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| Really, was there another image I should have used? |
Starring Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis and Bill Strother
Produced by Hal Roach Studios
"The Boy" is ready to make the leap to the big city. Get a good job, make some money, bring his girl into town and marry her. Sounds like a plan. In fact "The Girl" likes this plan so much, she is positive "The Boy" will succeed. The Boy of course starts feeling the pressure.
He hops a train (after accidentally carrying off a baby instead of his suitcase) and finds himself working the fabric counter at a department store. The pay is not great. He can't pay his rent, let alone make good on his promise to the girl back home. So, he pawns his phonograph (much to the chagrin of his roommate) and buys some jewelry to send back home.
Of course, this only convinces the girl that she should head to the city to visit her successful boyfriend. Faced with the choice between coming clean and developing a hair-brained scheme... well, we all know which option has the comedy gold. The boy tries to convince the girl he has an incredibly important job at the store and begins bossing some very confused employees around. He's exhausted from attempting to keep up the charade, but then he overhears his boss say he'll give a cool grand to someone who comes up with a plan that attracts people to the store. The boy accepts the challenge because...
Earlier in the tale, the boy's roommate escaped from the police by scaling the walls of a building. The boy figures he can just get his friend to replicate the stunt on the walls of the 12-story building his store is in, but this time with advertising. Hundreds of people show up for the event. Unfortunately, so does the cop who was chasing the roommate at the beginning of the tale. The roommate can't get anywhere near the building or he'll be pinched.
The boy swallows hard and decides to climb the building himself. And up he goes. His friend is set to relieve him in the middle of the climb, but there are complications. Will the boy survive the stunt? Will he get the girl?
Safety Last! is considered the Harold Lloyd masterpiece. While Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton were carving their niches in the pantheon, Lloyd was working on a different level best described as "holy $%!&, did he really just do that!" cinema. And staging the last third of your movie as a free climb up a 12 story building certainly falls into that category of movies.
The actual sequence in which Lloyd scales the building is thrilling. I've seen the iconic image of him hanging from the clock hundreds of times, but when the moment comes there is a real sense of danger. The movie is incredibly inventive in throwing up obstacles to Lloyd as he climbs and I won't spoil them here. The camera placement throughout is perfect as we see Lloyd up close, but we also get long shots of him actually scaling a building.
The only issue I have with the sequence is... well, it's not very comedic. That's not a problem per se, but when a film is advertised as a comedy and comes across as more amusingly thrilling then funny, it's worth warning people what they are getting into.
The rest of the movie is charitably hit or miss. I loved the comic timing of Lloyd attempting to board the train at the outset. The visual gag of how he and the roommate hide from the rent-seeking landlady is laugh-out-loud funny. And some of the moments in the department store are at least worth a smile. The camerawork and editing throughout are all top-shelf with some interesting dolly shots and a really great use of close-ups, medium and long shots.
However, there are also a lot of jokes that go on way too long. The sequence where the fabric counter is invaded by bargain-seeking women could have been cut in half. The moments where the boy is trying to convince the girl that he's a bigwig are just painful.
There's one moment in the film halfway through that took me completely out of the movie. The boy has brought the girl to his boss' currently empty office and pretends it is his own. He hears the boss coming so he has his girl sit down in the boss' chair, close her eyes and open her mouth. When the boss enters, he explains to the boss that the girl fainted and he should run to get water. But the girl hadn't actually fainted! She could hear every word he said! Why didn't she question him on this point? It was like when he said close your eyes, she went into an actual coma. Bizarre.
Still, my problems come in moments, in drips and drabs. The whole of Safety Last! is justifiably a classic for its amazing final third. The movie's sole purpose is to propel Lloyd onto that building and give film lovers one of the most iconic sequences of any era. Mission accomplished.
****1/2 out of *****
Photo from The Droid You're Looking For
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