Safety Last!

The "human fly" antics which ends this movie is undoubtly the most famous sequence in all of silent cinema. It is also the most hilarious. Breathtaking, heart-stopping & very funny, it is the element that you remember the longest. While THE KID BROTHER was Harold Lloyd's masterpiece, SAFETY LAST was & is his most famous movie.

But don't overlook the rest of the film in which he plays a lowly store clerk (dealing with frantic female shoppers and an imperious floorwalker) who tries to convince his rather gullible girlfriend - played by real-life wife Mildred Davis - that he's actually the store manager.

Throughout, Harold Lloyd is beyond praise. His comic genius makes it all look so easy. And his athletic daredeviltry is even more amazing when you realize that 2 of the fingers on his right hand are fake - he lost the real digits in a freak studio accident.

In 1922, the country boy Harold says goodbye to his mother and his girlfriend Mildred in the train station and leaves Great Bend expecting to be successful in the big city. Harold promises to Mildred to get married with her as soon as he "make good".

Harold shares a room with his friend "Limpy" Bill and he finally gets a job as salesman in the De Vore Department Store. However, he pawns Bill's phonograph, buys a lavaliere and writes to Mildred telling that he is a manager of De Vore.

One day, Harold sees an old friend from Great Bend that is a policeman and when he meets his friend Bill, he asks Bill to push the policeman over him and make him fall down. However Bill pushes the wrong policeman that chases him, but he escapes climbing up a building.

Out of the blue, Mildred is convinced by her mother to visit Harold without previous notice and he pretends to be the manager of De Vore. When Harold overhears the general manager telling that he would give one thousand dollars to to anyone that could promote De Vore attracting people to the department store, he offers five hundred dollars to Bill to climb up the Bolton Building. However things go wrong when the angry policeman decides to check whether the mystery man that will climb up the building is the one who pushed him over on the floor.

"Safety Last!" is one of the funniest comedies ever and the joke begins with the title that plays with the expression Safety First! Another day I saw "Hugo" and Martin Scorcese pays a tribute to "Safety Last!" showing the scene of Harold Lloyd hanging from the Bolton Building clock and I have decided to see this film again.

If Harold Lloyd himself or a stuntman climbed the building, it does not matter. The breathless scene is among the most known in the cinema history and "Safety Last!" is a must-see film for any generation. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): "O Homem Mosca" ("The Fly Man")

This is an excellent comedy in the best tradition of the silent classics. It is pleasant and lively, with a story revolving around silly predicaments combined with a good assortment of gags, and it all leads up to a terrific finale that combines humor with excitement and suspense.

Harold Lloyd has an ideal role as an earnest young man trying to make good in the big city so that he can impress his girlfriend. His antics in the department store are very amusing - in this part, it's hard not to be reminded of "Are You Being Served?" - there is even Stubbs the floorwalker fussing endlessly over trivial details. The situation is built up nicely until we get to the famous climbing scene that climaxes everything. This climax is one of the best sequences of its kind, set up very carefully and executed skillfully with lots of good detail.

Most fans of silent comedies should find "Safety Last" to be very enjoyable. And even those who do not normally watch silent comedy should be able to appreciate its masterful and thoroughly entertaining conclusion.

One of the best contructed full-length comedies of the twenties. Harold Lloyd was not as outrageously inventive as Chaplin, nor as sentimental. His style was a kind of minimalist one, taking a simple idea -- say, being a hasseled salesman in a clothing store and needing desperately to become a success -- and building on that small situation until, by the hilarious climax, he finds himself swinging from the bent minute hand of an oversized clock on the side of a building many stories above the street. (Human flies were popular around this time, as were flagpole sitters and goldfish eaters.) When a mouse crawls up the leg of his trousers, not only does Loyd go through a sort of break dance trying to get rid of it but when he finally does shake it out, the mouse falls down the wall of the building and in the process removes a toupee from a spectator peering out of a lower window. All of this without matte work. Not to say that the earlier scenes in the store aren't extremely amusing, because they are. Loyd had a very mobile face and like most silent comedians a deft physical manner. He makes a splendidly fawning salesman. A very funny movie indeed, and thrilling as well. Any five minutes of the climax, taken at random, makes one dizzier than whole sections of Clint Eastwood or Sylvester Stallone hanging around the Eiger or elsewhere in the Alps. Somehow, Loyd managed to make a self-deprecatory joke out of his athletic skill, while nowadays stars use what amount of it they have as an opportunity to show off their bravery and, when possible, their bulging muscles. Let's hear it for the silents.

The first half of this film takes place between Harold Lloyd and his fiancée. Harold works as a clerk in a department store. There are plenty of sight gags in this section, including the hilarious scene where Harold hides in a coat hanging on a coat tree. You have to see this to believe it.

The second part of the movie consists of Harold climbing up the side of a building. Forget that this movie was made in 1923. This scene is one of the most hair-raising things ever filmed and will have you on the edge of your seat. It builds and builds with one gag after another, climaxing in the timeless movie image that everyone has seen, of Harold hanging from the hands of the clock on the building. Every time I watch this scene I get very nervous.

I highly recommend this film even if you are not a fan of silent films. Though Harold Lloyd's overall fame was eclipsed by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, this film deserves to been seen and ranks as one of the best silents ever made.

See it on DVD.