#97: SAFETY LAST! (1923)

 

THRILL SCALE 1-10

5

HAVE I SEEN IT BEFORE?

Never

BEST SEQUENCE

The climactic building climb

BEST LINE

“...” - Everyone

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE

97%

ROTTEN TOMATOES CRITICS CONSENSUS

"Persuasive enough to give audiences acrophobia when they aren't laughing at Harold Lloyd's antics, Safety Last! is a marvel of visual effects and slapstick comedy."

IMDB SYNOPSIS

“A boy leaves his small country town and heads to the big city to get a job. As soon as he makes it big his sweetheart will join him and marry him. His enthusiasm to get ahead leads to some interesting adventures.”

THOUGHTS

• Due to its age, Safety Last! is in the public domain. So if by any chance you do want to watch it, the whole movie is easily available on Youtube. That's how I saw it
• This isn't a very plot-dependent movie, so I'll just describe it. The main character is a department store employee. He has a friend who's really good at climbing buildings. Main character overhears the storeowner say that he'll give $1000 to anyone with a good idea for a promotional stunt. Main character suggests his friend climbing the building will be good for business. Friend gets chased around by a cop, so main character has to climb the building instead. Seriously, that's the plot
• I haven't seen many (if any) silent movies, but this one has Harold Lloyd playing the protagonist, and Lloyd is considered an icon of silent comedy, alongside Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Lloyd did a lot of the stunts himself, and there was a certain amount of movie magic used to make the stunts less dangerous than they look, but they're still pretty impressive (and by the sounds of it, they were also still pretty dangerous)
• But while this was undoubtedly mind-blowing in 1923, that was also 100 years ago and we've come a long way since then. Watching Harold Lloyd climb the outside of a building is pretty cool, but he's still just...climbing a building. It's not exactly riveting stuff. Apologies to Tom Cruise in Ghost Protocol, which I haven't actually seen
• I'm sure this movie is included in this list for historical reasons, which is understandable and we'll have a few more like it, but they'll be hard-pressed to stack up to more modern stuff, at least in my opinion, which is the sole criterion of this blog
• Side-note, the aforementioned friend who can climb buildings like the dickens is named "Limpy" Bill, which is delightful
• Up above, under best quote, I made a silent movie joke, because I'm a clever boy like that. But there was some good old-timey wit in some of the title cards, and some good sight gags
• For example, in describing the main character's superior: "Mr. Stubbs - Head Floorwalker. Muscle-bound - From patting himself on the back." Something very quaint about that
• And having said that, my favourite part of the movie was probably seeing the depiction of working as a 1920s retail employee. The customers stay past the store's closing time, they fight over merchandise, and they ask annoying questions. As an ex-retail employee myself, I can confirm, some things never change

Up next: #96 on the list, and the first which is mostly thrilling because it's actually pretty disturbing, David Lynch's Blue Velvet. I'm also now remembering that movie titles should be italicized, so...moving forward, they will be!