A few years ago I interviewed the writer-director Kundan Shah for a book about his popular comedy Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. One of the things Shah spoke about was his discovery of the principles of movie comedy during his student days at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). Watching the silent films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton was a lesson, he said, in the breathless creation of one comic moment atop another - "You learnt how to build a gag on a gag on a gag on a gag on a gag until you had a pyramid of gags." Just when the viewer thinks the scene has reached its culmination, blindside him with something new.
If Chaplin and Keaton were the acknowledged masters of the art in the 1910s and 1920s, Harold Lloyd was not far behind - in fact, during his peak years he delivered more hits than the other two, but then faded from public memory for a few decades (the neglect was partly because Lloyd, unlike Buster and Charlie, did not direct his films). Some of his best work is available today in fine, restored prints, notably in the recent Criterion releases of Safety Last! (1923) and The Freshman (1925), and the former contains one of the most famous images in movie history: Lloyd, playing his stock character, the bespectacled everyman known as The Boy, hangs for dear life from the face of a clock near the top of a tall building.
Many people who haven't seen the film, or indeed know nothing about Lloyd, are familiar with this scene - if only through having seen it on an Oscar highlights reel or a documentary about film history. But as I discovered the other day, there is much more to Safety Last!. Watching it from beginning to end was to be reminded of Kundan Shah's words, for this film comprises a number of gag-pyramids that add up to form one giant pyramid. It is testament to how much thought and effort can go into little moments that achieve nothing more "consequential" than making people laugh, or gape.
With their visual gags, set-ups, incredible feats of timing, and balletic physical movements, good silent-film comedies are a form unto themselves - among the purest expressions of what some people call "pure cinema". In the best of these films, even the inter-titles would be used to clever effect. Consider the grim one that opens Safety Last!, and the shot that immediately follows it. The Boy, we are told, is about to take "the long, long journey", and then we see Lloyd behind what look like prison bars, with a noose in the background. The camera draws back to reveal two weeping women - the Boy's mother and girlfriend - as well as a policeman and a priest, and the meaning of the scene appears clear from these elements. But of course it's a set-up: they are at the railway station, the "hangman's noose" is a loop used to attach mail for passing trains to pick up, and the Boy is going to the big city for a job.
More gags follow in the next couple of minutes: a mix-up involving a baby in a pram, a frantic chase, and then a masterfully executed shot where the Boy accidentally clambers on board a passing horse-cart instead of his train. These comic vignettes run into one another, but in between all the madness there is an important "serious" moment - a close-up of the two lovers before they part - that tells us what is at stake for the main character: what the Big City, with its tall buildings, office politics and rich shoppers bullying salespeople, will mean for him.
There will be many more such sequences, leading up to that superb finale where the Boy climbs the building unaided, in pursuit of 1,000 valuable dollars. It is heart-in-your-mouth thrilling, but emotionally resonant too: here is a scene that literalises the idea of the small-town boy as social climber - moving up the ranks in a cutthroat world, with the stakes increasing for him every step of the way. This lovely, light comedy is right up there with any of the more serious-minded examinations of what can be lost and gained in the shift from a "simpler" way of life to a more competitive one. But it examines those ideas without ever losing its lightness - or its sense of how to build a comic pyramid.
If Chaplin and Keaton were the acknowledged masters of the art in the 1910s and 1920s, Harold Lloyd was not far behind - in fact, during his peak years he delivered more hits than the other two, but then faded from public memory for a few decades (the neglect was partly because Lloyd, unlike Buster and Charlie, did not direct his films). Some of his best work is available today in fine, restored prints, notably in the recent Criterion releases of Safety Last! (1923) and The Freshman (1925), and the former contains one of the most famous images in movie history: Lloyd, playing his stock character, the bespectacled everyman known as The Boy, hangs for dear life from the face of a clock near the top of a tall building.
Many people who haven't seen the film, or indeed know nothing about Lloyd, are familiar with this scene - if only through having seen it on an Oscar highlights reel or a documentary about film history. But as I discovered the other day, there is much more to Safety Last!. Watching it from beginning to end was to be reminded of Kundan Shah's words, for this film comprises a number of gag-pyramids that add up to form one giant pyramid. It is testament to how much thought and effort can go into little moments that achieve nothing more "consequential" than making people laugh, or gape.
With their visual gags, set-ups, incredible feats of timing, and balletic physical movements, good silent-film comedies are a form unto themselves - among the purest expressions of what some people call "pure cinema". In the best of these films, even the inter-titles would be used to clever effect. Consider the grim one that opens Safety Last!, and the shot that immediately follows it. The Boy, we are told, is about to take "the long, long journey", and then we see Lloyd behind what look like prison bars, with a noose in the background. The camera draws back to reveal two weeping women - the Boy's mother and girlfriend - as well as a policeman and a priest, and the meaning of the scene appears clear from these elements. But of course it's a set-up: they are at the railway station, the "hangman's noose" is a loop used to attach mail for passing trains to pick up, and the Boy is going to the big city for a job.
More gags follow in the next couple of minutes: a mix-up involving a baby in a pram, a frantic chase, and then a masterfully executed shot where the Boy accidentally clambers on board a passing horse-cart instead of his train. These comic vignettes run into one another, but in between all the madness there is an important "serious" moment - a close-up of the two lovers before they part - that tells us what is at stake for the main character: what the Big City, with its tall buildings, office politics and rich shoppers bullying salespeople, will mean for him.
There will be many more such sequences, leading up to that superb finale where the Boy climbs the building unaided, in pursuit of 1,000 valuable dollars. It is heart-in-your-mouth thrilling, but emotionally resonant too: here is a scene that literalises the idea of the small-town boy as social climber - moving up the ranks in a cutthroat world, with the stakes increasing for him every step of the way. This lovely, light comedy is right up there with any of the more serious-minded examinations of what can be lost and gained in the shift from a "simpler" way of life to a more competitive one. But it examines those ideas without ever losing its lightness - or its sense of how to build a comic pyramid.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer