Safety Last! (1923)

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

So far i didn't know the movie, but the moment with Harold grasping the clock of the building is a classic iconic moment of cinema and i couldn't miss that in my movies timeline! Now 80 minutes to get it is maybe a bit too much and if the whole movie is funny, the pace is a bit slow, especially when Harold climbs indeed as he has a lot of adventures between floors. However this movie offers an incredible sight about the 20s downtown LA and actually we see the hero working hard to earn his life. It's crazy how the world has changed because now having a comedy about being clerk is just impossible! But this movie offers a lot of other things besides the climbing and honestly i found this universe much better, romantic and fun than Chaplin!

I've only seen one other work by Harold Lloyd and that was a short. "Safety Last!" proves that he was able to hold his own in company with Chaplin and Keaton, at least in the creativity he demonstrated by providing all the clever sight gags employed in this film. It starts right with the opening scene with that 'noose' ominously swinging in a background that calls to mind a prison scene, but then it dissolves into something entirely different. I also got a kick out of the 'hanging coat' routine by Lloyd and roommate Billy (Bill Strother) when the landlady came calling. With films going all the way back to the Twenties, it's tough not to marvel at what things cost a century ago. How about that overdue rent of fourteen dollars after two weeks! Or The Boy's fifteen bucks for six days pay at the DeVore Department Store. That kind of puts a businessman's lunch for fifty cents into perspective when you think about it.Ordinarily, pratfalls and slapstick don't appeal to me, but when you go this far back in time and see some of the origins of comedy, it can be very entertaining. And when you get to the building climbing scenes and the daring swings twelve floors above the pavement, you begin to admire how film makers pulled off stunts like that without the benefit of CGI. Obviously camera tricks were involved in some manner, but a lot of it makes you wonder 'How did they do that'? Maybe they all used some of that Johnson's Nerve Tonic from the Acme Drug Company.It's kind of uncanny how movie goers still thrill to the antics of someone defying gravity and other various laws of nature like the ones employed by Harold Lloyd in this picture. Just think about the clock swing and the multiple one handed grabs he made on the ledge of the high rise. The movie I saw just before this one was this year's "Tomb Raider" with Alicia Vikander in the title role, and she simulated all those same kinds of thrills in an appropriately more dangerous twenty first century setting. With all the advances in film making and technology, it seems like the folks who make movies today always go back to the industry's roots.

I'm not an expert on the silent era by any means, but I have to say, this seems like a must-see movie for those who are interested in this period of filmmaking. It includes the iconic moment of Harold Lloyd dangling from a clock face many stories off the ground, and also many wonderful sight gags and a cute story.We see Lloyd accidentally getting on a horse-drawn ice wagon instead of the train in the beginning, as he goes off to the city to earn enough money to get married to his sweetheart. We see him and his buddy putting their coats on, hanging themselves up on hooks, and pulling their legs up out of sight to avoid the landlady who is looking for rent in a brilliant scene. He gets a job as a salesman, and we see him handle a crowd of women all going berserk over a fabric sale in all sorts of inventive ways.The scenes of him climbing perilously up a building wall take place over the final 20 minutes of the film, and has him dodging nuts dumped out by a child, being mobbed by pigeons, being hit with a net from above and a giant wooden beam for the side before reaching the clock face. He then hangs from the clock hands in a scene that is both funny and thrilling, since you know it's real, and the framing of the scene is absolutely perfect. As he ascends he'll also dangle from a rope, have a mouse crawl up his leg, and walk precipitously on the edge of a couple of ledges.You're not going to be laughing out loud, but Lloyd is likable and charming, and you will probably marvel at his inventiveness, as well as the danger in performing the climbing stunt, which he did himself for the most part, with nothing but a mattress a few stories below (off-screen) for safety. It was 'safety last' in the real sense as well! Definitely worth seeing if you get a chance.

Chaplin has always been close to my heart, and Keaton's work I have seen extensively. From Lloyd's work, however, I had, prior to this, only seen a few short films. Is there a better way to plunge headlong to Lloyd's comic whirlwind than his most famous work, "Safety Last!" (1923)? Especially since it has been now restored and released on Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection, an amazing achievement in all respects.The most famous moment in the film is just as iconic as the scene in "Modern Times" (1936) where Chaplin is trapped in the cogs of the machine he has been working with. Both images stand as testaments to the vision of how our society value time, and of course money. Whereas Chaplin also annotates technology, Lloyd might as well annotate media: the newspaper of a mystery man attracts a wild crowd, some having arrived from mere curiosity, others to cheer, others to wait for a disaster. Isn't this a very modern presentation of what commercialized media at its most rudimentary is about? And isn't this exactly what we are doing when we, at the edge of our seats, watch for Lloyd to climb the building?Having of course seen the iconic image (on the cover of the Criterion, as well), I knew very little else about the film. What surprised me the most was how pregnant every scene is with perfect comic timing and visual humor. The very first shot sets up this mood, and the pace is frantic throughout. It's a climax after another, all building towards the last sequence. And the final scene where Lloyd climbs the building. It's so masterfully executed that even if one knew how it was shot (the wall was constructed on another building for them to be able to shoot against a real cityscape) it would still thrill. And it does. And no matter how strongly those images have permeated our cultural consciousness, they're still strikingly fresh and powerful, and I was literally gasping through the ride.What a godsend of a film!