Safety Last (1923)

“Safety Last” (1923) is the one with Harold Lloyd hanging onto a clock, dangling from a building several stories high. You know the one.

Much has been written about Mr. Lloyd’s comic genius (including from time to time on this blog), and about his remarkable ability to still perform some stunts through the 1920s even though he had lost his right thumb and forefinger in an accident.

What is especially interesting about this film, like many of his other films of this period, is the legacy of an unintentional documentary slice of the 1920s. Mr. Lloyd and his gang are out to set up gags, thrill sequences, and climactic endings, but inadvertently document for us the era in a way later films shot primarily on studio lots, did not. There is a gloss to 1930s films, even the Warner Bros. gangster films, where illusion and façade permeate the story. The Dead End Kids are a big stagey, and even Bogart and Cagney get a bit talky at times. But in the films of Harold Lloyd where he plays his “glasses character,” there is a whole world going on in the background that no longer exists. It comes through the film in a genuine and unselfconscious sort of realism.

The story of this film has Harold, a.k.a. The Boy, leaving his sweetheart in the small town to go to the big city to Make Something of Himself. The line in the caption is “make good.” Making good used to be important in our society, and it had nothing to do with getting rich quick with fail-proof techniques learned from TV infomercials. It had nothing to do with skill through steroids, and not an ounce of bling was required or even tasteful.

“Making good” was a leftover Victorian principal, just beginning to be made fun of in the breezy 1920s, but not so much that it wasn’t still accepted as proper. It had to do with accomplishment, self-reliance, and respectability.

The film opens with a clever sight gag, where Lloyd is seen through bars, a noose hanging in the background, and a minister standing by. His girl, played by Lloyd regular and future wife, Mildred Davis, is teary-eyed. We think he is on death row, but when the camera shows us he is leaving the train station and the bars are just gates, the noose is a mail catch device for the train, and the minister, and his girl are just seeing him off on his adventure, we know we are in for a ride. Already we have been fooled.

As he is about to board his train, he mistakes a baby carrier for his luggage, and nearly walks off with an infant. Notably, the baby and mother are African-American, but this is not a racial joke. The two could be played by white actors, so it is heartening to see someone get a day’s pay for film work who might otherwise not have a lot of opportunity for that. Also, the mother is dressed for travel, with a suit typical to the period and an enormous hat, looking every bit the middle class lady. It’s unfortunate that later in the film we are shown a Jewish jeweler in an unflattering stereotype.

What is most fascinating about the film are the scenes shot in the big city department store where Lloyd has found a job. He rooms with a pal, and the two have a clever gag where, hiding from the landlady, they crawl into their overcoats and hang themselves by pegs on the wall. Some of the funniest gags are the most simple.

He has a meager job as a sales clerk, but boasts to his girlfriend that he is a big success, and that his position at the store “grows in respectability every day.” We see again that respectability is a very important component in making good.

His supervisor is a self-important floorwalker with a pince-nez and a morning suit. Lloyd is nearly pummeled by a flock of women shopping for the bolts of cloth at his counter. We see that many of them, women looking to be about in their 40s and 50s, actually have their hair bobbed. This was not just a fad for the young flappers. They are not dressed as flappers, obviously, but though the post-World War I world is not the one in which they grew up, and they mean to adapt. There are women clerks in the store, too.

Saturday is a half-day, and this means payday. We see that these were still the days when one’s pay envelope contained cash, not a company check. Harold is paid $15 for the week. Incidentally, there was no withholding for taxes at this time, and Social Security had not yet been created. Harold spends his hard-earned cash for a lavaliere and chain for his girlfriend, to create the illusion for her that he is “making good.”

But the climb up the corporate ladder is not easy for The Boy. In one scene, Harold is reprimanded by his supervisor for having taken off his suit coat while working behind the notions counter. He is called before the general manager for working in public in his shirt sleeves. In front of respectable ladies. No dress-down Fridays in Harold’s world.

Unexpectedly, his sweetie comes to the big city to visit him, and there is a sequence of scenes in the store where Harold must try to continue to fake his importance, bossing around his co-workers and taking over the general manager’s office, without being caught.

The thrills really come when, in an attempt to win $1,000 from his employer by creating a publicity stunt to bring business to the department store, he ends up climbing the building. His pal is supposed to be the one performing the stunt, but being chased by a cop throughout the rest of the film prevents him from taking over for Harold, who tries the climb himself. A rather literal way to climb the corporate ladder.

The building is 12 floors, and was filmed at the Brockman Building on 7th Street in downtown Los Angeles. This climb is part amazing stunt work, and part amazing trick photography. The way the camera angles move from the first-floor viewpoint, to the upper floors, to finally the top of the building is dizzying and must have created quite a thrilling spectacle for the audiences who saw it in 1923, because it’s still terrific today.

Crowds gather below, and a number of obstacles nearly topple Harold’s nerve-wracking climb, including pigeons, a mouse, office workers hanging out the windows, and a clock face that might not hold his weight.

We see actual traffic below, actual advertisements on the other buildings, and an array of casual observers, important despite their anonymity, to create a visual documentary of the mores, the attitudes, the humor, and the pace of the times in the early 1920s. Tellingly, Lloyd’s having made good has nothing to do with doing well at his job, but because of a get-rich-quick publicity stunt. Lloyd was not just a man of his time, but a man before his time.

Number, Please? (1920)

Harold Lloyd’s “Number, Please?” (1920) is one of those films where what is in the background and not the focus of attention is just as fascinating as the action occurring in the foreground.

This is in part because of Harold Lloyd’s typical “modern” feel to his films. His characters, the costumes, the slang, all are pitched firmly in the 1920s. There are no timeless allegories for Mr. Lloyd as what might be presented in a Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton film. Lloyd is all Jazz Age and because of this, we are treated to a view of that era that is genuine and natural. It is one thing to see a film made today of that era, or a documentary, but it is quite another experience to witness a time period so completely unselfconsciously presented.

This short has a simple plot. Lloyd, and his rival, Roy, played by Roy Brooks, must be the first to ask permission of the mother of The Girl, played by Lloyd regular and future wife, Mildred Davis, for The Girl to go on a hot air balloon ride. The first one who gets permission from Mother, gets the girl.

What makes the film interesting is not so much the set up of gags (though one running sequence of Lloyd coming into possession of a stolen women’s purse and being unable, despite repeated attempts, to get rid of it, is very clever), but rather the set and the times. The action takes place at Ocean Park in Venice. It opens with Harold, dejected at being left by his girl, moping as he rides the old wooden Blarney roller coaster. We see the park amusements in the background of his adventures, the advertising signs and the attractions. They are quite eye catching, and it is a delightful game to look for detail.

Several amusement piers had been constructed in the early part of the 20th century around Venice, and the Pickering Pier, where most of the action in this film seems to take place, was built in 1913, and bought by Mr. Pickering in 1919. It was renovated and had a grand re-opening in June of 1920. This film was released in December 1920, so we are seeing a new and extremely popular venue for tourists and day-trippers in that period, practically while the paint was still drying.

Some of the gags in the film include Mr. Lloyd’s getting smacked in the face by a toupee on the roller coaster, which has flown off the head of the fellow in front of him. When Lloyd is given charge of The Girl’s dog, “General Pershing” (this is 1920, after all, and we were still flush off the ebullient conclusion of World War I), he ties the poor dog to a carousel. Of course, the carousel starts to turn, and the dog endures what no film crew would dare do to a dog today. However, after being dragged around and around by his leash, the dog eventually hops onto the carousel and is saved by his own ingenuity from being strangled.

The title comes from Harold’s deciding to beat Roy’s time by reaching The Girl’s mother through that newfangled contraption, the telephone, instead of running over to her house, as Roy does. The public phone booths are extremely busy and he must endure several frustrating failed attempts to reach one. These are the days before self-service dialing, and he must tell the operator the number to connect.

Phone calls no longer cost a nickel and cell phones make phone booths obsolete, but when it comes to customer service, nothing has changed since 1920. The operators gossip and pay no attention to their customers, and when they finally address poor Mr. Lloyd’s needs, they are curt, and they give him several wrong numbers.

We see signs for Lucky Strike cigarettes in the background, for the Pickering Pier, for Ocean Park (which would be demolished in 1975 after a fire in 1974), for the Denver Hotel. Sammy Brooks, a young African-American actor who played several roles for Lloyd in the 1920s, has a funny gag when Lloyd, trying to hide from the police, puts the child on his shoulders and puts his own coat and hat on him. Harold walks away from the cops, looking like a very tall black man with very long legs, very short arms, and a hat too big for him. In a way, it copies the very funny sequence shown earlier where Harold is looking at himself in the funhouse mirrors and we are shown several out-of-proportion images of him.

Eventually, Sammy gets knocked off by an awning, and Harold must keep running.

For more on the history of Ocean Park amusement piers, have a look at this fun website.

Haunted Spooks (1920)

“Haunted Spooks” is a two-reeler where Harold Lloyd, dumped by his wealthy girlfriend for another man, marries a complete stranger instead and spends the wedding night in a haunted house. As with most silent comedies, the plot is thin but never-ending, at least until the film runs out.

Harold Lloyd has a remarkable modern quality to him, as noted before (see June 21st and June 27th entries), perhaps it is as much to do with his simple costume of a regular suit and nerdy glasses, and his manner of occasionally looking directly into the camera, as if to gauge our reaction to what he is doing. When Chaplin or Keaton look in the direction of the camera, it is to gaze beyond it, as if it is not there. Lloyd knows we are there every step with him, and he seems to want to know what we think.

The action takes place in the South, as the caption tells us, “Go down the Mississippi River several miles and turn to the right.” The 1920s college boy wit continues with the explanation that “A southern gentleman has died for the first time,” and his heir, The Girl, must live with her husband in the family mansion for a year, or the whole inheritance will fall to The Uncle.

However, The Girl, played by Mildred Davis, is not married. She tells the lawyer, “But I have no husband -- nothing but a Ford and a phonograph.” With such dialogue, we get the feeling the roaring, carefree 1920s has begun with this film.

Her ambitious lawyer tells her he will round up a husband, and finds Lloyd failing at a series of unsuccessful suicide attempts after losing out his best girl to another. He does not look terribly despondent, however, just frustrated that nothing works, not jumping off a bridge into ankle-deep water, nor standing in front of an oncoming trolley which switches tracks right before it hits him, nor throwing himself, backside first, into the oncoming car driven by the lawyer. This is quite a funny sequence with the lawyer’s car moving backward and forward and side to side, desperately trying to miss Lloyd, who perseveres and stubbornly sticks his bum out in front of the bumper wherever he can find it.

Lloyd agrees to marry The Girl in a hasty ceremony, after which a comic automobile ride in the Girl’s previously mentioned Ford out to the mansion gives us a sensation of being in a fast-moving Ford ourselves, as we trail the happy couple behind a road hog.

Meanwhile, at the mansion the Uncle, wanting to plant a trap and warn off the couple so he can inherit the mansion himself, tells tales of ghosts haunting the mansion on this night of nights to the assembled servants. All played by African-American actors and not white actors in blackface as was common before the 1920s, the staff are so upset by the ghost stories that they practically trample the happy couple on arrival in their haste to get away. Remaining is the dignified but anxious butler, who explains to Lloyd about the ghosts and the staff problem, and a young boy, played by Ernest Morrison. Young Morrison appeared in many silent films as a child and is probably the first black child star. Very popular, he worked for Hal Roach, and later appeared as one of the Dead End Kids in his teens.

Here, he is comic relief, when his unfortunate hiding place from the ghosts, a flour bin, covers him all in white powder and makes him appear ghost-like. He spends much of the film freaking out, and unavoidably freaking out others. This is the film of the famous shot of Lloyd with his hair standing on end in fright, as if from static electricity.

The mansion itself is an interesting set, very heavily ornamented, richly furnished, decorated with different wallpapers and wainscoting as to appear quite realistic and not like a slapped-together set.

Eventually the butler discovers the Uncle’s ruse and ghostly tricks, and he muscles him out. The other servants return, and Lloyd and The Girl proceed with their wedding night. As they enter their room, night clothes over their arms, she coyly asks him, “Say, what’s our name?”

Before all this chaos, there had not been time for a proper introduction.

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An Eastern Westerner (1920)

Harold Lloyd in “An Eastern Westerner” (1920) plays a rich milquetoast (do the younger folk of today even know that word?) who is sent by his father, after carousing all night in a dance hall where “Shimmie Dancing Prohibited” to an uncle’s ranch Out West as a punishment.

The plot is thin, the gags are constant, and hapless Harold Lloyd finds himself saving a damsel in distress and her father from the town bully. Like silent screen clown counterparts Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Lloyd does this through pluck, conscience, acrobatics, ingenuity, and a lot of dumb luck.

Unlike Chaplin and Keaton, Mr. Lloyd has a strange kind of modernity to him. Where Chaplin played the classic Little Tramp, a fellow who could have stepped out of the pages of Dickens to visit the 1920s, and Keaton, who played a wider range of roles in different historical time periods nevertheless still carried turn-of-the-20th century American Everyman about him, Lloyd was different. Harold Lloyd rode on the crest of the wave of public interest that had to do with the frivolous young college set, and he looked hopelessly collegiate.

Perhaps it is his round glasses which makes him seem like a modern day nerd, without any other affectation to his screen character (Chaplin’s costume or Keaton’s flat hat). Lloyd would make a credible computer geek today.

His antics to save The Girl, played by Mildred Davis, and her sausage curls from Tiger Lip Tompkins (Noah Young), the bully and his rather KKK-styled hooded gang called “The Masked Angels,” who we are told are “men who have broken eight commandments and twisted the other two,” Lloyd’s fighting is never direct but a kind of guerrilla tactic involving all the props one can find in an alley. There is an especially neat stunt when he hides in a wooden barrel, which is set to rolling and quickly smashes against a porch with the staves coming apart and the Lloyd entangled in the hoops.

Another fun scene is when Lloyd sits in at a game of cards and a tough hombre rolls his own cigarette with one hand while concentrating on his hand of cards. Lloyd tries to imitate him and comes out with a handful of factory-perfect cigarettes at once. Luck is occasionally with him.

In the silent screen days, at least with the comedies, the gags were the foundation of the plot, which was loosely constructed around the gags. It is as if a modern-day stage magician started to form a story around the tricks he performs for us on stage. The tricks are the purpose of the act; the story is just to string us along until the next trick.

The wild and wooly western town is actually quite realistic-looking, with its uneven streets and alleys and run-down structures. It looks more realistic than the neatly laid out and painted western towns of the B-westerns of a couple of decades later. Perhaps because 1920, when the film was made, was a bit closer to the wild west days than the late 1940s.

The film closes after one more stunt with a train, the damsel saved, and Mr. Lloyd takes a pencil and draws a circle around her ring finger, indicating they are to wed. It is the kind of thing Chaplin would do because the Little Tramp never had any money, but wealthy young college boy Lloyd should have been able to wire home for the dough to purchase a diamond. At the very least, such a gesture illustrates how much the film contemporaries borrowed from each other.

This film is also noted for being shot just after Mr. Lloyd lost part of his right hand in a stunt on a previous film, though his flesh-colored prosthetic glove and his superb athletic ability never reveals to the audience that he is now with a handicap. Like the character he played, he always found a way around a problem and never gave up.

That's all for this week. See you Monday.

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