Safety Last!

In 1922, the country boy Harold says goodbye to his mother and his girlfriend Mildred in the train station and leaves Great Bend expecting to be successful in the big city. Harold promises to Mildred to get married with her as soon as he "make good".

Harold shares a room with his friend "Limpy" Bill and he finally gets a job as salesman in the De Vore Department Store. However, he pawns Bill's phonograph, buys a lavaliere and writes to Mildred telling that he is a manager of De Vore.

One day, Harold sees an old friend from Great Bend that is a policeman and when he meets his friend Bill, he asks Bill to push the policeman over him and make him fall down. However Bill pushes the wrong policeman that chases him, but he escapes climbing up a building.

Out of the blue, Mildred is convinced by her mother to visit Harold without previous notice and he pretends to be the manager of De Vore. When Harold overhears the general manager telling that he would give one thousand dollars to to anyone that could promote De Vore attracting people to the department store, he offers five hundred dollars to Bill to climb up the Bolton Building. However things go wrong when the angry policeman decides to check whether the mystery man that will climb up the building is the one who pushed him over on the floor.

"Safety Last!" is one of the funniest comedies ever and the joke begins with the title that plays with the expression Safety First! Another day I saw "Hugo" and Martin Scorcese pays a tribute to "Safety Last!" showing the scene of Harold Lloyd hanging from the Bolton Building clock and I have decided to see this film again.

If Harold Lloyd himself or a stuntman climbed the building, it does not matter. The breathless scene is among the most known in the cinema history and "Safety Last!" is a must-see film for any generation. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): "O Homem Mosca" ("The Fly Man")

The first half of this film takes place between Harold Lloyd and his fiancée. Harold works as a clerk in a department store. There are plenty of sight gags in this section, including the hilarious scene where Harold hides in a coat hanging on a coat tree. You have to see this to believe it.

The second part of the movie consists of Harold climbing up the side of a building. Forget that this movie was made in 1923. This scene is one of the most hair-raising things ever filmed and will have you on the edge of your seat. It builds and builds with one gag after another, climaxing in the timeless movie image that everyone has seen, of Harold hanging from the hands of the clock on the building. Every time I watch this scene I get very nervous.

I highly recommend this film even if you are not a fan of silent films. Though Harold Lloyd's overall fame was eclipsed by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, this film deserves to been seen and ranks as one of the best silents ever made.

See it on DVD.

Safety Last was funny pretty much throughout its entirety. The scene where Harold and his roommate hide in their coats (you'd have to see it to know what I'm talking about) got an enormous laugh which lasted for a long time, followed by some applause. I remember that there was a slow section, lasting about 5 minutes, after Harold's fiancee arrived in the city, but other than that, this film was consistently hilarious.

And then during the building climbing scene, there were so many laughs and gasps, applause, and shouts ("OH MY GOD!") coming from the audience. It was probably the single most hair-raising scene that I or most of the other people in the theater had ever seen. And the climb, which lasts, I believe, 12 stories, should have gotten old. But it never came close to getting old. Each joke was masterful.

After having seen the film, I was unfairly comparing it to the silent film that I had seen the previous week at a theater with live piano: Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. Well, nothing is really comparable to that film. I consider it the funniest film I've ever seen. I was planning to give Safety Last a 9/10, but after some thought, I realized that I laughed a lot harder and more at this film than 90% of the other comedies I've seen. At least 90%, but probably much more. I have to give this a 10/10. This film really should be on DVD, or at least VHS. Harold Lloyd shouldn't be as forgotten as he is.

In the era of silent comedies, the man who was 2nd only to Charlie Chaplin was not Buster Keaton, but Harold Lloyd. Though he has since been mostly forgotten, except by film historians (who reluctantly list him automatically as the third great silent comedian behind Keaton and Chaplin), Lloyd's is still remembered for his clock sequence in Safety Last. More recently, this has been reproduced in "Back to the Future" and "Shanghai Knights".

However, it is not just the skyscraper sequence that makes this film special. Harold portrays his usual go-getter self, as his character moves to the city and tries to become a successful businessman, in order to impress his girlfriend. Along the way, there are many amusing mishaps, which conclude with the aforementioned skyscraper sequence. Quite magical in its silence, as compared to the later remake, also by Lloyd, "Feet First".

Highly recommended for silent film fans, and anyone wanting to get a taste of the genre.

One of the best contructed full-length comedies of the twenties. Harold Lloyd was not as outrageously inventive as Chaplin, nor as sentimental. His style was a kind of minimalist one, taking a simple idea -- say, being a hasseled salesman in a clothing store and needing desperately to become a success -- and building on that small situation until, by the hilarious climax, he finds himself swinging from the bent minute hand of an oversized clock on the side of a building many stories above the street. (Human flies were popular around this time, as were flagpole sitters and goldfish eaters.) When a mouse crawls up the leg of his trousers, not only does Loyd go through a sort of break dance trying to get rid of it but when he finally does shake it out, the mouse falls down the wall of the building and in the process removes a toupee from a spectator peering out of a lower window. All of this without matte work. Not to say that the earlier scenes in the store aren't extremely amusing, because they are. Loyd had a very mobile face and like most silent comedians a deft physical manner. He makes a splendidly fawning salesman. A very funny movie indeed, and thrilling as well. Any five minutes of the climax, taken at random, makes one dizzier than whole sections of Clint Eastwood or Sylvester Stallone hanging around the Eiger or elsewhere in the Alps. Somehow, Loyd managed to make a self-deprecatory joke out of his athletic skill, while nowadays stars use what amount of it they have as an opportunity to show off their bravery and, when possible, their bulging muscles. Let's hear it for the silents.