Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! came out in April 1923 and contained one of the most copied images in cinema history — a man in a straw hat dangling from the hands of a clock face, twelve stories above a busy Los Angeles street, with nothing below him but city traffic and a long drop.
The film follows Harold, a small-town young man who moves to the city to make money and impress his girlfriend back home. He writes her letters implying he is doing far better than he actually is, building up a fiction that eventually forces him to follow through on promises he was never equipped to keep. To earn a $1,000 bonus from his employer, he arranges for a professional climber to scale the outside of the twelve-story Bolton Building while crowds watch from below. When the climber gets caught up with a police officer on the first floor and can’t start the climb, Harold goes up himself — planning to hand off to his friend floor by floor. It never works out that way.
The building climb takes up the final third of the film and runs about twenty minutes. Lloyd climbs past a net of pigeons, gets a mouse trapped in his pants, battles a weather vane, and ends up on that clock — all while the camera makes absolutely certain the audience can see the real street far below.
Lloyd did the majority of the climbing himself. Camera angles were carefully constructed to maximize the sense of height, using a real building in downtown Los Angeles with platforms built just out of frame. Lloyd performed the stunts despite having lost his right thumb and index finger in a 1919 accident involving a prop bomb.
