About Safety Last! (1923)
The story behind the film
Safety Last! is the film that gave silent comedy one of its most famous images: Harold Lloyd, in his trademark round glasses and straw boater, hanging from the hands of a giant clock high above a busy Los Angeles street. The title is a play on the workplace slogan "safety first".
Lloyd plays "The Boy", a small-town young man who moves to the city to make his fortune so he can marry his sweetheart. He ends up as a lowly clerk in a department store, but writes home pretending to be a big success. When his girlfriend arrives unexpectedly, he has to keep up the lie — and to win a $1,000 prize for drawing crowds to the store, he arranges for a friend to climb the outside of the building. When that plan falls apart, the Boy has to make the climb himself.
The climbing sequence was inspired by Bill Strother, a real "human fly" steeplejack whom Lloyd had watched scale a building. Strother appears in the film as the Boy's pal, "Limpy" Bill.
Cast & crew
- Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor; produced by Hal Roach
- Harold Lloyd as The Boy
- Mildred Davis as The Girl (Lloyd married Davis in real life in 1923)
- Bill Strother as "Limpy" Bill, the Pal
- Noah Young as The Law, a policeman with a grudge
Why it's worth watching
The last twenty minutes or so are among the most suspenseful comedy ever filmed. Each floor brings a new obstacle — pigeons, a tangled net, a mouse up the trouser leg, a swinging rope, a dog — and the gags escalate until the famous clock moment. Even knowing it was staged with care, it still makes audiences gasp.
The earlier department-store scenes are also very funny, especially Harold's attempts to sneak into work late and to cope with a frenzy of bargain-hunting shoppers. Lloyd's character is different from Chaplin's Tramp or Keaton's stone-faced heroes: he's an optimistic, ordinary go-getter of the 1920s, which makes him easy to root for.
Fun facts
- Lloyd performed much of his own climbing, even though he had lost a thumb and forefinger in an accident with a prop bomb a few years earlier; he wore a prosthetic glove in his films.
- The building sequence was shot on real rooftops, with sets built so that the camera angle hid the safety platforms below; stunt doubles, including Bill Strother, were used for some long shots.
- The Library of Congress added Safety Last! to the National Film Registry in 1994.
- In 2019 it was among the first batch of films to enter the US public domain after a 20-year freeze on new public-domain works.
Public-domain status
Safety Last! was published in 1923 and entered the US public domain on January 1, 2019. We broadcast it with a public-domain (CC0) piano score; see "Rights & source" below.