Silent Films (pt. II)
Safety Last!
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
Hello hello hello, my dear readers, I hope you’re faring alright in this disturbing-on-the-daily-dystopia. After the loudly lewd and obnoxiously obscene films I watched last week, I desperately desired some quieter, more refined, and respectable cinema. So I decided to class up this blog once again with another round of notable and nostalgic silent films. Other than my exploration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis last year, I haven’t watched a silent film since 2022, not because I’m avoiding this area of film history, but because there are so many silent films to choose from that I needed about three years to narrow it down. Like any modern day media consumer, my attention span can be tested by the different pacing and sensibilities that are staples of silent cinema, but I am thrilled to announce that both of tonight’s films really captured my attention and never let it go. As with my last round of silent films, I chose a comedy and a thriller—to marvel at the technological and narrative feats achieved by these disparate genres in this limiting era of filmmaking. But, as I’ve stated before, I pretty much consider all silent films to be horror films. There is an undeniably haunting quality to the low-res, high-emoting performances in silent cinema; the way the lights flicker and glow and disappear into fuzzy nothingness can put me into a dizzied trance. These films are often shorter, but they are far from simplistic. They are filled to the brim with memorably evocative images, wide-mouthed acting, and exuberant gesticulating to express words that couldn’t necessarily fit into an intertitle. But silent films are also gutsier than they’re given credit for, as they often are critical of political institutions and social norms—by way of exaggeration or slapstick or both. There are many more masters of silent cinema left to explore, so let’s dive further into this silent but vibrant era of movie magic.
I began with the funnier of tonight’s two films, one that is known for one particularly impressive shot, but is overflowing with insane camera and stunt work—this is Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor’s 1923 film Safety Last! Appropriately released on April Fool’s Day and titled after a play on a turn-of-phrase that must’ve really killed back then, Safety Last! is a hilariously hectic adventure that is randomly available to watch on its Wikipedia page (something I’ve never seen before but am amazed by.) We are introduced to Harold Lloyd (played by… Harold Lloyd), who looks positively downtrodden as he stands behind bars. His girlfriend and his mother sob nearby as he spots a long, noose-like rope in front of him. But then the camera zooms out only slightly, to reveal that these three people are just waiting at a train station, and that noose was just a trackside pickup loop used by railway crews. This is just the first of Safety Last!’s 73 minutes worth of absurd jokes and misleading premises, but I was already hooked. Harold is off to the “big city”, with plans to “make good” and establish himself enough to marry his gal and bring her out there with him. After several more misleads—Harold at first accidentally grabs a baby carriage instead of his luggage then jumps onto a nearby horse-drawn carriage headed in the opposite direction before he catches the actual train—he arrives in the big, generic bustling city. A few months later, Harold is struggling to keep it all together. He shares a comically small apartment with only one chair with a roommate, and both men hide inside their hung-up coats when the landlady comes knocking. Harold deeply wishes to be successful, but first he’ll just have to fake it till he makes it. He gets a job on the salesfloor at the De Vore Department Store, and somehow scrapes together enough money to send his girlfriend a gorgeous pendant with no chain—and writes in an accompanying letter that he didn’t really like the chain it came with, so just wait a bit and he’ll make a trip to Tiffany’s soon. And when Harold finally does send a chain to his girlfriend, she mistakenly takes this gift as a sign that Harold has now become successful and financially stable enough to start a family, so she decides to take a train into the big city and surprise him. Meanwhile, Harold is working his ass off at this department store. He goes through enough trouble just to arrive at work on time, but once he’s there he is berated and physically abused by the overly-greedy female customers in need of assistance. The women are so brutal and demanding in their shopping habits that one woman mistakes a dog for a mink and puts it around her neck. On top of this, he has a micromanaging, self-important manager named Mr. Stubbs, described as “muscle-bound from patting himself on the back”, who watches Harold’s every move like a hawk. One shift, when Harold is tossed around so much that the sleeves are ripped off of his shirt, Mr. Stubbs writes Harold up for violating the dress code. The comedic chaos reaches its peak, though, when Harold’s girlfriend shows up at work, and is somehow convinced that he is the manager of this large retail establishment. Harold bends over backwards trying to do his job, while convincing his girlfriend that he runs the place, while dodging the men who actually do run this place. Through trials and tribulations and a series of unfortunate slapsticks, Harold ends up agreeing to climb to the top of the store’s very tall building in an effort to garner publicity. It is an impossible feat, one that was even more impossible to shoot, but it really does appear that Harold is climbing this skyscraper. And even though he’d already lost a thumb and a forefinger due to a previous film-stunt-snafu, Harold Lloyd did the vast majority of his own stunts in this film. Though he didn’t actually climb up the side of a real building, the clever way this was filmed really fools you—particularly when Harold dangles from a hand of a giant clock. Safety Last! was, like most silent films I’ve seen, even better and ballsier than I’d anticipated. It sucks that the Academy Awards didn’t begin until 1929, and that the category for stunt performers was only announced in 2024 (and won’t actually take effect until 2028 for some reason), because Harold Lloyd is one of the most energetic and impeccable physical comedians I’ve ever seen. I feel like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton get all of the praise for their contributions to comedy, but this man I’ve never heard of really, genuinely made me laugh—way more than I expected. I mean, if I was chuckling at this in 2025, I have to imagine that people laughed themselves to near-death watching this back in 1923. Safety Last! was silly, it was sweet, and it stressed me out quite a bit, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I liked tonight’s next silent film even more, though, because it catered to my specifically scary tastes and offered a peek into the early artistic instincts of one of my favorite horror filmmakers—this is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. Based on the novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, the play Who Is He?, and the real-life events caused by Jack the Ripper, The Lodger (which is also randomly available to watch on it’s Wikipedia page? Why don’t they do this with all movies??) opens on a woman screaming (presumably.) Glowing bright lights that advertise a show of “golden-haired” cabaret girls fades into the foggy darkness, and so does a mysterious figure. This woman is the seventh victim of a serial killer whose been targeting light-haired women—leaving behind a business card of sorts that simply says “the Avenger.” A witness gives a statement to the police—the first lead they’ve gotten so far—and they describe the killer as a tall man with his face “wrapped up.” The city grows anxious, and one showgirl says to another, “No more peroxide for this gal.” We then meet Daisy, a young woman with light hair, who works as a model and resides with her parents. When she returns home, she finds her parents and her cop boyfriend, Joe, reading the latest about the Avenger in the paper, and Daisy’s father is critical of the police’s inability to find this killer. Joe brushes this comment off then flirts with Daisy, “I'm keen on golden hair, same as the Avenger is”, which would be creepy enough, but Joe just has a creepy face with an even creepier smile, sorry to say. It’s relatively unclear that Joe is Daisy’s boyfriend, because Daisy isn’t charmed by this comment, or anything Joe says, really. But things take a turn for the dashing and dangerous when a mysterious man shows up at the door, inquiring about an ad for a room for rent. This tall, brooding individual bears a strong resemblance to the description of the Avenger, but he’s also quite handsome, even though his face is mostly wrapped up in a scarf. Because this was the trusting 1920s, Daisy’s mother lets in this hot stranger and he rents the room instantly, with very few words exchanged between them. If his aesthetic wasn’t enough of a red flag, this mysterious lodger then requests that all of the paintings in his room—which happen to all be paintings of blonde women—be removed while he stays. The lodger has a menacing but intriguing look to him, one that immediately catches the eye of young, dumb, blonde Daisy. He may be stoic and a little scary, but he’s not a pathetic horndog like Joe, who literally chases Daisy around with an engagement ring until she kinda says yes. But she is more than curious about this sexy lodger, who seems to be more of an intellectual—one who plays chess with her and doesn’t gawk at her. He’s a little bit socially awkward, but the lodger and Daisy have palpable chemistry—which deeply concerns Daisy’s parents, who begin to suspect the lodger is the killer. Joe the cop promises Daisy’s parents, rather romantically, “When I put a rope around the Avenger’s neck, I’ll put a ring around Daisy’s finger.” As the film goes on, Hitchcock’s twisty trademarks begin to take shape, and we as an audience begin to question if the killer really is the lodger, or someone else. There is some super bizarre editing in this film that, at times, reaches film-student-levels of avant-garde, and the jarring, unsubtle shifting between each piece of music here had me wondering if the copy I was watching had misplaced the audio. But for every blurry moment of confusion The Lodger provides, it has a phenomenal shot to follow it up with. There were some camera angles in this that I’d never before seen a silent film—overhead shots, intentionally-placed shadows on faces, shots that make it look like a dead blonde girl’s hair is glowing, not to mention a rather scandalous shot of Daisy in the bathtub, which felt like the beginnings of Hitchcock’s iconic bathroom set piece in Psycho (which came out over thirty years later.) This wasn’t technically Hitchcock’s first film, but it was his first foray into the thriller genre, and it really established his career and put him on the map. Just before making The Lodger, Hitchcock returned from Berlin, where he was profoundly struck by the growing wave of German expressionist films. Inspired by greats like Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, Hitchcock learned to implement unusual camera angles and lighting effects that better evoked suspense—techniques that took longer and made his collaborators think he was insane, until the film was released and became a smashing success. (Hitchcock was, of course, insane though, but I digress.) Of this film, Bioscope wrote: “It is possible that this film is the finest British production ever made.” I’m not sure if this is true, but The Lodger was certainly the most riveting silent film that I’ve ever seen. It kept me guessing and questioning my attraction for an alleged sociopath, as many Hitchcock films do, and even though I would’ve loved an even more scandalous twist, for 1927 this was preeeetty scandalous and twisted. I really loved these silent, palate-cleansing films, and I really hope you’ll give them a watch and not a listen if you’re ever curious. That’s about all the time I have for this week, dear reader, now shhhhhhhhhh.
