290 - Safety Last!, United States, 1923. Dir. Fred C. Newmeyer & Sam Taylor.

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

290 - Safety Last!, United States, 1923.  Dir. Fred C. Newmeyer & Sam Taylor.

The Boy, Harold, is behind bars.

He looks forlorn.

A noose hangs behind him.

His girlfriend and her mother stand looking through the bars, saying Goodbye.

We understand that these are his final moments before his hanging.

But then . . .

The ladies walk around the bars, through a gate, and onto his side of the platform.

We cut to a turnaround shot.

We are on a railway platform.

The bars are the gate to the platform.

The noose is a holding ring for a catcher pouch on a railway mail crane.  The train goes by and a worker grabs the holding ring.

The Boy is not about to be hanged!  He is about to catch a train.

He says Goodbye to The Girl, his girlfriend.

We are in Great Bend, 250 miles east of Leasburg, 165 miles west of Gainesville--fictional towns in a generic swath of Middle America.

As The Boy hugs and kisses The Girl, the train begins to move.  He must hurry!

He picks up his suitcase and runs.  No.  It is not his suitcase.  It is a baby in a carrier!

The mother runs after him.  They switch items.  He steps aboard the train.  No.  It is not the train.  It is the back of an ice wagon!

He is going on the wrong fork in the road.  He gets off and runs to the train.

And we get on with him for a great ride.

Now in the big city, Harold shows his roommate Limpy Bill the lavalier he has just bought his girlfriend.  Bill goes to put on a record but the phonograph is missing.  Harold has pawned it for the lavalier.  Oops.

He has to impress her.  She put pressure on him back at the station.  He needs to show her he is successful in order for her to come to the city and marry him.  If he could pawn the rest of Bill's records, he could purchase the chain to go with the lavalier.

Bill grabs the rest of his records and holds them tightly.

The rent is past due.  The landlady is coming.  They can hear her put her key in the door.  They hide in overcoats on pegs, pretending to be the overcoats!

She enters.  She does not catch them.

The story will unfold and the gags will continue, one after the next after the next.

It will culminate in a twenty-minute climb up the outside of a 12-story department store building, featuring one of the most famous images in the history of motion pictures--

Harold Lloyd's hanging from the minute hand of the clock near the top of the building.

But there are more challenges than just that clock.  So many more.

A police officer, a drunk man, secretaries, a mocker, peanuts, pigeons, a net, painters, a 2x4 plank, an untied rope, a dog, a wide ledge above, an opening window, a mouse, a photographer and male model with a gun, a spinning weather vane, and swinging upside down from another rope.

Will he make it up safely?

Will he win the money and win the girl?  Or will he fall?  All that distance.  To the pavement below.

Nearly a hundred years later, Safety Last! remains one of the funniest films ever made.

And without CGI, green or blue screen, split projectors, rear projection, plates with matte paintings, or glass shots, the film was made the way films were made back then:  Harold Lloyd and his stunt double, Harvey Parry, both put themselves into real danger doing real climbing.

For wide shots, Harvey Parry really climbed the building, with a harness.

For all other shots, Harold Lloyd did the climbing.

They built facades on scaffolding on the rooves of real buildings so that as Harold Lloyd climbed, the audience could see the real streets below.

And Harold, a great dancer, really stumbled on the ledges and could have really fallen--up to twenty feet to the mattresses on the roof below him, or even off the roof and all the way down.  They performed a test with a mannequin, which did land on the mattresses and did bounce and go over the roof to the street below.

Lloyd wore rubber tightrope walker shoes.

And he wore a prosthetic on his right hand to fill out his fingers.

He was missing the index finger and thumb of his right hand, having lost them in an earlier movie accident.

Yet he was a 300 bowler with that hand, using a specially designed bowling ball.

And here he does real high wall climbing with eight fingers.

This is a film that can be watched two ways.

As a comedy.

And as a how-to on filmmaking.  Not just the stunts but also the gags.

As a bonus it is a documentary of the times--of Culver City and Los Angeles in the early 20s.

We have seen Safety Last! nearly a dozen times.

It never fails to pay off.

It is one of the great classics.