Safety Last!

There were three great male comedic stars of the silent era: Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd. Harold Lloyd often feels like the forgotten star of the three, but I think Safety Last proves that when he is at his best, Lloyd can easily compete with Keaton or Chaplin at their best.

Safety Last has the kind of tight simplicity I prefer in a silent film. A man moves from the country to the city to make something of himself, with the ultimate goal of making enough to justify getting married to his hometown sweetheart. Like Chaplin’s Modern Times, this provides a framework on which to hang many clever visual gags that play on contemporary city life and work culture. Unlike Modern Times, the goal of marrying the girl provides greater narrative drive and stakes than the Tramp’s intermittent relationship with the orphan girl.

The gags the film gets up to are great, as well. Lloyd brings an entirely different energy to his performance than either Keaton or Chaplin. The famed producer Hal Roach remarked of Lloyd’s lack of inborn comedic genius that Lloyd was the best actor to play a comedian. I think there is something to that analysis. Where Chaplin, for example, would cultivate a comedic chaos that he could throw himself into for laughs, Lloyd’s man in Safety Last is more like a normal person finding themselves in funny circumstances and trying to make the best of it, the result of which is great physical comedy. Chaplin is a bit more the clown, where Lloyd offers more realism, as strange as that is to say about the exaggerated world of silent comedies.

There are plenty of bits throughout the movie that had me laughing good and hard, enough so that I would rate them favorably against even Keaton’s and Chaplin’s best. However, all of that pales in comparison to Safety Last’s ending. The final fifteen minutes or so are absolutely sublime. This sequence, in particular the moment where Lloyd hangs off the hands of a giant clock, is iconic for good reason. However, there is so much more going on here than just the build to, and pay off of, that famous moment. In actuality, that moment with the clock is in the middle of a much longer and consistently hilarious set of gags around climbing the exterior of a building.

Knowing the famous scene before having ever seen the movie, I came in with an expectation that the movie was going to be funny here and there but that the main thrust of the film was to build to the daredevil stunt spectacle that made the film’s third act so famous. A sort of less well made and well rounded The General. Boy, was I wrong. The daredevil nature of the climb, while still thrilling in a way that holds up even for a modern audience, is arguably secondary to the fact that the events of the climb themselves are funny. It is loaded with physical gags and carefully crafted recurring comedic ideas, and the implied peril of the circumstances is just the garnish on an already excellent dish.

Safety Last delivers everything you could want from a silent era comedy. It is tightly paced and consistently funny, with more of a story to drive the film forward and tie gag to gag and moment to moment than many of its contemporaries. What it lacks in madcap zaniness (a la Chaplin) it makes up for in cleverly conceived and executed visual effects and/or stunts that somehow balance the appearance of peril with the release of a big belly laugh. Not an easy tightrope to walk.

Would Recommend: If you are interested in, what I think at least, is maybe the best and most well rounded silent era comedy.

Would Not Recommend: If you don’t like the idea of occasionally reading intertitles.