Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music presented
another of their occasional screenings of silent films with live musical
accompaniment. This event saw two films screened, the short ‘two-reeler’ One Week (1920), starring Buster Keaton
and co-written and co-directed by Keaton with Edward F. Cline, and the
feature-length (‘seven-reeler’) Safety
Last! (1923), directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, and starring
Harold Lloyd, arguably the third member of silent comedy’s own ‘holy trinity’
along with Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.
The screening of both films not only
filled out the event’s run-time to over an hour and a half, but managed to
recreate the feeling of going to the cinema in the era before big multiplexes and
even bigger films – where cinema audiences would watch two films: a shorter
film (a ‘B-movie’) and a longer film (or ‘A-movie’) and was in keeping with the
‘retro’ spirit of the evening. Darius Battiwalla not only provided improvised
scores to both movies on the piano (used instead of the organ, the instrument
usually played when the RNCM screens silent films, as he felt that the piano’s
lighter tones suited comedy better), but was also knowledgeable about both
films, giving the audience the background to the films and their stars.
One Week marked
the first solo film of Keaton’s after a successful run of films with fellow
silent comedian Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle (whose hugely successful career
effectively came crashing to end following a scandalous trial and two retrials
between 1921 and 1922 where it was alleged he had raped and accidentally killed
the actress Virginia Rappe; Arbuckle was eventually cleared of all charges but
the damage to his reputation had been done, despite the support of both Keaton and
Chaplin). Keaton’s solo work saw him adopt his trademark ‘Old Stone Face’
persona where he would never smile. The film’s brief run-time of twenty-five
minutes meant the film was relatively light on plot, it basically follows the
trials and tribulations of Keaton’s first week of marriage as he and his new
bride attempt to build a prefabricated house given to them as a wedding
present, but packed with visual gags and incredible stunt work, carried out by
Keaton himself. One early scene featured Keaton straddling two cars driving on
the road (a stunt which Lloyd recreated in Safety
Last!) before being pushed off by an oncoming bicycle. Another daring stunt
saw Keaton take a large fall out of the front door of the house, positioned on
the top floor after a spurned suitor of Keaton’s bride amended the numbers the
components of the house came in, onto the ground below. There was also a
surprisingly ‘modern’ joke where Keaton’s bride is having a bath and drops the
soap on the bathroom floor – to protect her modesty while she recovers it, a
hand emerges around the side of the camera to cover the lens until she is back
in the bath, soap in hand. Battiwalla provided a suitably jaunty score on the
piano which often reflected the action onscreen; as Keaton is flattened by the
weight of a piano, Battiwalla echoed the sound of the keys crashing as it
landed on Keaton, he provided a glissando to represent the sound of rain
falling as the holes in Keaton’s roof let rainwater in during the ‘housewarming
party’ sequence, and even recreated the tone and rhythms of a fairground
‘merry-go-round’ as Keaton’s house was blown around by a strong gust of wind.
Battiwalla’s improvised score was similarly sympathetic to
the unfolding events in Safety Last! While
this film didn’t quite have the same ‘laugh-a-minute’ quota of gags as the
Keaton short, it did boast a more rounded plot (rather than a series of
sketches, as per One Week) and some
highly sophisticated visual effects and use of trick photography, most famously
in the film’s closing sequence which features Lloyd scaling the twelve storey
building he works in as part of a publicity stunt. In contrast to the
never-smiling Keaton and the down-on-his-luck melancholia of Chaplin’s Tramp
persona, Lloyd’s character (‘the Boy’) was a chirpy, optimistic chap who tried
to see good humour in every situation, no matter how crazy things got. Safety Last! sees Lloyd’s character,
also called Harold Lloyd, move from a small town to the big city to make his
fortune. He writes of his successes to his fiancée back home, claiming to be
the ‘floorman’ overseeing the counter-staff; in reality, he is a counter worker
under the constant glare of the haughty floor manager Stubbs. His fiancée’s
unexpected arrival in the city forces Lloyd to play up to expectations and,
seeking to provide his love with the riches his fiancée is expecting, comes up
with a publicity stunt to attract more customers to the department store in
exchange of one-thousand dollars: a ‘mystery man’ will scale all twelve floors
of the building the next day. Lloyd’s plan is for his pal Bill, a steeplejack,
to carry out the climb but, owing to an earlier incident with a police officer,
Lloyd himself endures the fraught climb to the top. Unlike Keaton, Lloyd didn’t
do all of the stunts in the film, but he did do the majority. The film’s most
iconic moment, Lloyd hanging off the hands of the clock on the exterior of the
department store building, was achieved through trick photography, but even so,
the film’s climactic climbing sequence remained genuinely tense and is rightly recognised
as a landmark sequence in the history of cinema.
Safety Last! also contained some hilarious jokes – in one scene,
Lloyd has to comb his hair while at work so as to maintain a smart appearance,
with no mirror to hand, he uses his reflection in the shiny head of a bald
gentlemen examining an item on the counter, in another sequence, he measures a
yard and a half of material by using the lengths of a larger built lady and her
stick-thin companion, both he and Bill hide from their landlady by donning
large coats and pulling themselves under them so that it seems that the coats
are just hanging off hooks, and even engages in some impromptu fencing with a
female customer who thrusts her umbrella at him, while he fends off her
umbrella with a ruler. Throughout, Battiwalla’s accompaniment helped carry the
audience along, from the sorrow of the departure of Lloyd from his hometown at
the start, to the romantic sweep of Lloyd’s fiancée receiving a letter from him
with a gift, before providing a frantic build up at Lloyd’s daring climb goes
on and he is impeded by pigeons, a mouse, a dog, a tennis net, and, finally, a
rope!
Considering both films are edging close to being a hundred
years old, they still hold up well with well-timed gags and daring feats.
While, arguably, the slapstick comedy these films demonstrate are no longer in
fashion, they still provided genuine entertainment and were helped along by the
skilful touch of Battiwalla on piano.
Reviewer - Andrew Marsden
on - 26/10/18
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