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Customer Reviews of Safety Last!

The Boy, The Girl, The Pal, The Law
Anyone who knows anything about cinematic history knows that the payoff in SAFETY LAST is Harold Lloyd's harrowing and comedic exploits hanging from the hands of a clock on the side of a building high above the city streets. As many times as I had seen excerpts from that sequence in various places, I had never seen the movie in its entirety until now. <
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>Harold Lloyd was a comic genius. The story is simple enough--boy goes to the big city; boy lies to girl about how well he is doing; girl comes to the city to surprise boy--but the movie is so rich in site gags that it is truly enjoyable throughout. Because this is a silent film, the comedy is physical and universal and appealing even to the jaded sensibilities of the present day. <
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>Lloyd plays "The Boy," a fresh-faced country lad who bids "The Girl" (Mildred Davis) farewell in order to pursue his dreams of riches in the city. When he arrives, however, he lands a job as a lowly sales clerk, and it is a daily struggle for him to avoid being fired. Bill Strother plays "The Pal," The Boy's roommate and compatriot in misery. The Pal, as a construction worker, has a talent for scaling tall buildings. When The Boy's boss offers $1000 to anyone who can draw shoppers to the department store, The Boy proposes a human fly stunt (by The Pal) to bring in the crowds. Unfortunately, The Boy unintentionally draws the ire of "The Law" (Noah Young) onto The Pal. As the time for the stunt draws near, The Boy needs to start climbing, at least until The Pal is able to shake The Law. <
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>Even after seeing excerpts from this scene hundreds of times, the clock-hanging sequence in SAFETY LAST is utterly breathtaking, more so when you consider that (evidently) no special effects or trick photography was used in the filming. The impact of this scene, therefore, is so much more powerful than any analogous scene in a modern film could ever be. <
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>SAFETY LAST is a classic and important film in the history of cinema, but one that is surprisingly accessible today, considering its age. It should certainly be part of any serious film buff's video library. <
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>Jeremy W. Forstadt

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Of course.....
...since it's the best of Harold Lloyd AND since it's no longer available in VHS, that makes sense (for the studios who are deeply in love with releasing trash by the hundreds, if not the thousands) it is not yet released on DVD. Are they really so few people liking good movies?????????

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Harold Lloyd dangles
Harold Lloyd is "The Boy", the typical character that Harold Lloyd played: spectacled, eager, fresh-faced, and up against the world. Mildred Davis plays his dopey, but utterly loveable girlfriend. SAFETY NOW encompasses much of what I now associate with Harold Lloyd films. The stunt work is exciting and breathtaking, while the storytelling is funny, and sweet without being schmaltzy.

SAFETY LAST is made up of two main segments. The first is a collection of humorous set pieces set in and around a department store. The Boy has gone off to the big city to make his fortune, promising to send for The Girl when he can afford their marriage. Understandably, he has somewhat overstated his position; he only works as a clerk, but in an attempt to keep his girlfriend happy he has managed to make himself a senior manager in his correspondences. The humorous situations that he gets into both trying to survive each day and keeping the truth from The Girl are very entertaining and amusing.

The second major portion of SAFETY LAST is what the film is most famous for -- Harold Lloyd scaling the side of a tall building using no safety ropes, no nets, and no trick photography. It is absolutely breathtaking, and utterly hilarious. We know he isn't going to fall off when he comically teeters towards the edge, but I couldn't help but laugh at his quick footwork.

One of the things that amused me most in retrospect was my own reaction to the building-climbing sequence. Harold Lloyd has been dead for over thirty years now. The film itself is eighty years old. And I know enough about cinema history to realize that Harold Lloyd did not plunge to his death while filming the stunt sequences all that time ago. Yet, I was watching the film with my knuckles turning ever whiter. Whenever Lloyd stumbled, I jumped. When he teeters towards the ledge in a seemingly uncontrolled fashion, I squealed. Amazing that something like this can still have an impact on this member of the modern audience. It's a real testament to Lloyd's talents to be able to pull off something like this. And I don't just mean that the stunt-work is excellent (which it is), but that it can still reach across the years to me sitting in front of my television wondering how on Earth the actor managed to do that.

SAFETY LAST was the first of Harold Lloyd's feature films that I was exposed to, and I really enjoyed the experience. It's really a pity that Lloyd's name has faded from cinema history, as, from what I've seen, his films deserve the sort of treatment now afforded to Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin. And they're certainly head and shoulders above much of what has been passed off as comedies in the years since the silent era died.