Harold Lloyd, Master of Suspense

I first saw this famous photo of Harold Lloyd, from his most popular comedy SAFETY LAST! (1923), when I was a child and it connected me instantly and consciously to imagery I had experienced only in dreams. As time marched on, the still image acquired brief bursts of motion, when footage from the rarely screened antique was co-opted into commercials or comedy programming like FRACTURED FLICKERS. I got around to seeing the superb 1989 documentary HAROLD LLOYD: THE THIRD GENIUS (narrated by Lindsay Anderson) and Lloyd's own restaging of his most dizzying career highlight in Preston Sturges' THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK (1947) long before my first actual viewing of SAFETY LAST! itself -- which finally took place last night, courtesy of Criterion's often breathtaking new Blu-ray disc, which sports a brand-new 2K digital restoration. It not only makes the actors' pancake makeup nearly palpable, but the powerful sharpness of the image brings us all the more into the presence of its terrors and the sheer cleverness of its meticulous execution. The bigger your home screen, the more you will feel in the pit of your stomach the awful threat of gravity.

Seeing the film at last brought something unexpectedly elemental into focus for me -- not about silent comedy but about what came after. I haven't done any reading about Harold Lloyd, so I have no way of knowing if what I'm about to say is original thinking, but it's original to me and I'm fascinated by it. Lloyd made a few of these so-called "thrill" pictures (as they are called in the THIRD GENIUS documentary, included as a gratifying extra on this disc) and I suspect the reason why motion picture comedy regards him as "the third genius" (after Chaplin and Keaton) is that he was more importantly one of the principal architects of the thriller and, in my opinion at least, the greatest of all influences on the work of Alfred Hitchcock.

This "department store stunt" sequence pictured above essentially takes the archetypal slip on the banana peel to its most terrifying extremes, and it makes us laugh the way rollercoasters make us laugh, by bringing us face-to-eyeteeth with the colossal maw of Death and allowing us to survive that encounter with grace, style and humor. The Hitchcock element looms large in this very photograph: it resonates with the British Museum sequence of BLACKMAIL, the Statue of Liberty sequence of SABOTEUR, with Scottie's fall in REAR WINDOW, with the Mt. Rushmore sequence of NORTH BY NORTHWEST, and perhaps most resonantly with VERTIGO. The scene is most challenging in its depiction of a single man attempting to conquer one of collective Man's most towering achievements, and most terrifying in its exposure of the individual to the forces of the world around him. At one point, as Lloyd ascends the face of the building and comes to a ledge, he comes under attack by a group of pigeons in a moment every bit as traumatic as Tippi Hedren's assault in THE BIRDS. The Hitchcock connection must have been noticed by composer Carl Davis who, in his 1989 score, accompanies Lloyd's desperate attempts to swat them away with stabbing strings that recall Bernard Herrmann's shower music for PSYCHO. It is commonly labelled a classic comedy sketch, but it is much more importantly one of the screen's most elaborate suspense set pieces and a masterpiece of sustained anxiety.

Before seeing SAFETY LAST!, I always looked to Germany for the antecedents of Hitchcock's cinema: Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene, the expressionists. That has always been the common wisdom. But no... The real Hitchcock -- the American Hitchcock, if you will -- is far more vividly foreseen here in Lloyd's white-knucked grip on the hands of that clockface. It's also there in the closing shot, a disarmingly and charmingly contrived shot of our now-carefree hero walking blithely through a sticky tar spill that pulls him out of his shoes and then his socks, in the way Lloyd seems to say, "When you can't be terrifying, be elegant."

In fact, everything I know about the thriller can be glimpsed here, even when Lloyd's feet are soundly placed on terra firma. His character, The Boy, signs Lloyd's own name on the dotted line, so the identification of actor and director is complete. He moves to the Big City, leaving his trusting girl behind with promises of inevitable success, which lead to deceptions by mail as his metropolitan ship fails to come in, aside from a menial job as a salesman at a fabrics counter in a department store. He lies to his lady love, painting himself into corners that require more lies, and he fetishizes her memory into the gift of a pendant, incomplete as he cannot yet afford a chain for it. When he finally gets the chain, which he can afford only by forgoing a week of meals, Lloyd turns the screws of every last dime of the price tag by showing the components of a window displayed fifty-cent meal disappearing into thin air, piece by piece. (As another master of the thriller, Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage, wrote in his own memorable "Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot": "Is the hero getting it in the neck?") Even then, he must have the chain delivered with a handwritten explanation that the "Tiffany" chain is being forwarded by the downmarket Jewish merchant's shop where he actually acquired it on sale. The only way to obliterate the lies accumulated through the hero's best intentions is to force him into a place of mortal peril, fully exposed to the elements, to a jury of his peers, and to a gasping audience. Lloyd compels "Lloyd"'s pretended ascent to success with a literal ascent to success, prodded upwards floor by floor by the perpetual threat of arrest.

Another aspect of the Hitchcockian thriller found here is in Lloyd's sense of America and Americana, the disparity between the wholesome American dream and money-driven Big City reality. It's not hard to see a parallel between this film's Harold and Mildred (Mildred Davis) and, say, Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) and his niece Charlie (Teresa Wright) in SHADOW OF A DOUBT; in both cases, a citified cynic finds himself representing a myth of worldly success and adventure to the untravelled small town souls who are least inclined to sit in judgment of him. Harold isn't a murderer of widows in his most brazen reality, but he does turn the crime of an acquaintance into a sanctioned publicity stunt for profit. Many Hitchcock heroes are men who are not who they seem to be: John Robie in TO CATCH A THIEF, Manny Balestrero in THE WRONG MAN, Norman Bates in PSYCHO. 
 
Of course it was from Lang and Hitchcock, not to mention the Edgar Wallace krimis, that the James Bond films also arose. Lloyd's gasp-inducing stunt work, however augmented it may have been with forced perspective trickery, just as surely played a role in predicating those "audacity of Bond" pre-credit sequences which have been thrilling audiences since the heart-stopping ski jump that opened THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and established these as a series must in 1977.  

To see SAFETY LAST! -- a film now approaching its 100th anniversary -- is to see at least 50 other classic movies, unreeling at high speed through your senses in a free-falling rush of recognition. It is to recognize a living tissue sample which shares precious arteries with films playing in theaters today. When one considers that its achievement followed the Lumière Brothers' first documentary uses of their cinematograph by less than thirty years, it puts the supposed technological advances of cinema's last thirty years into comparatively tepid perspective.