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| Noah Young and Harold Lloyd in Safety Last! |
I was sure I had seen Safety Last! but as the film progressed I began to suspect that I had seen only excerpts, including the scene in which Harold Lloyd, aka The Boy, dangles from the clock, reprised countless times in compilations of great movie moments. But this great film is more than that moment, or even the extended sequence in which The Boy climbs the façade and encounters that treacherous timepiece. Getting to that moment involves byzantine, almost Rube Goldberg plotting. Because The Boy is not even supposed to be climbing the building: It's a task meant for The Pal (Bill Strother), who instead is fleeing from The Law (Noah Young), racing through the building from floor to floor inside, intending to swap places with The Boy at some perpetually receding moment. And The Pal is in trouble with The Law because of a run-in that resulted from The Boy mistaking The Law for an old buddy of his, a different cop, and involving The Pal in a prank played by mistake on The Law. And the reason The Boy is involved in climbing the building is that he wants to win The Girl (Mildred Davis), who thinks he's actually the general manager of the department store where he's actually a lowly clerk in danger of getting fired. And the reason The Girl thinks that is ... oh, hell, watch the movie yourself. The point is that Safety Last! is an intricately worked piece of art. By contrast, even the best film of Charles Chaplin or Buster Keaton, let's say The Gold Rush (1925) or The General (1926), is a comparatively simple affair, with a story line that doesn't tax the summarizer. Which may be a clue to why Lloyd is not as highly regarded or as fondly remembered as Chaplin or Keaton. He doesn't have the former's balletic gracefulness or the latter's athletic control. The delight of Lloyd's films doesn't come from watching Lloyd himself so much as from watching the situations he gets himself into, from watching him fail upward, so to speak, in Safety Last! Chaplin or Keaton would devise clever ways to climb that façade, whereas Lloyd bumbles and flounders, beset by clocks and pigeons and badminton nets, only to recover by luck and pluck. We don't think "What will he do next?" so much as "What will happen to him next?" This, mind you, is comic genius in itself, a shrewd devising of hilarious situations, but it's comedy imposed on the character, not emerging from within. Which doesn't make it less comic or less genius, of course.
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