Safety Last! (1923)
A small-town boy moves to the city for a lowly job as a department store clerk and inflates his success in letters to his sweetheart. When she visits, a publicity stunt goes wrong and he ends up scaling the building's face himself, floor by floor, dangling at one point from the hands of a giant clock.
The shot of Harold Lloyd swinging from a clock face is among the most reproduced images in silent comedy, and Safety Last! built to it through the “thrill picture” structure Lloyd had refined into a form of its own. It was selected for the National Film Registry.
Background
Harold Lloyd was one of the biggest stars of the 1920s, and Safety Last! is the film that made him a legend. The climb up the side of a tall building was shot on a rooftop set using camera angles to make the drop look lethal, and Lloyd’s stuntman, Bill Strother, helped with the longer shots. Lloyd himself had lost his right thumb and forefinger in a 1919 accident with a prop bomb and wore a special glove to hide it.
What to watch for
The clock scene is one of the most-copied images in film. Robert Zemeckis paid homage to it in Back to the Future. What is striking is how carefully the film builds to it, with a series of smaller gags that get progressively more nerve-wracking, so that when Lloyd reaches the top, the audience is already gripping their seats. Mildred Davis, who later married Lloyd, plays the girl. The film joined the National Film Registry in 1994.
