Silent movies - Safety Last!

I already mentioned that before this project my silent movie "knowledge" mostly consisted of snippets from the compilation shows we watched as children.
One of those snippets is of course this iconic picture.

How many people know the film this is from, though? I can't remember ever having watched it completely as a child although I always liked Harold Lloyd better than Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, even if he was called "The Third Genius" and his name is less known today.
Maybe it was just me being superficial because I found him more handsome or because he seemed so normal, just your average guy. Maybe the reason is that I tend to be on the underdog's side and he felt like an underdog compared to his more appreciated colleagues (although I hardly could have known that as a kid). Who knows, it could even be all of this together.
Anyhow, it was about time to watch some Harold Lloyd starting with "Safety Last!"

The plot (as usual with spoilers).
Harold is leaving his hometown to go to the big city and get successful enough to marry his girl.
Things don't quite work out, Harold is a dry goods salesman at a department store and shares a place with his friend "Limpy Bill", a high-rise construction worker, but he can't get himself to admit that to Mildred. Instead he pawns the phonograph (Bill's and his?) to get her a very pretty lavalier (a kind of pendant, I had never heard the word before), but he can't afford the chain yet.
At the end of one shift, he meets a policeman he knows from home and when Bill comes to pick him up, he tells him as a prank to push the policeman over who is on a callbox saying he will sort it out. Unfortunately, it's a different policeman now and to escape him, Bill climbs up a building.

After Harold has sent Mildred a chain costing him more than his last weekly salary, Mildred's mother convinces her not to wait any longer and follow him to the city.
She arrives at the department store and now Harold has to keep up the lie about his success, especially when Mildred sees him next to the general manager's office and thinks he is the manager.
Then he overheards the manager saying he would pay $1000 for a new idea bringing people to the shop and suggests a "human spider" climbing the 12-story building where the store is, thinking of Bill of course whom he offers half of the money.

The day of the big stunt arrives, but the policeman has seen it announced in the newspaper, guesses that Bill is the mystery man and waits for him at the starting point.
So Bill tells Harold to start climbing himself and he will take over upstairs, but he just can't get rid of the policeman, so Harold climbs and climbs and climbs having to overcome obstacles like ledges, a rope, hungry pigeons, a clock ... until he finally reaches the roof where Mildred is waiting for him (who got married to him in real life shortly after, by the way).

This movie seems to have two parts.
You have the romance and the workplace, combined when Harold tries to hide the truth from Mildred, and you have the last 20 minutes which are full of suspense and actually were the initial idea for the movie.
Lloyd had seen Bill Strother who plays The Pal climb a high building and thought this would make a good thrill sequence, then they made the introduction for it.

As usual, reviews are divided.
There are people who think Lloyd just wasn't funny because he wasn't as inspired as Chaplin and Keaton, others praise that he may not have been a natural comedian, but that he became one.
I don't know why I have to compare them at all. Am I not allowed to enjoy different approaches?
Also I can definitely say that there were a lot of funny moments in "Safety Last!" The anniversary sale scene for example reminded me very much of the first days of the summer and winter end sales we used to have here (which I avoided) and was very funny. I liked the fast thinking Harold shows trying to keep his lie from being exposed or when he gets caught in a towel truck and does his best to get back to work in time, so he won't lose his job.
The last sequence is not so much funny as exciting and it totally grabbed my attention although I of course knew he wasn't really climbing a 12-story building.

Which brings us to the #1 question - how did they do that sequence? Did Lloyd do his own stunts? What was the trick?
Again I was surprised at some commenters. It was as if they thought the fact that Lloyd was "only" three stories high at the most was cheating.
Yes, so he had help from Strother (for wide shots) and from a circus artist (dangling from the rope) and a stuntman. Smart people get help from people who specialize in something.
Also, Lloyd had actually lost thumb and index finger of his right hand some years before when a prop bomb for a photoshoot turned out to be real.

I don't care (even if it's interesting) what camera angles they used or if they built a platform on the building instead of using the real building itself and that I knew that beforehand because it was so convincing that I still gasped and had a hard time watching some of it.
And by the way, Luke Skywalker isn't a real Jedi and Sinbad didn't fight real monsters. Just saying.
I watched the film without a score (although there is one with score on YouTube here) and I don't even want to know what suspenseful music during the climb would have done to me.

Last but not least a warning - there is one short scene portraying a Jewish shopkeeper, a very ugly stereotype, not unusual for the time unfortunately as we know, but still uncomfortable to watch today.

All in all, this is a movie I can definitely see myself watching again.

Sources:
1. The official Harold Lloyd website - Biography
2. Ed Park: Safety Last!: High-Flying Harold. On: The Criterion Collection. Essays. June 17, 2013
3. Jeffrey Vance: Safety Last! On: San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Essay. 2013
4. Arik Devens: Safety Last! On: Cinema Gadfly. Essay. May 16, 2015
5. Pamela Hutchinson: Don't look down: 100 years of Harold Lloyd's Safety Last! On: The Guardian, March 24, 2023
6. Kevin Brownlow and David Gill: Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius. TV documentary 1989.
7. Roger Ebert: The third genius of silent film. On: RogerEbert.com, July 3, 2005