Harold Lloyd
Nearly two hundred comedies. Hanging off the clock, with two fingers missing.
Harold Lloyd made close to two hundred comedy films between 1914 and 1947, silent and sound, and is among the most influential comedians of the silent period. The glasses were the character rather than a costume.
The single most reproduced image of him is the clock face in Safety Last, and the context is rarely mentioned: Lloyd performed his climbing work after losing a thumb and forefinger in an accident with a prop bomb in 1919. He wore a prosthetic glove for the rest of his career.
Look for the glove in the photographs. It is there in most of them.
The climb in Safety Last! was built rather than faked. The crew put false facades on the roofs of several downtown Los Angeles buildings of different heights, so that each stage of the ascent could be shot with a platform a floor or two below; the city behind Lloyd changes from shot to shot. Bill Strother, a steeplejack billed as the Human Fly, did the long-shot climbing, and Harvey Parry doubled some of the rope work. Lloyd did the close work on the clock himself, on a set on the roof of the Broadway Leasehold Building. The film cost $121,000 and returned about $1.5 million.
Lloyd kept his negatives and controlled them, which is why his films were rarely seen for forty years. He refused television, asking $300,000 a picture for two showings, and reissued sparingly; a vault fire at Greenacres in August 1943 destroyed part of the collection. Greenacres itself, built between 1926 and 1929, had 44 rooms and a nine-hole golf course. He was Imperial Potentate of the Shriners in 1949 and 1950, and the installation at Soldier Field in Chicago on July 25, 1949, drew 90,000 people. His compilation Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy played Cannes in 1962. He died of prostate cancer at Greenacres on March 8, 1971.
Facts on this file are checked against the Wikipedia article Harold Lloyd. The wording is ours. Nothing about the photograph is asserted beyond the credit the file itself carries, and that credit is usually a studio rather than a person: stills departments were staff jobs and the photographer's name went unrecorded. Confident attributions in the trade are mostly inherited guesses.
Other prints under this name
About Harold Lloyd
How did Harold Lloyd lose his fingers
On August 24, 1919, at the Witzel photography studio in Los Angeles, he posed with what he took to be a papier-mache prop bomb for publicity photographs and lit its fuse from a cigarette. It was live. The explosion took the thumb and index finger of his right hand, burned his face and chest and for a time threatened his sight. He was back at work within months. A prosthetic glove covered the hand for the rest of his career and is nearly invisible on screen.
Did Harold Lloyd really hang from the clock
The close shots are Lloyd, on a clock built into a set on the roof of the Broadway Leasehold Building with a platform below and out of frame. The drop was real as far as the platform and would have been fatal beyond it. Long shots of the climb are Bill Strother, a professional building climber, on the International Bank Building at Temple and Spring. Each set stood on a lower rooftop so the street appeared further down than it was. The picture opened on April 1, 1923.
How did Harold Lloyd die
Prostate cancer, on March 8, 1971, at Greenacres, his Beverly Hills estate; he was seventy seven. His wife Mildred Davis, whom he had married on February 10, 1923, had died of a heart attack in August 1969. He had received an honorary Academy Award in 1953 as a master comedian and good citizen and had spent his last years showing his films at Cannes and on campuses. His granddaughter Suzanne Lloyd oversaw the restoration of the surviving negatives between 2002 and 2005.
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