A sold-out crowd packed the Harold J. Miossi Cultural and Performing Arts Center at Cuesta College on Sunday afternoon to watch Orchestra Novo bring to life the silent film Safety Last.
I had never seen this film, although I had a feeling it was going to be exciting, given the famous photo with Harold Lloyd hanging from clock hands suspended far above the street. Adding to the evening was a question-and-answer period with Lloyd’s granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd.
It is truly magic to watch an orchestra performing live with a moving picture. Conductor Michael Nowak, using a score written by Robert Israel, kept perfect time for over an hour as the musicians made us forget we were watching a silent film.
The storyline was simple, befitting a movie made in 1923. Lloyd’s character, Harold, leaves his girlfriend Mildred behind in a small town, and moves to the Big City to make it rich, then send for her. He gets a menial job in a department store but uses all of his money to send jewelry home to her to make her think he was moving up the ladder.
Mildred surprises him by showing up at his department store, ready to get married. Harold has to think fast to keep his deception going. He learns that the manager of the department store would pay someone $1,000 to bring in more business. Harold remembers that his roommate, Bill, a construction worker, once scaled a skyscraper just for fun. Harold convinces the manager to hire a “mystery man” to climb the department store building, which will attract a huge crowd. Bill agrees to split the $1,000 prize with Harold.
Unfortunately, Bill has a run-in with a policeman earlier in the film, and the policeman shows up at the event to arrest him. Bill tells Harold to start climbing the building to the first floor, duck in a window, and they will trade places. Unfortunately the policeman is hot on Bill’s trail and follows him to each floor. Bill keeps encouraging poor Harold to just go up one more floor and then another, until Harold reaches the top of the building himself.
Perhaps it is a universal fear of heights that puts us right up on the ledge with him. I would have been afraid to check my blood pressure after the movie concluded.”
I don’t know why this climbing sequence is so terrifying. We, the audience, collectively know nothing happens to Harold Lloyd, but we still shriek and groan at every close call, whether he gets tangled in a net and almost falls, or has to deal with a mouse running up his pant leg halfway up, or has a flock of pigeons landing on him.
Perhaps it is a universal fear of heights that puts us right up on the ledge with him. I would have been afraid to check my blood pressure after the movie concluded.
Suzanne Lloyd was raised by Harold Lloyd and his wife Mildred Davis (who plays Mildred in the film and who was in many other films with Lloyd). She told us how the movie came about.
Lloyd was in downtown Los Angeles and saw a man scale a skyscraper. He called his producer, Hal Roach, and said “We have to make a movie about this.” He hired Bill Strother, the man he saw climbing, to play the actual part in “Safety Last,” and came up with a script to work in the stunt.
Lloyd did most of his own stunts in the movie, and he actually was high up on that skyscraper, hanging on for dear life. Suzanne told us he did have a painter’s platform out of sight underneath him, in case he fell. Still, to me that is not very reassuring.
Suzanne said forever after, when Lloyd would take her to the circus and the high wire performers would come out, he would jump up and offer to get her candy or popcorn and leave the arena. She finally asked him why he left, and he told her he just could not watch the high wire act because he knew what they were feeling.
And, from the reaction around me in the theater, the audience was feeling it too.
Bravo to Michael Nowak and Orchestra Novo for a memorable performance that earned them a very long standing ovation.