Safety Last! (Newmeyer, Tayler, 1923)

Safety Last! (Newmeyer, Tayler, 1923) - TSPDT #1300

A poor shop clerk that has moved to the city for a better life lies about his status to his countryside fiancee, when she comes for a surprise visit.

For me, this was one of the easier Lloyd films to approach and I must admit, that for reasons unknown to me I just can't get around liking his work. Mostly, I feel strangely at unease with the strange pacing of the story and the cheesy intertitles don't help. In contrast to Chaplin and Keaton, Lloyd's performance has a documentary quality to it, that I have a hard time to connect to. And the set-up of the story (angrying the policeman) didn't work inside the boundary of this realistic set-up. (Maybe a different type of run-in with the law might have added to the story instead of this stupid "pushing over" trick)

On the other hand, many of the scenes on the facade were breathtaking and still hold up easily with many other things today. The clock scene definitively deserves its place high up in the ranks of classics.

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