Safety Last!

There’s a moment early on in Harold Lloyd’s perennial silent hit in which his character (sometimes called ‘the boy’ but sometimes bearing his own name) and the said character’s roommate Limpy Bill (Bill Strother, a steeplejack by trade) are in their shared apartment and hear the landlady approaching. Two weeks late with the rent and having pawned all the furniture, they glance around anxiously for somewhere to hide, then dart for the wall where their long coats are hanging, grab the hooks behind them and pull themselves up out of sight. The landlady is baffled, the threat of eviction postponed. It’s a simple but inspired comedy moment which also demonstrates the athleticism which marks out Lloyd’s particular brand of comedy.

The film is full of spirited gags like this, all building up to the famous scene in which our hero dangles from a clock face six floors up over a busy street – an image with which cinemagoers of all ages remain familiar although it is now 100 years old. Safety Last! has a special anniversary screening as part of the 2023 Edinburgh International Film Festival, and this is unlikely to be the only chance to catch it on the big screen, which is well worth doing if you get the chance. The daredevil stunts are only part of the appeal. There are some brilliant slapstick sequences and there’s also great character work which emphasises that, for truly skilled actors, spoken dialogue is far from a necessity.

As Harold plays Harold, so does Mildred Davis, whom he married that same year, play Mildred, who promises to marry the fictional Harold when he has ‘made good’ in the city. With her soft curls, lace trimmed collars and floral accessories, Mildred is the perfect image of sweet, yearning femininity established in Hollywood over the preceding decade, but with a skill to match her co-star’s she can switch in an instant to a forceful expression of disapproval which keeps her man firmly in line, without ever losing his devotion. The flip side of this, however, is that he feels forced to lie to her, pretending he’s doing much better than he is. When she decides to pay a surprise visit to the fabric store where he works, a desperate farce ensues as he endeavours to maintain her belief that he’s a manager and not just a lowly sales clerk, without losing his job in the process. If you’re somebody who typically finds this kind of comedy distressing to watch, you’ll be surprised by how easily it plays thanks to Lloyd’s light touch.

The easy charm with which the boy gets himself out of trouble almost matches the mischievous streak which gets him into it, yet Lloyd still manages to make him seem both socially and physically vulnerable. This is aided by some brilliant camerawork, with directors Fred C Newmeyer and Sam Taylor frequently using elevated viewpoints to make him seem small (though he was a little over average height for the time). Scenes in which we see him hanging off the side of a bus or literally flung around by demanding customers all contrive to emphasise his fragility when it comes to that final sequence.

At the time of release, and for an impressively long time thereafter, the myth was maintained that Lloyd really climbed all the way up a building himself. It wasn’t true, of course, but the way the stunts were staged – and he did most of them himself – was still far from safe, even by the standards of the time. What is perhaps equally impressive is the way the myth survived despite the fact that if you pay attention it’s easy to see that the background changes between shots. Without trying, you won’t notice it, because your eyes will be fixed on Lloyd. As one calamity after another assails him during his ascent, he seems perpetually on the verge of falling – and at no point does the real peril interfere with the acting, even when the latter places him at increased risk. It’s a tour de force and there’s really no wonder that we remember it a century later.

Safety Last! is one of those rare films which deserves every bit of its hype, and which belongs on anybody’s list of essential cinema.