WARNING: SPOILERS 

Last month my wife and I went to see Harold Lloyd’s “Safety Last!” at the Paramount Theater with its famed Wurlitzer Organ. Silent Movie Monday used to be about once or twice a month and now it’s just four times a year, but the place was packed. Maybe they need to do more of these?

Oddly, I think I’ve only seen “Safety Last!” on a big screen. The first time was in 2006 with my friend Jessica Thompson, at, I believe, the Heights Theater in Minneapolis—a renovated old-timey theater near a renovated old-timey Dairy Queen. I love that area.

I’m going to say something sacrilege here, and apologies in advance: I’m not a huge Harold Lloyd fan. I realized that watching this a second time.

Apologies
Lloyd is usually listed as the third great player in the great silent film comedy triumverate—after Chaplin and Keaton. And, yes, he’s not at the same level as the other two, but for me it’s more. They make me laugh, he doesn’t. Much. And I like the Tramp. I like the Buster character. I identify with those guys. I don’t really like the Harold character. I like his haplessness and stunts. But I don’t like the way he strives.

Who is the Harold character? In “Safety Last!” he’s a kid from South Bend, Indiana, who goes to the big city while promising the girl back home, AKA The Girl (Mildred Davis), that they’ll get married when he makes his fortune. She responds “You’d better not fail!” and he gets a worried look on his face. That’s fun, but for the rest of the movie he pretends he’s something he’s not, and that’s less fun. He puffs himself up. In doing so, he screws over friends. Sometimes he screws over friends for no reason whatsoever.

Early on, he sends The Girl a lavalier. He can’t afford it, but he hocks the phonograph without telling his roommate and pal “Limpy” Bill (Bill Strother). Is the phonograph Limpy’s? Is it theirs? Maybe it’s the landlord’s, to whom they owe money, and from whom they hide behind hung jackets? (That’s an early, clever bit.) We never know. But he does it without consulting anyone. 

At one point, he meets a friend, a cop, then brags to Limpy that he’s got such an “in” with the police that he can knock over that cop over there. Go ahead, he tells his friend. I’ll get on all fours behind him, and you push him over. Of course, by the time they do this, it’s no longer his friend but a cop Harold doesn’t know (Noah Young). And that cop spends the rest of the movie in pursuit of poor “Limpy” Bill.

All this time, too, Harold's been lying in letters to The Girl back home. He tells her he’s doing great at De Vore Dept. Store—that he’s a general manager or some such—when he’s bottom rung. He's a sales clerk. He lies so well, in fact, and starves himself and screws over his friend so much, in order to send the jewelry, that The Girl’s mother urges her to visit before she loses such a prize catch. When she shows up, he works overtime pretending he is what he isn’t.

Then we get the scheme that makes the movie famous. He overhears the general manager say he’ll give a $1,000 bonus to anyone who can concoct a scheme to get people into the department store. At that point he remembers “Limpy” Bill scaling the outside of a building to escape the enraged cop, and he makes a deal with Bill, 50-50, for Bill to do the same at De Vore. That’ll draw a crowd! And it does. Harold will start it out, then swap places with Bill on the second floor. Except the cop hears about the stunt, suspects it’s Bill, shows up, and chases poor Bill around. So it’s no go on the second floor, and then on the third a bunch of secretaries are watching. Etc. Harold winds up scaling all … is it 12 stories? … despite pigeons, a dog, a mouse, construction guys, and an errant rope.

And he gets The Girl.

Here's a question that doesn't need askng but I can't help myself: Do any of the gawkers actually go into the store?

All along the clocktower
Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock is of one of cinema’s most indelible images, inspiring homages from the likes of Jackie Chan and Martin Scorsese. It’s also an apt metaphor for life. We’re all just hanging from a clock tower. And every moment, we’re slipping, slipping.

I like The Girl. Mildred Davis, who became Lloyd’s real-life wife, looks amazingly modern. You put her, sans cloche hat, into the 2020s, nobody would blink.

I also liked the fact that there are several Black extras, including a woman with a baby, and it doesn’t get embarassingly racist.

I just wish I liked the Harold character more.