by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s film at the
annual silent-movie screening at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, with Steven
Ball providing a live organ accompaniment, was a comedy classic, Harold Lloyd’s
Safety Last! (I hadn’t realized the
title contained an exclamation point) from 1923. Other people got credited with
the direction (Fred Newmeyer, who went from Lloyd staffer to director in his
own right, making independent films in the 1930’s: I’ve seen two of them, Discarded
Lovers from 1932 — which was
quite good within the strangling budget limitations of an early-1930’s indie —
and A Scream in the Night, made in 1935 but so abysmal it didn’t get released until 1943, and that
only to take advantage of the popularity of its star, Lon Chaney, Jr., through
his horror films and mysteries at Universal; and Sam Taylor, who directed and
scripted the 1929 version of The Taming of the Shrew with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, leading
to the infamous writing credit, “By William
Shakespeare. Additional dialogue by Sam Taylor”) and the writing (Hal
Roach, who also produced — the film was a collaboration between Lloyd’s and
Roch’s companies and was distributed by Pathé — along with Sam Taylor, Tim
Whelan and title writer H. M. “Beanie” Walker, one of the few title writers who
made the transition to talkies by learning to write whole screenplays; he’s
credited with a lot of the Laurel and Hardy films of the 1930’s), but Harold
Lloyd was clearly the auteur. Lloyd was the most “normal” of the great silent comedians, both in
terms of his characterization and his personal life; of the great male stars in
silent comedy (Chaplin, Arbuckle, Keaton, Langdon) Lloyd was the only one who
married just once — to Mildred Davis, who co-starred with him in Safety
Last! as his girlfriend back
home in Great Bend.
I’ve argued in these pages that most of the silent
comedians played well-identified “types” within America’s class system: Chaplin
the lower-class “Tramp,” Arbuckle the proletarian working-class survivor, Lloyd
the middle-class striver and Keaton the upper-class twit (though, aside from
Chaplin, they sometimes dabbled in each other’s socioeconomic strata — Lloyd
plays an upper-class twit in the marvelous For Heaven’s Sake and Keaton a middle-class Lloydian character in Sherlock,
Jr. and Seven Chances). In Safety Last! Lloyd (playing a character listed only as “The
Boy” in the credits but identified as “Harold Lloyd” on screen) leaves his
small town of Great Bend to try his luck in the big city (obviously Los Angeles
since a number of signs identify it as being in California). He gets a job as a
sales clerk at DeVore’s department store but writes his girlfriend back home
every day (including Sundays — back then mail came all seven days of the week
and in some places there were still morning and evening mail deliveries) and, of course, makes her
think he’s a good deal more successful than he is. At one point he gets her a
lavaliere pendant and his roommate, “The Pal” (Bill Strother), points out that
she’ll need a chain for it — and there’s a surprisingly Chaplinesque scene of
pathos the next time he gets his pay envelope (he’s paid $15 a week in cash)
and the chain costs $15.50, meaning he has to forgo the 50¢ lunch he was
counting on. There’s a marvelous effects touch as each item on the display of
the lunch fades out as Lloyd hands over his last five dimes, one by one, to a
stereotypical Jewish jeweler in full Tevye drag. (One imdb.com “Goofs” poster
pointed out that a store owner who was that observant a Jew would not be open
on a Saturday, when this transaction is supposedly taking place.)
There are
also some great scenes in which Lloyd is shown at work in the fabrics
department dealing first with an incredibly picky customer who, it turns out,
just wants a sample; then, when there’s a sale at the fabrics counter, poor
Harold is inundated with the ugliest, meanest-looking women his casting
department could find, all demanding immediate service from him until he has a
brainstorm: showing a degree of public resourcefulness rare in a silent comic’s
characterization, he yells out, “Who dropped that fifty-dollar bill?,” and all the women descend to the floor to look
for it and he gets a moment of peace. He tries to impress his roommate when he
learns that one of the big-city cops is an old friend of his from Great Bend —
he dares the roommate to kick the cop in the ass and then Lloyd will square it
with his old friend — but in the meantime, of course, Lloyd’s friend goes off
duty and the cop who replaces him is significantly less sympathetic, chasing
his friend Bill (like Harold Lloyd and Mildred Davis, Bill Strother is playing
a character with his own first name) up the side of a building. Harold asks
Bill how he could climb the building, and Bill said he’s had years of
experience doing this sort of thing — Safety Last! was made at a time when there was a fad for “human
flies” doing death-defying climbs up tall buildings, and that’s undoubtedly
where Lloyd got the idea for this film (an imdb.com “trivia” contributor said
Lloyd actually witnessed Strother doing a human-fly stunt, got the idea for the
film then and there, and hired Strother to act in it) — and Lloyd and his
writers bank that piece of information for later withdrawal before moving to
their next plot issue. Their next plot issue is that Mildred (ya remember Mildred?) is coming to visit Harold in the big city, and
since he’s been so fabulously successful (well, that’s what he’s written her,
at least) she’s expecting him to marry her and buy her a house right away.
The
film deals with the various subterfuges with which Harold tries to maintain the
pretense that he has a more important job than he does, from sniping at his
supervisor Stubbs (Westcott Clarke, who’s taller but pretty much the same
“type” Franklin Pangborn played later) to impersonating the store’s general
manager. Nearly fired for his shenanigans, Harold hears the general manager —
the real one — say to his top staff that he’ll give $1,000 to anyone who will
come up with a new idea to promote the store. Harold thinks of his friend Bill
the human fly and proposes that a mystery man climb the 12-story Bolton
Building in which the store is located at 2 p.m. the next day. The DeVore
publicity people do a great job promoting the stunt, drawing a huge crowd and
also attracting a drunk (whose appearances throughout the movie were signaled
at the Organ Pavilion by live organ accompanist Steven Ball playing the
“Libiamo!” drinking song from Act I of La Traviata — Ball announced before the film that it takes him
40 hours of work to score a silent film, but both modern silent-film accompanists
and those in the actual silent-film era frequently used pre-existing music in
their scores — especially when, as here, the original lyrics or the song’s
content were analogous to those parts of the film) who ends up with a huge
tennis net draped over him as Harold executes the climb. Bill was supposed to
do it but that pesky cop (Noah Young) has traced him to the building and is
leading him a merry chase up the stairs; the idea was that Harold would climb
the first story, duck into a window and then change clothes with Bill, who
would do the rest of the climb. But every time Harold makes it to the next
floor Bill is still being chased by the cop and is unable to make the
substitution — the dialogue title, “Make this next floor faster. I’m having a
little difficulty in ditching the cop,” becomes a running gag throughout the
film — so Harold has to contend with bloodthirsty spectators crowding the
windows inside the building as well as a crowd below (in 1923, before process
screens, the only way Lloyd and cinematographer Walter Lundin could have got
those shots is to mount the camera on a construction crane), including a
supercilious twit who’s worried that Lloyd’s climb will injure his precious
dog, and an old woman who tells him, with genuine concern, “Young man, don’t
you know you might fall and get hurt?”
The big scene that everyone remembers
from this film — and the one whose stills have been reproduced so often they’re
familiar even to people who’ve never heard of Harold Lloyd — is the one in which he encounters a huge clock hung
on the side of the building and has to maneuver around it, a task made harder
by the giant clock spring in which his shoe gets stuck and what’s supposed to
be an electrical charge inside it that shocks him. Eventually he makes it to
the top of the building — after a last battle with a pesky anemometer (a device
for measuring barometric pressure) that gets in his way on the roof — and of
course Mildred is there waiting for him, and they clinch as we can “hear” in
the background (represented by the “I’m still trying to ditch the cop” title
printed in small type) Bill Strother still being chased by that pesky cop over
various building rooftops. There are differing reports of how the famous stunt
sequences were done — whether Lloyd was climbing over a real building (some
reports are that he actually used a horizontal set of a vertical building the
way Adam West and Burt Ward ascended in the 1960’s Batman TV series), how much danger he was in for real and
whether it was even he doing all the climbing. While Lloyd was alive the word
was that he’d done the stunt for real and it was all he, but after his death a
man named Robert Golden, credited on the film as an assistant director, claimed
he was also Lloyd’s stunt double for parts of the sequence (notably the one in
which a mouse climbs up his pants leg and Lloyd has to shake it loose). It is known that in 1919, three years before making this
film, Lloyd had suffered a terrible accident when a prop bomb unexpectedly
exploded in his right hand and blew off two of his fingers. The ever-inventive
Lloyd made a special glove so it would look like he still had nature’s full
complement of fingers, but in his heavy-duty stunt films, including this and
the early talkie Feet First (of all the great silent comedians, Lloyd was the only one who made a
fully successful transition to sound) he was grasping ledges and pulling
himself up from them with just eight fingers. (Later, after he married Mildred
Davis, Lloyd made another special glove for his left hand so he could still play a single man on screen
without taking off his wedding ring.)
Lloyd himself was rather kvetchy about Safety Last! in his later years — in one interview he said, “I
just made six thrill pictures, and those are the only ones anyone remembers me
for” — but what’s remarkable about this movie is that it’s not just some
ponderous exposition to set up a big action climax: it’s incredibly funny all
the way through. It’s also a great example of the nearly lost art of building
one gag on top of another (though before the film began both Charles and I
mentioned Scott Prendergast’s 2007 comedy film Kabluey, in which he directed, wrote and starred, as one of
the few modern comedies that emulated the silent greats in being able to build
one gag on top of another to make the audience laugh even harder at each
permutation). Harold Lloyd tends to get lost in the shuffle of the great silent
comedians because both he and his character were so normal — he married just once, saved his money, ran a
functioning business and invested most of the proceeds from his film career in
Los Angeles real estate just before it zoomed in value during the suburban boom
after the Second World War. He also played the most “normal” character of the silent comedy greats, and his films
may sometimes seem relatively ordinary because Lloyd didn’t have the intense
romanticism of Chaplin or the doomed fatalism of Keaton — but he sure knew how
to make people laugh, enough that British film historians Kevin Brownlow and the
late David Gill aptly called their biographical documentary on Lloyd (a
follow-up to the ones they did on Chaplin and Keaton) “The Third Genius.”
