Analysis on Silence: Harold Lloyd

Harold Lloyd isn't as well known, nowadays, to the general public as the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, however he is groundbreaking, both for his stunts but also for his groundbreaking approach towards slapstick humour. The look that is most synonymous with Harold Lloyd is his hat and glasses. His youthful look and natural ability to express very exaggerated facial expressions, as well as his very energetic and flexible body movements, all contribute to his acting style. His films would also incorporate romance and love interests into his stories, often leading to comedic antics that involve him acting awkward around women, one of the first of this kind of storytelling and done more effectively then than ever more. His stunts were very influential, inspiring famous stunt men Vic Armstrong and Jackie Chan. They were often life-threatening, especially due to his thumb and forefinger on his right hand being severed, and needing to disguise the wound with a prosthetic glove, due to an accident on set in which a real bomb was mixed up with some fake ones.

He is best known for his performance in Safety Last!, in which he scales a tall building and hangs from a clock, one of the famous images in film history. It was a well-coordinated sequence that used strong tension as the basis for its humour, in which several circumstances lead to him nearly falling. It was also very ingeniously built up throughout the film, as it happens due to him the idea to his boss that a stuntman he knows will climb the building, and draw in a mass audience to his shop. He does this because it mean getting paid a fortune, thus not disappointing his girlfriend who visits unexpectedly and expected him to be successful after moving into the bug city. This idea backfires when Lloyd's stuntman has a run in with a police officer who has a grudge against him because of an earlier scene in the film. They decide the best idea would be for Lloyd to climb the building himself then once the stuntman loses the cop they swap clothes and the stuntman climb the rest of the way to the top; a lot of circumstances lead to Lloyd having to climb to the top of the building. This scene works because even if we know Harold Lloyd is skilled at climbing buildings and being a stuntman, the character he plays is just a dorky guy that is a constant victim of circumstance and bad luck within the context of the film, and Harold Lloyd does such a great job at portraying this character that the audience relates to his struggle climbing the building, and therefore sees the humour behind it.