‘Safety Last’: Harold Lloyd classic turns 100 with special Academy Museum screening

Bespectacled Harold Lloyd, one of the legendary clown jewels of silent film, is best known for such films as 1924’s “Girl Shy” and “Hot Water,” 1925’s “The Freshman” and 1928’s “Speedy.”  And his masterpiece “Safety Last!” is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. In this charming comedy, Lloyd’s “The Boy” leaves his small hometown hoping to make it good in the big city and earn enough money to send for his starry-eyed girlfriend (Mildred Davis). Though there are many wonderful moments in the film, “Safety Last!” is best membered for the sequence in which Lloyd defies gravity hanging from the hands of a gigantic clock of a high-rise building.

And if you live in Los Angeles and its environs, you can catch a beautifully restored screening of “Safety Last!” Sunday August 27 at 2 p.m. at the Academy Museum’s David Geffen Theater. A live orchestra conducted by Angel Velez of the late Carl Davis’ original score will accompany the film. Suzanne Lloyd, the comedian’s granddaughter and trustee of his films who has worked the past five decades restoring and presenting his films, will introduce “Safety Last!”

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I caught up with Lloyd  during a recent Zoom conversation.

Though “Safety Last” is a century old, it doesn’t date. It’s brilliant rom-com.
He was basically the father of romantic comedy. It’s his take on life, which is so lovely. You got to make a living. He wants to get the girl. Every comedy Harold made, the second plot was ‘I have to get the girl,’ whether its meet the girl, date the girl, get engaged to the girl and ask the girl to marry me. He never got married in a picture except for one where he was married in a feature called ‘Hot Water.’ But in the end he said, ‘I couldn’t play that well. I could get more out of the single boy in the romance chasing the girl. ‘That is romantic comedy.

There are also a lot of parallels between 1923 and 2023.
When he shot it, everybody was moving. Everybody was moving fast. They had come out of a war. Everybody had a gimmick. They were heading toward a recession. They had come out of a pandemic, very similar to COVD. Sometimes they say fashion repeats itself every 15 years, 20 years. It’s the same in life. It goes in a cycle. Harold, his films, his character….He  was the regular guy. He’s got a pair of glasses; he blends into society.

“Safety Last” features one of the most indelible comedy sequences in in which he hangs from the hands of a clock tower high above the streets of downtown Los Angeles. How did he come up with the idea of the film?
He saw Bill Strother, who was called the Human Fly, climb a building in downtown L.A. It just terrified him. He couldn’t really watch. He went around the corner, came back, looked, went around the corner, came back, looked and said ‘Oh my god, this guy is still up there.’ When he realized, {Strother] was going to get to the top, he went in the building and said who he was and ‘let me have access to this gentleman…. meet him.’ And he did. He said ‘I’ve never seen anything like this. I have to make a movie out of this. I want to scare people and thrill people and have them feel the way I felt and the crowd felt watching this man climb this building.’ He wanted to capture that thrill.

Though it looks like he was climbing a ten-plus story building, in “Safety Last” that wasn’t the case.
He was still five stories [up] at some point when they were doing stuff. He could have been really hurt. He had a mattress.  He had a single mattress on a platform. In this climb, there were these little ledges he could put his fingers in. The clock was stored at Paramount for years. It was a fake clock they put on top of the roof on top of a platform so you could get even more depth. He used three different buildings.

How long did it take to shoot that entire scene?
It took him about two-and-a-half, three months. The light has to match with the climb, so they could only shoot from 11 a.m. to 1:30 pm., 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. They couldn’t [go any longer} because shadows could come across the building.

I read, though, that stuntmen were used in long shots.
He had a stuntman in the long shots because insurance wouldn’t let him do it. He wasn’t that crazy.

Harold did that stunt with just eight fingers, having had his thumb, index finger and half of his right hand blown off in 1919.
They put a live bomb in his hand with a fuse [for a scene] and he was going to light a cigarette from the bomb fuse. Luckily, he said to the photographer ‘you can’t see my face. There’s too much smoke.’ He dropped his right hand and  the bomb went off.’

“Safety First!” also marks the last time he worked with your grandmother, Mildred Davis.
They got married before the premiere. He told her ‘I can’t have you as my leading lady when I’m playing a bachelor; people know that we’re married to each other. This isn’t going to work.  And I really don’t want you to work. After she had my mother in May of 1924, she went to my {Harold] and said, ‘I’d like to do a couple of pictures; could I do that?’ He said ‘Go ahead honey, if  want to go back to work, it’s alright.’ Then she did two films.

For more information on the screening go to www.academymuseum.org

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