Harold Lloyd

The iconic clock-hanging scene in Safety Last! (1923) was filmed using forced perspective, with a real clock facade built on a platform atop a shorter building rooftop and trick camera angles to make it appear Lloyd was dangling over the street below. Lloyd still performed the stunts himself at significant height, and the sequence remains one of the most famous images in silent cinema.

Yes, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton are widely regarded as the three great silent film comedians, though Lloyd was the most commercially successful of the three at his peak. While Chaplin was known for the sentimental Tramp and Keaton for deadpan physical comedy, Lloyd's 'Glasses Character' was an optimistic, resourceful everyman that resonated with 1920s audiences.

Lloyd performed many of his own dangerous stunts, including the building-scaling sequences in Safety Last! and Feet First (1930), using safety platforms and careful planning to reduce but not eliminate the actual risk. Notably, Lloyd had lost the thumb and index finger of his right hand in a 1919 accident with a prop bomb and wore a prosthetic glove for all subsequent films, a fact few viewers ever noticed.

The Harold Lloyd Estate carefully controlled the rights to his films for decades, which kept them less widely seen than Chaplin's or Keaton's work. Restored Blu-ray and DVD collections have been released through distributors including New Line Cinema and Criterion, and Safety Last! and The Freshman (1925) are the most frequently screened at film festivals and repertory cinemas.