop (Noah Young, a Lloyd regular and one of the great faces of silent comedy). Harold has to climb the first story himself, and then the second and then on to the top, confronting a series of perils (including pigeons, a mouse and a wooden plank thrust out a window by a team of carpenters) as he claws his way to the ultimate goal, financial stability and the home and family that comes with it. For Lloyd himself, the climb was barely a metaphor. Born in the tiny farming village of Burchard, Neb., Lloyd had arrived in California in 1912, as full of ambition as the comic hero he would eventually create. Beginning as a Chaplin imitator under the name Lonesome Luke, Lloyd passed through the broad slapstick tradition of early film comedy, slowly separating himself from the new medium’s large herd of mustached grotesques as he constructed his own naturalistic, psychologically rounded character. The horn-rimmed glasses, which he did not wear off camera, became his trademark and the badge of his down-to-earth, boy-next-door appeal. The Criterion edition of “Safety Last!” also contains three newly restored short films — (1918), (1919) and (1920) — that illustrate the stages of Lloyd’s development, as well as the superb documentary produced by David Gill and Kevin Brownlow in 1989.
The two other geniuses of the documentary’s title are, of course, Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton, both of whom Lloyd trounced at the box office in the ’20s. (Although Chaplin’s films made more money individually, Lloyd made more of them.) Chaplin and Keaton lived poetically in worlds of their own creation, while Lloyd lived, thrillingly but unmistakably, in a world the audience recognized as its own. When that world — the booming, newborn, irrepressibly optimistic America of the 1920s — ended with the bust of, Lloyd’s career collapsed as well.
Harold Lloyd Safety Last Photos
Although he had a pleasant speaking voice and continued to make movies after talkies came in, he was too strongly identified with the ’20s to maintain his mass appeal. His can-do cheerfulness must have seemed a rebuke to moviegoers struggling to survive, and gradually he withdrew from public view as a wealthy man, taking his films with him (he was smart enough as a businessman to retain the copyrights for himself). Advertisement Although Lloyd’s features have been rereleased twice since his death in 1971, they’ve never taken root in the culture the way Chaplin’s and Keaton’s work has. Each generation seems to need to rediscover Lloyd for itself. The present generation will have the benefit of high-quality home video editions, as Criterion continues to release films from the Lloyd library in the months to come; it will not have, however, the immense pleasure of seeing these films with the large theatrical audiences they were made for, and which Lloyd understood more profoundly than his peers. He knew his public because he was his public, with the difference that, for him, the American dream came true. (Criterion Collection; Blu-ray, $39.95; DVD, $29.95; not rated) ‘Accidentally Preserved’ Silent comedy continues to inspire a passionate fan base, whose members are responsible for a substantial share of the research and preservation work in the field today.
One such dedicated individual is the musician whom New York cinephiles will know for his piano accompaniments to silent films at the Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere. Model has now, with the help of a Kickstarter campaign, issued a DVD’s worth of extraordinarily rare silent comedies featuring overlooked stars of the period.
Harold Lloyd Safety Last Video
I accept without question that there were times in 'Safety Last' when Harold Lloyd could have fallen to his death. The question becomes: Is that funny? Sony ebook reader buy books.
These are films that only survive because they were reissued in 16-millimeter by companies catering to the home movie market before the days of VHS — hence the title of Mr. Model’s collection, “Accidentally Preserved.” Here, accompanied by program notes by Steve Massa (whose fine book on neglected silent comics, “,” was recently published by BearManor Media), are films featuring classic broad slapstick with stars like Paul Parrott and Clyde Cook, as well as extremely rare work by comedians like Wallace Lupino and Neal Burns, who followed Lloyd into more naturalistic characterizations. This compilation is aimed at specialists, but it is a sterling example of the kind of home-brew work that is now possible in film preservation, and where much future effort will doubtlessly lie. All nine films come, of course, with scores performed by Mr. (Undercrank Productions; $19.95; not rated).