High over a traffic-filled street, a young man clings to the minute hand of a large clock on the side of a skyscraper. The clock is slowly but surely coming adrift from the wall. The young man's face is frozen in mute terror, but, incongruously, his glasses are neatly in place and his straw hat remains on his head. This comic-horror nightmare is one of the cinemacs iconic images, fixed in the folk memory, even if few people today could tell you what film it comes from, or that the man in distress was called Harold Lloyd.
Everyone still knows Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and where film buffs gather, the controversy over which of them was the greater genius drones on. Nobody talks about Lloyd, though in his day he was more prolific and more profitable than either Chaplin or Keaton. The long eclipse becomes even more mysterious now that his films have been restored to pristine condition, and are revealed as enduring masterworks of comedy, in no way inferior to the work of his contemporaries.
The big difference between Lloyd and the other two was that his screen character was so ordinary; Chaplin and Keaton were extraordinary. Lloyd, in his buttoned-up jacket and shiny shoes, was the nerd-next-door. Though he had a fine physique, he always managed to make himself look like a weed.
The regular pattern of a Lloyd comedy is that the nerd is challenged, often by his own ambition, to conquer his natural dumb timidity. He faces up to a universe of comic catastrophes to win through and get the girl. His lucky strike was that his boy-who-makes-good-despite-himself provided an archetypal figure for the optimistic, go-getting Twenties, the heyday of the American dream. It was significant that though he made a successful shift to sound films, his career declined in the Thirties: after the Depression, the go-getter was no longer an ideal.
Lloyd's special discovery was the comedy of thrills, of which the clock sequence from Safety Last (1923) is the supreme example. He plays a shop assistant who has somehow manoeuvred himself into the predicament of having to perform a 'human-fly' act on the side of the skyscraper. The higher he climbs, the worse the hazards. He attracts a flock of pigeons, gets entangled in a net, is assaulted by a painter's trestle and knocked off a ledge by a swing window. The clock is the climax. The effect this meticulously structured sequence invariably achieves in the cinema is phenomenal, with the juxtaposition of terror and absurdity exciting even the most resistant audience.
Lloyd preferred to do his own stunts . Only at the insistence of the insurance companies did he use doubles for the craziest shots. But it is Lloyd himself who hangs perilously on to wildly speeding trucks. Slapstick was a dangerous game: Lloyd, doing a stunt with a bomb for a publicity photograph, blew off his thumb and forefinger and thereafter had to wear a prosthetic glove on screen.
What amazes us today, seeing the great feature comedies of the twenties, is how perfect they are, not just in the phenomenal physical execution of the gags, but in the structure, the rhythm, the integrity of the characterisation, however extravagant. It is all the more remarkable since in silent days none of the three great director-clowns ever used a written script. The films were composed piecemeal, as collages. One good gag, like the skyscraper in Safety Last, was enough: the rest of the story would be pieced together around it as the work went on. It was not done casually. Keaton, Chaplin and Lloyd would sit around with their gagmen and assistants for days or weeks if necessary, wrestling with ideas until they had in their heads the idea for the next comedy sequence planned, honed and polished. A witness of the time recalled that these sessions, though they resulted in some of the deftest and funniest comedy ever seen, were appallingly serious affairs, 'worse than a morgue'.
This high seriousness - added to the unlimited time and money that, as their own independent producers, the great comic stars were able to invest - only partly explains the cultural miracle: in little more than a decade, from 1914 to 1927, Hollywood produced a flowering of comic genius which has never been seen before or since. The fame of the big three overshadowed a whole generation of other, hardly less gifted comedians, among them Harry Langdon, Charlie Chase and 'Fatty' Arbuckle.
One partial explanation is the legacy of vaudeville and music hall. Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon, W.C. Fields , Eddie Cantor and the Marx Brothers all grew up in vaudeville, starting as kid performers, learning the craft of comedy through the constant interplay with a tough and demanding audience.
Yet this does not explain Lloyd, a boy from a broken home in Nebraska, who went west as a teenager with his feckless father and elder brother. He was stage-struck, certainly, but all his acting experience was in melodrama with touring stock companies. Hal Roach, his partner and producer in the early years, insisted that he was not really a comedian at all but 'the best actor I ever saw acting being a comedian'. He first met Roach when they were both picking up $5 a day as extras at the Universal Studios. When Roach acquired a little money, they went into business, making execrable one-reel comedies.
In his first films, Lloyd, like everyone else at the time, shamelessly imitated Chaplin's business. The results were far from polished, but they were energetic and, turning them out at the rate of two a week, Lloyd built up a comic vocabulary that was to serve him well when he had the luck or genius to settle on the (lensless) horn-rims and the character that went with them. Even before the first of the classic feature films, Lloyd had made around 90 shorts starring what he called 'the glass character'.
What Lloyd did have in common with the other great comedians was inordinate competitiveness, a relentless dedication to his work and the drive of a perfectionist. Each comic was determined to outdo the other and would stop at nothing to achieve it. Like Keaton, Lloyd was not only a comedian of consummate skills and boundless invention, but he had an ability to perform comedy stunts that appear humanly impossible; he also became a master filmmaker. Although other people are generally given director credit on the films, all the evidence indicates that the dominant creator was Lloyd himself; and the stylistic consistency from film to film is further proof.
Were silent comedies really so funny or is the idea of this golden age just the fantasy of nostalgists? Put to the test, the silents really do still win. Their total concentration on visual comedy, heightened by good musical accompaniment, can generate a comic delirium that eludes even the best sound comedy. Lloyd himself proved the point. In his late films he used sound and dialogue with intelligence and success; but when he attempted to repeat the clock sequence with sound, in Feet First (1930), it wasn't the same. The cries and shouts brought it toppling from the heights of comic fantasy. Billions of dollars-worth of digital tricks will never buy the quality of laughter that we still get from just one of Lloyd's, Chaplin's or Keaton's inspired gags. Harold Lloyd: the Third Genius runs at National Film Theatre, London SE1 from Thurs until 28 April
