Safety Last!

When a store clerk organizes a contest to climb the outside of a tall building, circumstances force him to make the perilous climb himself.

After Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the silent film era's "third genius" was Harold Lloyd, who stars in this Horatio Alger-style story of an average country boy trying to make good in the big city. The Boy Lloyd leaves his sweetheart, The Girl Mildred Davis, later the real-life Mrs. Lloyd in Great Bend while he pursues his fortune in a teeming metropolis. The Boy lands a job as a clerk at a fabric counter of DeVore's, a huge department store, but he lies in his letters home to his beloved, pretending to be the store's manager and spending his earnings on lavish gifts. The Boy's roommate, The Pal Bill Strother makes money as a "human fly," performing attention-getting stunts. Promised $1,000 by DeVore's real manager if he can devise a publicity gimmick, The Boy convinces his friend to climb the 12-story establishment and split the winnings with him. On the day of the event, however, The Pal is busy dodging The Law Noah Young, forcing The Boy to make the arduous climb solo. Dodging a variety of obstacles, The Boy climbs higher and higher, eventually dangling from the store's clock tower, in the film's most memorable image


All Movie Guide - Lucia Bozzola
Safety Last (1923) pokes fun at the lengths that a 1920s man would go to to be a success, and it's also the movie in which Harold Lloyd's trademark "comedy of thrills" produced the timeless image of Lloyd's dangling precariously from a clock above a busy city street. A formidable athlete, Lloyd mined humor from a relentless series of situational and physical gags involving the efforts of his ambitious sales clerk to make it in the big city and impress his girlfriend back home. The famed climax arrives when Lloyd is forced to scale the high rise department store himself after his "human fly" publicity gambit goes awry. As he hangs off the clock 10 floors above the street, he encounters a new difficulty at every story, turning the climb into a hilarious and breathtaking physical feat. Lloyd performed most of the stunts himself (despite having lost his right thumb and forefinger in an accident) and without trick photography. One of a series of Lloyd feature hits, Safety Last helped him surpass fellow comics Buster Keaton and Charles Chaplin in box-office popularity and become a 1920s icon. .