Those who see the image without having seen the film itself probably don’t ask themselves how Lloyd’s character (who is billed as “The Boy,” but is referred to as Harold throughout the story) got himself into that precarious predicament in the first place. His hanging from the side of a building is the climactic quintessence of the film’s singular focus on the desperation of social and financial advancement and the shame of falling short. Safety Last! is essentially a small-mouse-in-the-big-city tale, in which Harold leaves his family and beloved girlfriend Mildred (Mildred Davis, whom Lloyd married just before the film’s premiere) behind in the small burg of Great Bend to make it big in Los Angeles. He promises to send for Mildred once he’s made his fortune so they can be properly married, but he quickly finds that success is difficult to achieve. Both he and his friend “Limpy” Bill (Bill Strother, a real-life human fly whose exploits inspired the film) are in dire straits, although Harold compounds the issue by pretending that he is financially successful, sending Mildred expensive presents financed by pawning his meager possessions and misleading letters about his managerial importance and wealth.

In truth, Harold is barely scraping by working as a salesclerk at a downtown department store, which is humorously depicted as a barely controlled den of chaos in which shoppers descend on him en masse, demanding his attention and, at one point, literally ripping the coat off his back in the process. Harold is hard-working and attentive, but like many tragicomic figures, he is beset by constant misfortune. At one point he is almost late to work because he is accidentally trapped in the back of a laundry truck, and at work his diligence is constantly undermined by Stubbs (Westcott B. Clarke), a petty mid-level-manager looking for his own advancement. When Mildred unexpectedly shows up at the department store, Harold must put on a grand display to convince her that he is the store’s manager, rather than a meager salesclerk, which entails all manner of clever misdirection and subterfuge (at one point he must continue pretending to be the manager in the manager’s office with the actual manager present).

Harold’s dangling from the side of the building is the direct result of his plan to create a major event to draw attention to the department store after he overhears the manager complaining about the store’s lack of marketing and how he would give $1,000 to anyone who could draw crowds to the front door. Harold’s original idea is to have Bill, who had earlier climbed up a building to escape an angry police officer (Noah Young), scale the side of the department store as a mysterious “human fly,” but when the still-angry police officer shows up at the event, it falls on Harold to be the “Mystery Man” who will scale the building, despite being somewhat clumsy and having no climbing experience. Yet, in the extended sequence that comprises the film’s thrilling climax, Harold does indeed scale the building, putting on a demonstration of physical strength, flexibility, and ingenuity that is always coupled with a comical goofiness that has us simultaneously laughing and gasping in awe. It is one of the great feats of physical comedy, and it was something that Lloyd had been building toward for several years after having helped pioneer the “comic thrill” subgenre in films such as High and Dizzy (1920). In this regard, Safety Last! is viewed by many as Lloyd’s crowning achievement, the greatest film by a consummate perfectionist whose comic stardom had him besting both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton at the box office in the early 1920s (he also made more films than both of those comic icons combined, although he was forgotten for several decades because his films fell out of circulation and did not play on television in the ’50s and ’60s).

The building ascent is giddy vertiginous comedy at its finest, and even though history has eventually revealed the various tricks Lloyd employed to create the illusion of constant physical danger (for decades it was believed that he genuinely scaled the building, rather than elaborate façades built on the roofs of several different buildings), it remains one of the most suspenseful sequences ever committed to film. The fact that everything was done for real in-camera (no process shots or miniatures here) gives the sequence a truly dizzying physicality.

But, beyond the illusory tricks and aesthetics of the building climb, the sequence crackles because there is so much at stake. Far from being an extended gag divorced from the narrative proper, Harold’s dangerous ascent is the manifestation of his desperation for upward mobility, without which he fears he will lose Mildred and, therefore, his legitimacy. Every foot that he clamors up the side of the building, grasping at jutting bricks and swinging himself over wide ledges while dealing with pesky pigeons, a rambling rodent, and gawking onlookers hanging out the windows, is not just another instance of avoiding death or serious bodily injury, but a measure of his social anxiety and need to prove himself. The climb has both comic and dramatic weight because it is both a thrilling exercise in physical humor and a thematically rich evocation of the pressures men feel to succeed, lest they be viewed as less than a man; his recognizable desire for upward mobility is literalized, made physically, not just socially, harrowing. The fact that Lloyd’s character is a slightly goofy, bespectacled nerd of less-than-imposing physicality makes his eventual triumph all the more rewarding, as he successfully tackles both the skyline of downtown Los Angeles and his own insecurities.

Copyright ©2013 James Kendrick

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