Preferisco l'ascensore

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")

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 the era of silent comedies, the man who was 2nd only to Charlie Chaplin was not Buster Keaton, but Harold Lloyd. Though he has since been mostly forgotten, except by film historians (who reluctantly list him automatically as the third great silent comedian behind Keaton and Chaplin), Lloyd's is still remembered for his clock sequence in Safety Last. More recently, this has been reproduced in "Back to the Future" and "Shanghai Knights".

However, it is not just the skyscraper sequence that makes this film special. Harold portrays his usual go-getter self, as his character moves to the city and tries to become a successful businessman, in order to impress his girlfriend. Along the way, there are many amusing mishaps, which conclude with the aforementioned skyscraper sequence. Quite magical in its silence, as compared to the later remake, also by Lloyd, "Feet First".

Highly recommended for silent film fans, and anyone wanting to get a taste of the genre.

I found much of the building climbing scene of this movie unwatchable. Not because it's poorly done, but because it's too well done. A certain amount of doubt in my mind about exactly how many of the shots are faked, and how many are definitely Harold Lloyd (distant shots are apparently a double, but many hanging-from ledges shots are close up shots of Lloyd) meant that the palms of my hands were sweating while I watched it, and I felt sizable relief when he finally makes it to the top. The pre-amble to the climb is not really that wonderful, but the climb makes it all worthwhile. Interesting to compare this movie to a modern effects movie like Starship Troopers. Give me Safety Last any day.

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.