I completely agree about "Safety Last". Even though I knew he would make it safely to the top, I was still on the edge of my seat during the building climbing. It was evident that there was *no* safety net of any kind.

They would certainly never let a leading man do a stunt like that nowadays!

Walter Kerr, in The Silent Clowns, quotes Hal Roach speaking of Harold Lloyd in conversation with William K. Everson, "of course he wasn't funny in himself; he needed his writers and a constant stream of gags. I remember in our early days together he was always so concerned about being a comedian all the time. A transition shot might just call for him to walk out of a door and across a room. Midway he'd stop in his tracks, turn to me and say, "what do I do to be funny."

Kerr's first chapter on Lloyd is entitled "Hard Work". Lloyd had none of the natural gifts of Keaton and Chaplin, and where they established their characters and particular film visions almost at once, Lloyd took years of effort to even discover the beginnings of his. I've not seen any of the Lonesome Luke films, but they were in his own words, frenetic imitations of Chaplin. He didn't hit on the glasses character until 1917 when he'd already made 80 - 100 films, and even then, as Kerr notes, it took a couple more years for him to define himself. He grew into the part of playing himself. In the commentary to Safety Last, Richard Correll, who'd met him as a child, says, you want to know what Harold Lloyd was like, he was like this guy. It was pure will and calculation that created Lloyd's art.

Correll explains in detail how the climbing shots were done. Some people maintain that the demystifying of gags and stunts somehow diminishes them. I disagree, the physical work speaks for itself, some of the smallest gags are the most mysterious and more impressive in their way than the spectacular stunts.

Bill Strothers, who plays Lloyd's roommate and was meant to do the climb, was an iron worker who as a hobby climbed buildings. It was seeing him one day which gave Lloyd the idea of Safety Last. Strothers had broken his leg and was only recently out of a cast before filming began. You can see that he favors one leg when climbing the building to escape the cop. The long shots of Harold's climb and those shot from directly above show Bill Strothers. Lloyd and Roach insisted he be on a wire, though he felt it was unnecessary. The scenes at the base of the building were done at the Roach Studios in Culver City.

Harold's climb was shot on 18 foot prop facades, built atop three successively taller buildings from four to about ten stories. Below him, about 20 feet usually, was a padded platform which would be moved up as he climbed. Apparently, off the corner to his right there was nothing between he and the street, but straight below was part of the roof of the building and the platform. The grooves in the wood walls allowed him to reach over the lip providing a much better grip than the corresponding slots in the side of a masonry building. Harold is doubled in the scene where he's swinging by a rope which has gotten wrapped around his ankle. I'm not sure who by, however. Correll himself seems not to know about the latest tidbit, revealed only last year by film historian Jeffrey Vance, that Lloyd's assistant director, Robert A. Golden, doubled him frequently between 1921 to 27, and that it's Golden in the scene where Lloyd shimmies on the ledge after the mouse has run up his trouser leg. I've looked at that scene over and over recently, and it certainly looks like Lloyd, but then his character's look is a bit nondescript. Does knowing any of this diminish his performance? Not in my view. At one point they tested the platform by dropping a dummy on it. It bounced off and went over the edge. Lloyd dislocated his shoulder doing the clock scene. I must say the longer 70 minute version makes for a much stronger film with many clever gags before the climb occurs. His team seems loath to abandon a gag without compounding it three times.

In an earlier thrill comedy, Never Weaken, in which he inadvertently ends up on girders , Lloyd's set was built atop the Hill Street Tunnel, employing the same perspective of great height, which Keaton would use so effectively a couple years later in Three Ages.

As good as Safety Last is, Girl Shy, his first independent release is probably a better film, a very sweet romance with Jobyna Ralston, capped by an astounding dash across Los Angeles, in which Harold employs stolen cars, a police motorbike, horse drawn wagon, and electric trolley, among other things. Stunts such as that in which Lloyd leaps onto the back of a firetruck, grabs the firehose which begins to unroll from its spool, lowering him despite his best efforts until he's first parallel with the street and then laying in it, or that in which he is riding on top of a driverless trolley, pulls the power rod down to disconnect it from the line and hopefully slow the tram car, ends up hanging from it as it swings off to the right when the trolley goes around a corner, and then drops through the roof of a passing flivver, are as or more dangerous than anything he did in Safety Last. It could almost be termed the first screwball comedy

Lloyd's character will never have the fascination for me of a Keaton. It's not surprising that his films grossed more than Chaplin's and Keaton's combined, his character matched the personality of the decade, nor that he failed to make a successful transition to sound, that same character being quite out of place in the depression 30's. If Lloyd captured the brash willful abandon of the era, its soul spoke through Buster. His was the articulation of an uncertain universe, which he traveled through as baffled and fascinated, as would be a visitor from another planet. Lloyd virtually willed his own success, painstakingly discovering and honing his craft over an entire decade. To put it in perspective, Safety Last was the 201st of his 218 films. He may have been as Pynchon might put it "a slow learner", (Keaton in contrast began making out and out masterpieces after an apprenticeship of only a dozen or so films over three years, even interrupted by a stint in uniform in France). All the same the results of Lloyd's peak period speak for themselves, very well produced, meticulously paced films and with stunning physical action in perfect harmony with the plot. It must have been something of the nature of the times, the era of the stunt, that birthed so many brilliant acrobatic comedians to make visible the zeitgeist. It seems impossible to imagine anything like it ever occurring again.