Safety Last!

A comedy that produced one of the best known images of the silent era. A young man from the country writes to his girlfriend that he has found work in the city and is rising fast. In fact he is a clerk in a department store; he can barely pay the rent and lives by dodging his landlady. The girl comes to the city to surprise him. He has to keep the lie going, and to bring customers into the store he offers an idea: someone will climb the outside of the building. He thinks he has arranged the climber. He has not. The last section is given over to that climb and contains the most copied image in cinema: a man hanging from the hands of a clock. Harold Lloyd performed the sequences himself. His hand was damaged; in 1919 a prop bomb exploded during a publicity shoot and took the thumb and index finger of his right hand, and he wore a prosthetic glove for the rest of his career. That hand is not visible in the climbing scenes. The real height of the building is exaggerated by framing; even so, the platform below did not make it safe. Bill Strother, who plays the climber in the film, was a professional building climber; Lloyd saw him performing in the street and put him in the picture. Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor directed. The right door for anyone starting with silent comedy. For a viewer with no patience for a slow opening, the first half is setup and the real section is saved for the end.