Lloyd was initially interested in the theatre, but after his parents divorced and he moved to California with his father in 1910 he found that the money lay in movies. He developed three silent characters. His first two were rip-offs of Charlie Chaplin: Willie Work was a tramp with a sweet disposition, while Lonesome Luke had a trilby or a top hat, a walking stick and a downcast shuffling walk, and a greasepaint moustache comprised of two large dots. Lonesome Luke got Lloyd a lot of pratfall work, and he appeared in more than 200 silents, with a great many titles displaying a desperate desire for alliteration: Luke Laughs Last, Luke’s Lost Liberty, Luke Pipes the Pippins, Luke’s Trolley Troubles, Luke Locates the Loot and Lonesome Luke, Lawyer. And then there were ones with a militaristic bent: Luke Joins the Navy, Luke and the Bomb Throwers and Luke’s Preparedness Preparations. Lloyd was often the naive bystander as an exciting and destructive new century rushes past. It was late 1916, early 1917. America was just about to enter the war. One of his films was called Kicking the Germ out of Germany.
Lloyd grew tired of Luke’s limitations. It was only when he adopted his third persona, which he called the Glass Character, that he found a way of stepping out from Chaplin’s shadow, and in so doing assured his wealth and fame. The Glass Character was rather like Lloyd himself – respectable and righteous, bashful but eager to impress. He dressed in the clean cut of the day, often wore a straw boater at a modest tilt, and although his eyesight was fine he donned round tortoiseshell horn-rimmed spectacles that somehow made him look both dim-witted and studious, like a tawny owl, and in years to come he would make the glasses fashionable. He was foolish but not a sucker, and you rooted for him, not least as he outfoxed those in authority and did crazy things to impress women. The glasses were lensless, and once on, they never came off, not even – or especially – when playing American football in his most successful film The Freshman.
In the mid-1920s, the peak of his fame, Lloyd was making around $30,000 a week, which is certainly equivalent to today’s DiCaprio/Pitt/Clooney level, and he invested it in Los Angeles real estate. He spent $1 million on constructing Greenacres, a 16-acre estate in Beverly Hills from where he could see Rudolf Valentino’s home and invite round his neighbours Charlie, Buster and Fatty. He made many more pictures than them, but time has not been kind to those movies; in later life, Lloyd estimated that about 70 per cent had been destroyed by their own flammability and a general disregard for their future worth. When sound came in the late 1920s, few dared to predict that silent movies would one day be the subject of nostalgia or academic study. They were just finished, something old in a speeding nation. Time has changed that view, but no one back then had the luxury of regarding large canisters of film as a potential library, much less a treasure trove. (The exact point at which a storage problem becomes an archive has yet to be calculated.)
Naturally, one of the pleasures of moviegoing is escape. Not just for a couple of hours in the dark, but for all time: movies may show us how to be free, and show the better, richer, redemptive way ahead – not an escape from reality, but an escape into reality, albeit the perceived reality of a story other than our own. The weightless promise of freedom featured strongly in those early movies, not least as each new mode of freedom came into view: the steam train, the hopping crankshaft car, the flight to the cities. For a while, even tall buildings must have seemed a thrill – the sky’s the limit.
William Carey Strother was born in North Carolina in 1896, and as far back as anyone could remember he liked to climb. He was, in the vernacular, a ‘builderer’. He began with trees, but Bill Strother just kept on going, on to church steeples and county courthouses and then buildering further and higher – the taller they would build, the higher he would climb. After a while he became The Human Spider, and it was the making of him. He would get $10 for his earliest ‘professional’ ascents and $500 at his peak.
Because $500 was a lot of money, The Human Spider soon found he had competition – from The Human Fly. In fact there were at least two Human Flies, and on one occasion the Spider and one of the Flies scaled the same building in competition on the same day. Strother won.1
The key to buildering was to plan every foot and hand placement at the bottom, much as a mountain climber would plan a route months before seeing ice. Once the groundwork was established, you could then add flourishes and tricks – pretend slips, gallant hat waves to the crowds, stunts with windows. Strother did a bit of charity climbing, and in 1917 he began raising Liberty Bonds to fund America’s entry into the war. He didn’t fight in the conflict, but he felt he faced comparable risks. ‘It’s dangerous business,’ he said in April 1918, ‘and death always climbs with you. In three years I’ll have enough money to quit.’
But Strother never had enough money to quit; or rather, when he quit he hadn’t earned enough money to retire. He tried to make a living selling dog food and operating a guesthouse, but then he hit upon something for which he had a calling. In her marvellous and disturbing book, The Real Santa of Miller & Rhoads, Donna Strother Deekens recounts how her distant relative found a new sense of worth by dressing up annually in a beard and velvet gown. Miller & Rhoads was a fancy department store in Richmond, Virginia, and in the middle of the century they made Bill Strother the highest-paid Santa in the world. Why was he so valued? Because his ‘Santa setup’ included entering through a chimney and allowing the children to see him comb his beard, and when he had done this he drew huge crowds to the tearoom to enjoy his ‘Rudolph Cake’.2
In 1951, at the peak of his Santa fame, he told an interviewer from the Saturday Evening Post that he loved meeting all the children, but he still had a hankering for tall buildings. ‘It makes you sweet inside when you look down and the crowd cheers. What is that word? Exult! I exult all over!’ One day in 1922 he was up a tall building feeling sweet inside when Harold Lloyd strolled by.
‘I was in Los Angeles, walking up Seventh Street, and I saw this tremendous crowd gathered round a building, the Brockman Building,’ Lloyd told Film Quarterly in 1962. ‘Upon inquiring I found that a Human Spider was going to scale the side of that building . . . Well, it had such a terrific impact on me that when he got to about the third or fourth floor I couldn’t watch him anymore. My heart was in my throat and so I started walking on up the street.’
But Lloyd couldn’t stop himself looking back to see if he was still there. The Spider progressed to the top, and Lloyd approached him afterwards about appearing in his next movie. But before filming could begin Strother was involved in a fall. So a new part was written for him, a role named Limpy Bill, and Lloyd began thinking that he would have to do a lot more climbing himself.
To watch Safety Last! today, more than 90 years after it was made, is to experience a joy both intricate and soaring. Directed by long-term Lloyd collaborators Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, this is, by most standards, a modern film: there is strong depth of character, a three-act structure and a climax that builds like a Beethoven symphony.
The film opens with a caption card: ‘The Boy – He has seen the sun rise for the last time in Great Bend . . . Before taking the long, long journey.’ We see Lloyd behind bars, saying goodbye to his mother and sweetheart. A noose hangs in the background, and a man who is probably a pastor arrives to console him. But we are deceived, the first of many deceptions: the next shot shows the reverse angle, and we are actually on a station platform, the bars marking the perimeter, the noose a device for messages to be gathered by speeding trains. Lloyd is travelling to the big city in search of fortune.
Lloyd promises to marry his sweetheart as soon as he becomes a successful businessman, but when we next see him, in a bare bedsit he shares with Limpy Bill, he is financially embarrassed; he has just pawned the gramophone.
He works in the haberdashery section of a modern department store. When Harold overhears a store manager announce that the business needs a publicity stunt to attract new customers and a thousand dollars is on offer for the best idea, he enlists Limpy Bil
l to climb the outside of the building. But there are complications involving the police, and so Lloyd makes the climb himself. There are obstacles on every floor: nuts that fall on him and attract pigeons, entanglement in a net, some carpenters with a board. When he reaches the clock near the top and grabs a hand, he has us for all time.
Theatre managers asked for nurses to be in attendance before showing the film. ‘Safety Last Sends Audience Into Hysterics’, one newspaper reported; ‘Woman Faints As Lloyd Pulls Rare Thriller’. The New York Times concluded: ‘When people are not rollicking in their seats at the Strand they will be holding on to the chair arms to keep them down.’
Safety Last! lasts 70 minutes (7 reels), but audiences found that time just froze. As with Orson Welles in the Viennese shadows, or Janet Leigh in the shower, life is temporarily suspended; the images lodge in our cortex. With Harold Lloyd dangling from a clock high above the city, our entire modern world just hangs there too.
You want a moral? When Lloyd makes it – OK, if he makes it, as there’s some business with a rope and a mouse to get through first – his girl will be waiting for him at the top. At the end of the climb there is love: cinema has been telling the same story since the dawn of time.
ii) Oncoming Train
If it’s true that audiences ran screaming from their seats when they first saw a train coming towards them in a Lumière Brothers film in January 1896, wouldn’t that just have been a wonderful piece of publicity for early movies?
Before film could tell a proper story, it had to tell the story of itself. This story involved time and space: a five-second film of a man sneezing, workers shuffling from a factory, a couple kissing (a lengthy embrace, almost 20 seconds, the first time a censor was called), or a moving train. For what is cinema if not time made manifest?
When the train movie was first shown, the audience had a lot of clues as to what to expect. It was called L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat. At the beginning of the film the way of the oncoming train had been carefully prepared – the crowds on the platform are standing back in anticipation and to ensure the camera had a full and clear view. Trains had been a feature of the French landscape for more than half a century. The only difference now was that a train would appear in the darkened basement room of a Parisian café.
Shown at the directors’ intended speed, the film lasted only 50 seconds, only slightly longer than the sequence widely regarded as the first film ever, showing factory workers leaving the Lumière factory in Lyon after a day’s work (it wasn’t quite the first film, but it was probably the first film to deceive an audience – the sequence was shot several times and was filmed in the middle of the day; when they were done, the workers went back to work).
The fact that the train film seemed shorter to the audience was due to another trick, something that movies got right from the start – the concept of time speeded up. If a picture thrilled, if it captured the audience, if it was novel, then it swept away the notion of ordinary time. All other thoughts just vanished in the steam. And then there is the trick that time plays on memory: we may recall the train pulling in head-on, as if it would come hurtling through the screen, but that wasn’t the film-makers’ intention, and that wasn’t the film. The train only moves towards us – rather sedately we see now – side-on. There is no threat to the audience’s safety. The train is only in motion for less than half the film, and for more than half of that it is slowing down. For the rest of the movie the train just sits there hissing, and the action switches to disembarkation and embarkation and the usual platform mayhem. But history seldom recalls the station porter bustling along, or the man who looks drunk as he gets out of a carriage and staggers around.
Harold Lloyd was two when all this silent movie commotion began.3 The first screen comedy, L’Arroseur arrosé (or The Waterer Watered or The Sprinkler Sprinkled), also by the Frerès Lumières, from 1895, gave away its entire plot in its title. It was humour the audience would recognise from vaudeville, and later from The Benny Hill Show. A man is watering a large garden with a long hose, a boy comes up behind him and steps on it, thus cutting off the supply. The gardener, not seeing the boy, is puzzled and looks into the nozzle. At which point, mais oui, the boy takes his foot off the hose and the gardener is drenched and his hat blows off. He sees the boy, grabs him by the ear, spanks him and resumes his duties.
The film lasted around 45 seconds. But it may also have been 40 seconds, or possibly 50 seconds. The timing of moving pictures in those days was anyone’s guess. The standard length of a single-reel comedy was a little under 1,000 feet, but you could speed up the filming and slow down the playing, or vice-versa. Before automatic motors, much depended on the cranking skills of the cameraman during filming and the projectionist during showing. In the perfect standardised world, 1,000 feet of 35mm silent film shown at the accepted 16 frames per second would last 16½ minutes. But we live in a world where silent movies show too many people racing jerkily or dawdling aimlessly, and there is a reason for these unnatural movements. Before sound and synchronisation, films were hand-cranked and hand projected, and the two often failed to match. Robin Hood (starring Douglas Fairbanks, 1922) and Ben Hur (1925) were both filmed at 19 frames per second, but the cue sheets provided by the studio requested a projection speed of 22 frames per second; Monsieur Beaucaire (1924, with Rudolf Valentino) was 18 and 24, while Keaton’s The General (1926), made on the brink of talkies, was 24 and 24. Films with multiple reels would not always have the same rate over each reel, causing the projectionist even more problems. Get it wrong, and you could add minutes to a story that was never intended. But get it right, and you could alter the mood of the audience. In his study Film Style and Technology, Barry Salt refers to the ‘expressive variations’ performed by projectionists at a director’s command: mood was romantically altered by decelerating a swishy ballroom scene or a kiss, and a person mounting a horse could also be slowed down to increase elegance and poise. A dream sequence or flashback, those other great cinematic devices, could also be elongated long after shooting was over. For certain moments, the man in the box behind you at the Odeon became as central to the creative process as a film’s director or stars.4
There were other reasons why people and animals seemed to move in stop-go motion in black and white: the guileful manipulations of the cinema manager. In 1923, the year of Safety Last!, which lasted 6,300 feet, the cameraman and projectionist Victor Milner wrote in American Cinematographer that for a busy 8 p.m. showing he would hand-crank a 1,000-feet reel at the dramatic speed of 12 minutes, and in the afternoon, with business slouchier, he would ‘project the same reel so slow that it took Maurice Costello [the first screen Sherlock Holmes in 1905] ages to cross the set’. The projectionist would receive these instructions daily, as would the musical director in the pit; the fuller the house and the greater the crush in the queue outside, the more the conductor and musicians would wave their hands, and the faster the audience had to be at reading the title cards.
Perhaps there was an artistic reason we projected ourselves this way: more vigour for the human race, a cleaner and more decisive look in an exciting age. The train coming through the screen – one stationary camera, one take with no edit – was too much like real life; ever since, reel life has helped us escape to an ideal. The film historian Walter Kerr has noted that Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times was ‘filmed at a rate that puts springs on his heels and makes unleashed jack-knives of his elbows. This is how the films looked when they were projected as their creators intended.’ Harold Lloyd’s cameraman for many of his pictures was Walter Lundin, and his bespoke cranking of the camera could define the success of a movie: a chase was often slowed down to 14 frames a second to increase the apparent speed when shown; the slower he went, the faster the cars and the trains.5 This was at least one reason why Chaplin was Chaplin and Lloyd was Lloyd and you were you: not only were they able to form and retake their stories, but the cameramen and projectionists added dynamism to their every move.
It was perfect comedic timing. In photography a comparable trick would later show itself in airbrushing and Photoshop; in music, Auto-Tune.
Everything changed with sound and motorisation. Only now was it possible to put a running time on the posters and promotional material. The first time a Harold Lloyd film was awarded a running time was in 1932, for the 96-minute feature Movie Crazy. But by then time had caught up with him, and filmgoers had new wonders and new idols: Grand Hotel, Horse Feathers, Pack Up Your Troubles, The Mummy, Blonde Venus, Greta Garbo, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Boris Karloff, Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant.
When he was older, and wore glasses for real, and was said to be unchanged by all his fame and canny investments and was celebrated for his lasting marriage to his co-star Mildred Davis, Harold Lloyd looked back at his career with film historians. He said he was delighted to receive an honorary Oscar in 1953. It stung that he was too often critically ignored and only occasionally swam in the same genius pool as Chaplin and Keaton. He had made a slightly more successful artistic (if not financial) transition to the talkies than either of them, although that’s not saying much. Lloyd made seven sound films, nine if you include the ones he made but didn’t star in. He made only five ‘thrill’ pictures, he said, and therefore hundreds of others that were, by definition, not so thrilling, and he was occasionally a little peeved that, more than any other film star before or since, he was principally remembered not for one film, but for one stunt.
‘That scary business in Safety Last! wasn’t faked,’ Lloyd said in 1949, while promoting the rerelease of seven of his old movies (not that he needed the money; he was thought to be the wealthiest film star in America).
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