Review #42 SAFETY LAST! (1923, Fred C Newmeyer, Sam Taylor)

 

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A young man leaves his village to seek his fortune in the city, with hilarious consequences.  

Starring  Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Bill Strother, Noah Young, Westcott Clarke

Written by  H M Walker, Jean Havez, Harold Lloyd

Produced by  Hal Roach

Duration  73 minutes   

   

Marilyn Monroe’s dress billowing from an air vent in THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH (1955). Elliot and his alien pal on a bike in front of the moon in ET (1982). Fred Astaire swinging from a lamp post in SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952). Father Merrin arriving outside the house in THE EXORCIST (1973). Janet Leigh screaming in the shower in PSYCHO (1960).

So what is the most iconic image in motion pictures? And where does Harold Lloyd hanging from a clock face way above a busy street in 1923’s SAFETY LAST! figure? And furthermore, to what extent do people (like me) only know that shot because it was paid tribute to in BACK TO THE FUTURE?

I’d wager that most casual moviegoers have no idea from what movie the Monroe sequence is from, either, let alone the plot of SEVEN YEAR ITCH (which is a fairly amusing mid-level Billy Wilder comedy). And I myself certainly had no idea what SAFETY LAST! was all about, save for the hi-jinks promised by the counterintuitive title, and the fact that a bloke hanging on for dear life in such a precarious situation is unlikely to be taken from a study in neo-realism.

I was familiar with Charlie Chaplin; well, I’ve seen CITY LIGHTS (1931). And I knew Buster Keaton; that is to say, I caught THE GENERAL (1926) on TV one time. But I’d never heard of Harold Lloyd, so wasn’t sure if he was going to have as indelible a screen image as those two silent movie titans.

As it turns out, in SAFTEY LAST! Lloyd is playing a character named ... 'Harold Lloyd'. Just like James Spader plays 'James Ballard' in CRASH (1996) after the source novel’s author, except without the creepy implications of that far more twisted story (JG Ballard was never actually part of an underground cult that sexualised car crashes... as far as we are aware). Anyway, movie Lloyd is earnest, naïve and good-natured – not to mention physically dextrous. We like him.

The plot has Lloyd heading off to "the big city" (Los Angeles?) to find employment, so he can then send for his fiancé to join him when he is successful (she, incidentally, is played by Mildred Davis, who looks exactly like every other silent movie actress I’ve ever seen – or maybe I’ve only ever seen her, who knows.) And from there, it’s a sketch-like series of his farcical escapades in menial work, sprinkled with some mistaken identity, due to Lloyd wanting his visiting sweetheart to believe he has risen higher up the corporate ladder than he really has.

And the movie is pretty funny. There are lots of great sight gags: Harold running onto the back of a truck instead of his train; he and his flatmate jumping under their hung-up coats to hide from their rent-happy landlady. And the title cards are often amusing, too, as a substitute for witty spoken dialogue. Really, SAFETY LAST! is a relentless series of moments designed to make you chuckle. And it’s successful, as well as more than a little charming. It’s basically a live-action cartoon. Plus the clock sequence does not disappoint, managing to be a genuinely suspenseful set piece (although given the choice, I’d take Dr Emmett Brown any day of the week.)

So alright, answer me this: does the world need silent movies back? Was anything better before sound? I guess you didn’t get the mixing problems on movies like Chris Nolan’s INTERSTELLAR and TENET, or have to endure an actor’s voice that you find aurally annoying. There’s an efficiency to the storytelling, an unavoidable and welcome reliance on the ‘show, don't tell’ principle.

And it’s not like every technological advance makes the old thing redundant. Take practical effects vs CGI: it’s now a cliche that filmmakers will boast how much a scene is practical and not computer generated, especially a stunt. (This is a far cry from 1998’s LOST IN SPACE, where the marketing gushed so proudly about the project breaking the record for number of onscreen SFX shots with 750.)

But ultimately, let’s face facts: after THE ARTIST kicked up such a big fuss back in 2011, people didn’t suddenly fly out and start making more silent movies, did they? So what does that tell you?

Four stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  The entire backend of the film is Lloyd climbing up a building with nothing to stop him falling to his death, so they weren’t joking when they told us that being safe would not figure high on the agenda.

What would a movie SAFETY FIRST! be about?  It would be a lot duller.

Previously:  THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME

Next time:  LAST NIGHT IN SOHO 

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

Review #41 THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME (2020, Olivier Megaton)

 

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The not-too-distant future is such a shitshow that the powers-that-be resort to broadcasting a signal that prevents people from engaging in unlawful acts.

Starring  Édgar Ramírez, Michael Pitt, Anna Brewster, Patrick Bergin, Sharlto Copley

Written by  Karl Gajdusek

Produced by  Jesse Berger, Jason Michael Berman, Barry Levine

Duration  149 minutes

  

JAWS is pretty much credited for establishing the summer blockbuster. But more than that, it’s one of the first of what can be classed as a ‘what if?’ movie. In the case of the 1976 hit, it’s a pretty innocuous one: What if a beachside tourist community was threatened by a man-eating shark during the 4th of July weekend?

It wasn’t until the more-is-more ’80s that big idea pictures reached their full potential. Mega producers like Joel Silver and the Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer combo made a killing on high concepts that could be summed up in one sentence and had the potential for high stakes, sexy characters, tense culture clashes and enormous ticket sales:

– What if a racist white cop needed a black criminal to crack a case? 48 HRS (1982) (Silver)

– What if a sexy young woman worked as a welder by day and a stripper at night, with dreams of becoming a professional dancer? FLASHDANCE (1983) (Simpson/Bruckheimer)

– What if a streetwise Detroit cop used his brash ways to investigate a crime in Los Angeles County's snootiest zip code? BEVERLY HILLS COP (1984) (Simpson/Bruckheimer)

– What if two virginal nerds manufactured their dream woman and became the most popular guys in school? WEIRD SCIENCE (1985) (Silver)

– What if sexy young pilots flew around in a vaguely competitive tournament, between games of beach volleyball and hanging around the locker-room shirtless? TOP GUN (1986) (Simpson/Bruckheimer)

– What if a black cop needed a white cop to crack a case, but couldn’t be sure that the white cop wasn’t an unstable suicidal liability? LETHAL WEAPON (1987) (Silver)

– What about one out-of-town New York cop versus 15 European terrorists in an LA skyscraper on Christmas Eve? DIE HARD (1988) (Silver)

– What if it was TOP GUN again, but this time with cars that keep turning left around a big circle while the spectators hope for a crash? DAYS OF THUNDER (1990) (Simpson/Bruckheimer)

Now, THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME is hardly a summer blockbuster; it’s a Netflix original that is unlikely to ever be projected onto a large screen or be subject to queues around the block.

But it does have a what-if scenario that would’ve fit right in during the '80s: What if the US Government made it physically impossible for anyone to commit a crime?

The first thing that comes to mind re: controlling people to lessen antisocial behaviour is Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, where Alex is a guinea pig for a new method that induces revulsion to counteract his naughty urges. Then there’s Brave New World, where Aldous Huxley went the nicey-nicey route for keeping the populace in check – as opposed to 1984, with George Orwell’s "boot stamping on a human face" focus on prevention through disenfranchisement: there can be no thoughtcrime if the state has removed the words to express dissent from your vocabulary. More recently, similar territory to THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME has been explored in THE PURGE movie series, where society is allowed to get all the crime out its system for one anarchic night per year.

Unfortunately, LAST DAYS wraps its intriguing premise up in an uninspired and generic crime thriller. It’s long, but not deep; violent, but unexciting; loud, but not clever. Disappointing, then, but perhaps not surprising, being that it comes to us from the director of TAKEN 2, TAKEN 3 and COLUMBIANA, the implausibly named Oliver Megaton, and that rather than the likes of Burgess, Huxley or Orwell, the source material is some comic book.

It’s the kind of movie where you’ve seen everything before: the plot points, the relationships, the attitudes, the tense interactions ... even the songs have all been used already in other, better movies: ‘Glory Box’ by Portishead (1996's STEALING BEAUTY); The Stooges’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ (from LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELLS in 1998 – and also recycled from Megaton’s own TRANSPORTER 3!). LAST DAYS turns out to be a heist movie, and the heist, when it eventually comes, is good – but not good enough to make the previous 110 minutes worth enduring.

And by the end, I was left with my own 'what if?' question: what if they'd made THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME with more smarts, or more fun, or more originality – basically anything that could have stopped it becoming a bland, generic, overlong slog that’s worse than even the later PURGE sequels?

Two stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  To paraphrase Dr Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in JURASSIC PARK, crime will find a way.

What would a movie called THE FIRST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME be about?  Someone stealing George Washington’s wooden teeth or something like that.

Previously:  ABOUT LAST NIGHT

Next time:  SAFETY LAST!

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com