The Great Movies III

Lloyd was "the third genius," the silent-film historian Kevin Brownlow declared in a documentary of the same name. Lloyd's films outgrossed those of Chaplin and Keaton in the 'zos, if only because he made many more than Chaplin, and his everyman appealed to a wider audience than Keaton. But he is not a genius in their sense, creating comedy out of inspiration and instinct and an angle on the world.

"He had to think it all out,"Walter Kerr says of Lloyd in his invaluable 1975 book The Silent Clowns. "Lloyd was an ordinary man, like the rest of us: ungrotesque, uninspired. If he wanted to be a successful film comedian, he would have to learn how to be one, and learn the hard way."

Lloyd played an early would-be Chaplin character named Lonesome Luke, then saw a silent film where the character calmly replaced his glasses after an action scene, and adopted the glasses as his own. To the degree Lloyd's famous character has a name at all, it is "Glasses," and in Safety Last, he is billed merely as The Boy. The glasses make distinct a face that is otherwise pleasant, even handsome, but not remarkable in the way that Keaton's deadpan gaze and Chaplin's toothbrush moustache are distinctive.

Nor was Lloyd's character remarkable-not in the sense of Chaplin's Little Tramp, whose every movement expressed an attitude toward life, or Keaton's characters, always on the run, always deadly earnest about goals of overwhelming importance. The Glasses character in Safety Last would have blended with the background of the department store where he worked if it had not been for action imposed upon him. But what action!

The plot: The Boy promises The Girl (Mildred Davis, Lloyd's reallife wife) that he will go to the city, make good, and send for her. He gets a lowly job as a dry-goods clerk, but impresses her with such inventive letters that she hurries to the city to join him.The Boy poses as the manager of the store, is exposed, and decides to risk everything for a si,ooo prize offered to anyone who can lure more traffic to the store. His idea: have his roommate (Bill Strother), a human fly, climb the building.

This is a splendid idea, as far as it goes. It doesn't take into account that the roommate has earlier angered a cop (the silent veteran Noah Young) and escaped from him by climbing up the side of the building. Now, as the roommate prepares to repeat the stunt, the cop appears and gives chase, and The Boy is forced to substitute as the climber. The theory is that the roommate will replace him on the second floor, or the third, or sooner or later, but Glasses ends up scaling the entire building, despite hazards on every floor. A child showers him with peanuts, which attract hungry pigeons. A mouse climbs up his pants leg. A window swings out and almost brushes him to his death. A weathervane changes direction and nearly dooms him. And finally there he is, hanging from the clock. A little later, he does some remarkably casual walking or even dancing on the building's roof ledge.

It looks real. That is the whole point. It seems to really be Harold Lloyd, really climbing the building, over a real drop that would be fatal. Kerr emphasizes in his book: "virtually every shot in it keeps the street below in view."

Well, was it Lloyd? It certainly wasn't special effects, which were not capable in 1923 of creating such illusions. In many shots, it is clearly Lloyd because we can see his face. In longer shots, as Kerr points out, the climber is certainly not the shorter and stockier Strother, who was a human fly in real life.

Analysis of the camera angles suggests that the height was exaggerated by using a building on a hill and by selecting dramatic camera angles. Lloyd himself said he had a platform with mattresses on it placed one, two, or three stories below him. After his death in 1971, according to the critic Dennis Schwartz, "it was finally revealed that the famous climb up the 12-story building was done with the aid of a stuntman."With the aid. What exactly does that mean? Having seen a high-resolution 35mm print in which I am clearly looking at Harold Lloyd much of the time, I am prepared to believe that certain shots may have been doubled, but that in others the star himself was in mortal danger.

That was not unique for the period. Buster Keaton did virtually all of his own stunts, allowing a building to fall around him in a hurricane, running on the top of a train, dangling over a waterfall. I accept without question that there were times in Safety Last when Harold Lloyd could have fallen to his death. The question becomes: is that funny?