Safety Last!
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| Safety Last! | |
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| Directed by | Fred C. Newmeyer Sam Taylor |
| Produced by | Hal Roach |
| Written by | Hal Roach Sam Taylor Tim Whelan |
| Starring | Harold Lloyd Mildred Davis Bill Strother Noah Young Westcott Clarke |
| Release date(s) | April 1, 1923 |
| Running time | 73 min |
| Country |  United States |
| Language | Silent film English intertitles |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Safety Last! is a 1923 comedy silent film starring Harold Lloyd. It includes one of the most famous images from the silent film era: Lloyd clutching the bending hands of a clock on the side of a building as he dangles from the outside of a skyscraper above moving traffic. The film was highly successful and critically hailed, and cemented Lloyd's status as a major figure in early motion pictures. It is still popular at revivals, and is viewed today as one of the great film comedies.
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[edit] Plot
Most of the film's plot is a setup for the stunts of the final sequence. The first scenes show Lloyd behind bars with two women consoling him as a somber official and priest show up and the three of them walk toward what looks like gallows. The camera then moves to facing towards the bars from the opposite side and it becomes obvious they are in a train station and the noose is a train order dispatch setup. During the farewells with the women who come through the ticket barrier (the bars), he promises to invite his girlfriend to the city once he has "made good". After getting his luggage mixed up with a woman's baby and his train with an oxcart, he is off to the city.
There he gets into a clerk's job at a department store where he has to pull various stunts to get out of trouble with the snobbish floorwalker Mr. Stubbs. He has been renting a room double with his Pal "Limpy" Bill who is a construction worker. When Lloyd gets off his shift, he sees an old friend of his as a policeman working the beat. After joking around with him for a while, his Pal shows up. Bragging to his Pal about his friend in uniform would let him get away with, he invites his Pal to knock the policeman backwards over him while he's using the police box. When his Pal does so, he knocks over the wrong policeman. To escape, he climbs up the façade of a building; the policeman tries to follow but can't get past the 1st floor. Before giving up, the policeman shouts a threat to the Pal: YOU'LL DO TIME FOR THIS! THE FIRST TIME I LAY EYES ON YOU AGAIN, I'LL PINCH YOU!
Meanwhile, Lloyd has been attempting to hide his misfortune by sending his girlfriend at home the most expensive presents he can't really quite afford. She mistakenly thinks he is already successful enough to support a family and takes a train to visit him. In his embarrassment he pretends to be the store manager when she first arrives, managing to get back at Stubbs for his earlier complains against when he was being attacked by women at his counter. He comes ever closer to losing face and antagonizing his co-workers in a series of incidents and accidents. While attempting to retrieve her purse, he overhears the general manager talking about how he would give 1,000 dollars to anyone who attracts major attention to the store. He then remembers his Pal and the policeman, and pitches the idea (with a little help) to his boss. He then promises to pay Pal 500 dollars to climb the building. He intends to sit back and make 500 dollars with little or no effort.
With the intervention of a drunk, "The Law" (the policeman pushed over) realizes Bill (the Pal) is going to be the one climbing the building. He hangs around and all efforts to get rid of him fail. Finally Bill suggests Lloyd climb the 1st story and then switch his hat and coat with Bill, who will continue on from there. After Lloyd starts up, the Law sees Bill and chases him into the building. From then on Lloyd runs into all sorts of trouble, and at each floor the Law gets to his Pal before he can switch out. He eventually reaches the top and gets the girl.
[edit] Background
The spectacular stunts of the film are an enduring testament to Lloyd and his film collaborators. The scenes were created without modern special effects, and were actually staged on high buildings. The long shots of Lloyd during the building climb were performed by Bill Strothers, the real-life "human fly" who inspired the film and costarred as Lloyd's roommate. Lloyd himself performed the medium-shots and close-ups (such as the famous clock sequence), which were staged on a series of facades built on the rooftops of buildings in downtown Los Angeles. The camera and sets were ingeniously positioned so that Lloyd appeared to be hanging above the streets. These stunts were still dangerous and demanding, especially since Lloyd was missing the thumb and forefinger on his right hand (due to a 1919 accident with a prop bomb), and wore a prosthetic glove. Lloyd reportedly dislocated his shoulder during the filming of the famous clock sequence. The effect was truly remarkable, and audiences remain astonished at the vivid sense of danger. At original screenings of the film in 1923, audience members were reported to have fainted, a fact played up in the film's promotion.
Safety Last! also features Mildred Davis, Bill Strothers, Noah Young and Westcott Clarke. The movie was written by Jean C. Havez, Sam Taylor, H.M. Walker and Tim Whelan. It was directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor for Hal Roach Studios. Composer Carl Davis created a new score for the film in the 1990s for British television station Thames Television's Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film. Davis has conducted live performances of the film with full orchestra, and the score was later used in both the video and 2005 DVD issues.
The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Jackie Chan's 1983 directorial effort Project A contains a deliberate homage to the clock tower scene in Safety Last!
Back to the Future also pays homage to this movie when Christopher Lloyd hangs onto the hands of the clock tower in Hill Valley while trying to reconnect a cable.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Official website (only the forum is currently online)
- Safety Last! at the Internet Movie Database
- A Roger Ebert review.
- A filmsite.org review.
- Turner Classic Movies
- Variety.com
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| Silent | A Sailor-Made Man (1921) • Grandma's Boy (1922) • Doctor Jack (1922) • Safety Last! (1923) • Why Worry? (1923) • Girl Shy (1924) • Hot Water (1924) • The Freshman (1925) • For Heaven's Sake (1926) • The Kid Brother (1927) • Speedy (1928) • Welcome Danger (1929, released 2005) |
| Sound | Welcome Danger (1929) • Feet First (1930) • Movie Crazy (1932) • The Cat's-Paw (1934) • The Milky Way (1936) • Professor Beware (1938) • The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947) |
