Country: USA
Released: April 1st, 1923
Genre: Comedy
Directed by: Fred C. Newmeyer
Produced by: Hal Roach
Like Dr. Caligari it's hard to talk about Safety Last properly, which is a problem most comedies have. A comedy is only as good as its jokes, and beyond saying that they're good I can't really explain much else without spoiling most of the. I mean what am I supposed to do, describe all the punchlines and talk about how totally funny they were when Lloyd did it? What kind of review is that? To quote E.B. White, "Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process." Basically this doesn't leave me with much to talk about.
Suffice it to say that I was pleasantly surprised by how funny the movie was, despite its limitations. It didn't have me struggling for breath or anything, but it sure as hell tickled me, which is damn impressive for a comedy without any dialogue. I was genuinely impressed by the number of jokes that took me off guard, I was expecting them to all have been done to death by this point a la Nosferatu, but a lot of them still held up as pretty fresh. Keep in mind that as a silent film the humour is exclusively slapstick, but this is slapstick at its finest. Lloyd is truly a master of his craft and as an amateur comedian I can't help but marvel at the level of control he has on screen. Every facial expression, every pratfall, every breath is perfectly timed. The choreography for some of the more intricate jokes is absolutely delightful, and one can really feel the level of skill on display. Just when I thought the film was about to lose steam it threw another surprisingly clever joke at me and I was immediately sucked back in.
There isn't really isn't much in the way of thematic depth for this one. It's about as inoffensive as a movie can get, which was pretty much Lloyd's schtick. Perhaps that's why he fell by the wayside behind other comics. While Chaplin was pushing the envelope by offering a glimpse into the hardship of the Great Depression in Modern Times or satirizing fascism in The Great Dictator (another special feature I'll visit in the future), Lloyd stuck to "safe" stories. This is by no means to disparate his work or his talent, after all it ain't easy pulling off good comedy, but the plot itself is fairly generic. It's an archetype common to comedies of this time: a down on his luck dreamer hopes to make it big and woo his love interest; nothing all too groundbreaking here. Still the little romance is pretty sweet despite being cliche, mostly because Lloyd and Davis have great chemistry on screen.
What Safety Last offers is a series of jokes strung along by a basic plot, and in that sense it delivers. Lloyd is amazing to watch, and the dexterity he displays is incredible. Some of the sequences are so quickly timed I could swear there was some kind of special effects trickery on display if it all didn't feel so genuine. And that feeling of tactile realness really adds something special to the film.
I think it's fair to say that I enjoyed Safety Last. The jokes, even if not all completely original (at least with the foresight of over a century of comedy) are still well executed and fun to watch. It is a film that has aged surprisingly well and can still produce quite a few chuckles.
Released: April 1st, 1923
Genre: Comedy
Directed by: Fred C. Newmeyer
Produced by: Hal Roach
Written by: Hal Roach
Welcome to "Special Features!" What is the Special Feature you may ask? Simple. When going over Steven Schneider's 1001 Movie's You Must See Before You Die list I noticed it had some notable exemptions. Movies that by all accounts are considered classics and one would expect to be included but, for some reason or another, aren't. Seriously there are some glaring omissions, a lot of which I was hoping to watch and write about. So instead of just ignoring them I decided to compile and watch them alongside all the other movie in chronological order, squeezing them in where their spot on the list would be had they been included. I plan on being pretty selective on which omissions to watch, since one thousand movies is already a crap-ton, but expect a few more of these in the future.
So without further adieu, this is the critically renowned but editorially snubbed Safety Last.
If you were to ask the average movie goer to name an icon of silent comedies they will invariably answer Charlie Chaplin, maybe Buster Keaton if they were knowledgeable of older films. Odds are though they wouldn't mention Harold Lloyd, at least not by name. Harold Lloyd is a real conundrum of cinematic history. Despite being one of the fathers of movie comedies, up there with Chaplin and Keaton in terms of influence and contemporary fame he has since been largely forgotten my most mainstream audiences. In fact I bet you'd be surprised to learn that he grossed higher than Chaplin, and even was awarded an honorary Oscar before him (although to be fair that was also mostly fuelled by Chaplin's less than kosher politics during the McCarthy years). For all intents and purposes Lloyd was one of THE comedians of his time making it pretty odd that he's not on a list of greatest movies ever. How the fuck is it that one of the best comedians of silent films is ignored but I still have to watch a white guy squint for two hours in Broken fucking Blossoms? Ah well, what do I know? I'm just some dick on the internet who probably couldn't tell his ass from a hole in the ground. I just find it a bit perplexing that Lloyd would be ignored so thoroughly.
Which is especially disappointing since Safety Last is pretty great.
Most famous for producing arguably the most iconic image of the silent era (this one), Safety Last chronicles the story of Harold Lloyd as... Harold Lloyd. Yeah, an odd quirk of this movie is that characters are all named after the actors portraying them. Even stranger still they aren't credited by their names so much as by their role in the story. So even though his character's name is Harold he is officially referred to as "the boy" in the credits.
We'll just call him Harry to avoid confusion.
So Harry has just moved to the city, hoping to make a fortune and eventually marry his sweetheart "the Girl," referred to as Mildred and played by Mildred Davis because that doesn't feel weird at all. It's worth noting that Davis would eventually become Lloyd's wife, which is kind of sweet.
Anyways after a series of comedy set pieces Mildred surprises Harry in the city, which is problematic because he had told her he was the big-shot owner of the department store he worked at. Desperate to make money Harry convinces his boss to give him one thousand bucks in exchange for organizing a publicity stunt wherein his buddy "Limpy" Bill (Bill Strother, credited as "the pal" because I guess by this point Lloyd just wanted to fuck with us) would climb a sixteen story building. Bill unfortunately becomes indisposed when he's accosted by a grudgeful cop (Noah Young), forcing Harry to climb it himself. The film ends with Harry and Mildred meeting on the roof and walking off into the sunset.
Like Dr. Caligari it's hard to talk about Safety Last properly, which is a problem most comedies have. A comedy is only as good as its jokes, and beyond saying that they're good I can't really explain much else without spoiling most of the. I mean what am I supposed to do, describe all the punchlines and talk about how totally funny they were when Lloyd did it? What kind of review is that? To quote E.B. White, "Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process." Basically this doesn't leave me with much to talk about.
Suffice it to say that I was pleasantly surprised by how funny the movie was, despite its limitations. It didn't have me struggling for breath or anything, but it sure as hell tickled me, which is damn impressive for a comedy without any dialogue. I was genuinely impressed by the number of jokes that took me off guard, I was expecting them to all have been done to death by this point a la Nosferatu, but a lot of them still held up as pretty fresh. Keep in mind that as a silent film the humour is exclusively slapstick, but this is slapstick at its finest. Lloyd is truly a master of his craft and as an amateur comedian I can't help but marvel at the level of control he has on screen. Every facial expression, every pratfall, every breath is perfectly timed. The choreography for some of the more intricate jokes is absolutely delightful, and one can really feel the level of skill on display. Just when I thought the film was about to lose steam it threw another surprisingly clever joke at me and I was immediately sucked back in.
There isn't really isn't much in the way of thematic depth for this one. It's about as inoffensive as a movie can get, which was pretty much Lloyd's schtick. Perhaps that's why he fell by the wayside behind other comics. While Chaplin was pushing the envelope by offering a glimpse into the hardship of the Great Depression in Modern Times or satirizing fascism in The Great Dictator (another special feature I'll visit in the future), Lloyd stuck to "safe" stories. This is by no means to disparate his work or his talent, after all it ain't easy pulling off good comedy, but the plot itself is fairly generic. It's an archetype common to comedies of this time: a down on his luck dreamer hopes to make it big and woo his love interest; nothing all too groundbreaking here. Still the little romance is pretty sweet despite being cliche, mostly because Lloyd and Davis have great chemistry on screen.
What Safety Last offers is a series of jokes strung along by a basic plot, and in that sense it delivers. Lloyd is amazing to watch, and the dexterity he displays is incredible. Some of the sequences are so quickly timed I could swear there was some kind of special effects trickery on display if it all didn't feel so genuine. And that feeling of tactile realness really adds something special to the film.
I think it's fair to say that I enjoyed Safety Last. The jokes, even if not all completely original (at least with the foresight of over a century of comedy) are still well executed and fun to watch. It is a film that has aged surprisingly well and can still produce quite a few chuckles.
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