A Film Canon

Safety Last! constitutes Harold Lloyd's first systematic engagement with the rural-urban-rural narrative trajectory that will become paradigmatic of his later work. Although Lloyd is in the city, he is palpably not of it, parading a pre-industrial body that's only capable of registering the modernist metropolis at the level of simple collision, here figured through a taxonomising of that fundamental topos of rural-urban confrontation: the pedestrian-car crash. It makes sense, then, that the narrative should be a mere pretext for an extended stunt in which Lloyd is required to climb a twelve-story department store facade, since his connection to this vertical cityscape is as tendentious and unnatural as his relationship with the horizontal one, both of which constantly repel him, producing a vertiginous disorientation whose common denominator is the most Protean urban crowd that I have seen in any silent film to date. More practically, this extended stunt sequence provides a series of prototypical obstacles for action heroes faced with the difficulty of climbing up or around buildings: protruding ledges, troublesome clotheslines, misbehaving windows and tenants and, most iconically and comically, the rapidly loosening hour hand of a town clock.