Micro-review · 1923
Safety Last! (1923)
- Directed by
- Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
- Country
- United States
- Running time
- About 73 minutes
- Our rating
- ★★★★½ 4.5/5
You know the clock shot. You don't know how much funnier the 50 minutes before it are, or how nauseating the climb still is. Harold Lloyd plays the eager striver better than anyone. My palms were sweating at a movie from 1923.
The longer review
Most people know one image from Safety Last!: a young man in round glasses and a straw hat hanging from the hands of a clock high above a city street. The full film is a lot more than that image. It's a comedy about lying to impress your girlfriend, and the climb only happens because the lies have piled up.
Harold Lloyd plays "the Boy", a clerk in a department store who has written home claiming to be a manager. When his girl, played by Mildred Davis, turns up in the city, he spends the first hour faking it, hiding from his boss, borrowing an office and staging his own importance. These scenes are quick and inventive, and Lloyd's mix of eagerness and panic makes him easy to root for.
Then comes the publicity stunt. He arranges for a friend who works as a steeplejack to climb the outside of the store, and when the friend is chased off by a policeman, the Boy has to do it himself. Floor by floor, something new goes wrong: pigeons, a net, a mouse up his trouser leg, a painter's plank, and of course the clock.
The climb was filmed on sets built on rooftops so that the real street shows far below, and the camera angles sell the height completely. Lloyd did much of the work himself, despite having lost a thumb and forefinger to an accident with a prop bomb a few years earlier. Knowing that makes the sequence even harder to watch, in the best way.
Before you watch
Restored versions with recorded scores are widely available. The film entered the US public domain at the start of 2019.