Safety Last! 1923

The story

The Boy leaves his small town for the city, promising to send for The Girl as soon as he has "made good". He has not. He is a sales clerk at the De Vore department store, sharing a room with his pal Bill, sending home presents he cannot afford and letters that make him sound like the boss.

Then The Girl turns up. While keeping up the act, he overhears the real general manager offer a thousand dollars for an idea that will bring a crowd to the store. He has one: a man will climb the outside of the building. His pal Bill is a steeplejack who can do it for half the money.

On the day, a policeman with a grudge against Bill is waiting on the pavement. So The Boy starts the climb himself, just for one floor, until Bill can shake the cop off and swap places. The cop is never shaken off. Floor by floor the swap fails, and floor by floor something new goes wrong: pigeons, a tennis net, a painters' plank, the clock, a rope, a dog, a mouse up a trouser leg, a spinning wind gauge. At the top are the roof and The Girl.

Where the idea came from

In July 1922 Harold Lloyd stopped in a Los Angeles street to watch a man climb the Brockman Building as a publicity stunt and, by his own account, could hardly bear to look. The climber was Bill Strother, a steeplejack billed as the "Human Spider". Lloyd hired him.

Strother plays the pal, "Limpy Bill", and the limp is said to be real: he reportedly broke his leg shortly before filming. There was no written script. The climb was filmed first, and the story of how a clerk ends up on a wall was worked out afterwards to lead up to it.

How the climb was filmed

There is no trick photography in the climb. The trick is architecture.

In the summer of 1922 the crew built sections of the store's wall as sets on the roofs of three real buildings in downtown Los Angeles, each taller than the last, so that the street would drop further away as the climb went up. The camera stood on a tower, angled so that the real roof under Lloyd's feet stayed out of the picture. What you see behind him is the real city. The clock was on the roof of 908 South Broadway, which is still standing: at that point the street really is eight storeys down. The location historian John Bengtson worked all of this out from the streets visible in the background.

A platform covered in mattresses was built below the set, just out of shot. Accounts of how far below differ: two or three storeys, or about fifteen feet. It had no railings. By one account, when the crew tested it by dropping a dummy, the dummy bounced off and fell to the street.

The shots from far away, in which a tiny figure climbs a whole building, are Bill Strother on the International Bank Building, filmed on 17 September 1922 with a dummy clock hung on the wall to match. A circus acrobat did the swing on the rope, and an assistant director stood in for one moment on a ledge. The stuntman Harvey Parry said, after Lloyd's death, that he had doubled Lloyd in the long shots; the historians who have traced the locations credit Strother.

The rest is Harold Lloyd, on a wall, on a roof, a long way up.

Eight fingers

On 24 August 1919, Lloyd was posing for publicity photographs with what everyone believed was a prop bomb. It was live. The explosion took the thumb and index finger of his right hand and part of the palm, and blinded him for a time. From then on he wore a glove with a false thumb and finger in every film. Nobody watching was supposed to notice, and almost nobody does.

So the man hanging from the minute hand in 1923 is holding on with eight fingers.

He is also wearing glasses with no lenses in them. Since 1917 Lloyd had played one character, an eager, ordinary young man in horn-rims. Chaplin was a tramp and Keaton a stone-faced enigma, but Lloyd looked like someone you knew, which is what makes the climb work: he is so plainly a man who should not be up there. Taken together, his films of the 1920s are generally said to have earned more than theirs.

The Girl is Mildred Davis, his regular leading lady. She and Lloyd married on 10 February 1923, seven weeks before the film opened. It was her last picture with him.

Why it matters

It built a comedy on real suspense. Lloyd made a speciality of the "thrill picture", and Safety Last! was his fourth and most elaborate. The climb is a single idea wound tighter one gag at a time, each floor with its own obstacle. Action comedy has worked that way ever since.

It was a huge hit. The film is reported to have cost about $121,000, and it took about a million and a half dollars. Variety wrote that Lloyd "looks like a picture staple in the comedy line for all time."

The image outlived the film. A man hanging from a clock high above a city is known to people who have never seen a silent comedy. Doc Brown hangs from the courthouse clock in Back to the Future (1985), and a novelty clock of Lloyd on his minute hand ticks among the clocks in that film's opening scene: its writer Bob Gale has said they knew they had to feature it. Jackie Chan falls from a clock tower in Project A (1983). In Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011) the children watch the scene in a cinema, and the boy later hangs from a station clock himself.

The title is a pun on "safety first". In 1994 the Library of Congress added the film to the National Film Registry.