The story of the movie part 14
Safety first
Safty Last! (1923)
Fred C. Neumayer/Sam Taylor
For a long time in the past, I generally despised comedy, probably because of the lack of humor in the environment in which I grew up, and because of the bad comedies after the golden age of Hong Kong movies watched as a teenager. Therefore, such a shallow experience gave me the impression that comedy is "tasting and ending", spinning around on the surface of things, only about immediate satisfaction, not about the deeper "transcendence".
The misunderstanding of comedy must be gradually resolved after growing up through the language fun of the two kings of the Northern language family, taste the benefits of humor, and realize that making laughter is not easy. Later, after seeing those great comedy works in the movie world, such as Chaplin in the previous article, Buster Keaton mentioned later, and Jacques Tati, etc., did you consider comedy thoroughly. Let go of prejudice (even looking at Zhou Xingchi's works have more different experiences).
But in the middle, I missed Harold Lloyd. Many film histories call Lloyd Chaplin’s apprentice. I thought to myself even the best. What flashed in my mind was the future generations on TV. Those clumsy Chaplin imitators, this somewhat compromised my impression of him. It was not until the development of this writing project that I saw Lloyd’s work for the first time. It was too late, but it was these fresh discoveries that made me feel that this writing project is a film adventure. , The one who has benefited the most may not be others, but myself.
But Harold did start his acting work with Chaplin as a template, just as Chaplin started his career by imitating Max Lindy. Great artists ultimately need to get rid of "path dependence" and find their own unique style. This is almost the most insurmountable gap from mediocrity to greatness. When Lloyd made his first appearance in Edison’s films in 1912, he had to go through hundreds of comedy short films for nearly ten years, and he was discouraged for a while and had the idea of changing his career. His own label style: black-rimmed glasses, weak scholar-like, cowardly but possesses the energy and energy of an athlete. Lloyd himself also explained the rewriting of Chaplin's appearance: "I subverted Chaplin's dress subtly, Chaplin is all too big, mine is too small".
Lloyd started his original journey with what he said. Cousins did not hesitate to push it to the height of the "author" in "The Story of the Movie": Although Lloyd was not named as the director in the film, he was influential in the actual production. The angle of view often puts forward their own opinions. This set of narratives is not unfamiliar to Chinese movie fans. Later, I often see it being embezzled to evaluate the influence of Stephen Chow on its starring movies.
"Safety First" tells a typical story about the American dream: Salted fish seeks to turn around and get rich before they can make the world. Considering that in 1923, when the film was released, US President Warren Harding died during his term. Coolidge took over the liberals. While tax cuts, the “Belt and Road” initiative led the Americans: the most important thing is to do business. The subsequent technological frenzy first allowed the Americans to witness Lindbergh flying across the Atlantic in an airplane, and then Ford entered millions of homes. Loose financial credit, credit cards, and ubiquitous advertisements are all urging Americans to spend their money. Nearly a hundred years later, the Internet frenzy has made the Chinese dream look a bit like the American dream. The background of this story makes people more familiar. Please don’t forget that the hurricane’s American dream is also accompanied by a certain conservative prohibition: Prohibition, we Of course, I am no stranger to bans, forbidding entertainment, vulgarity, and tattoos.
The "extraordinary branches" tells the background of the times when the film happened, in fact, it is to tell the story of the film is also universal. Chaplin played the gold rush of Charlotte, Lloyd played the story of Rock from the countryside to the city, in fact, since the industrialization era and the process of urbanization, mankind has accelerated the convergence, a common destiny. Aristotle once said: People come to the city to live. "Safety First" is a comedy about life and survival.
The story tells that the young man played by Lloyd bids farewell to his fiancee and makes a living from the countryside to the city, hoping to fight for a bright future. But the light is unknown, and there are thorns along the way. In order to keep his job as a clerk in a department store, Lloyd ran all his strength and was exhausted. He accumulated Weibo income to buy gifts for his girlfriend, but his girlfriend's family mistakenly thought that he had been in trouble in the city. The cowhide was about to blow. Lloyd wanted to turn the tide and offered to invite friends to do stunt performances for the company to do business promotion for the company to earn money for the family. The duck was put on the shelf, and under the gaze of his girlfriend and everyone, he completed the "safety down" performance of climbing stairs.
The story itself is a bitter history of struggle at the bottom. A great comedy always makes you feel the tension in the predicament in the laughter. It is the "responsibility" of all comedy masters to strike a faint balance between the relaxation of joy and the struggle in difficult situations . In "Safety First", Lloyd tried to achieve this balance.
When you finish watching the movie, if you still remember the beginning of the movie, you will feel that this is really a wonderful opening. It makes use of the scene changes brought about by the motion of the editing and the camera to make fun of the audience. In the opening round shot, the iron bars constructed a scene that looked like a prison, and then the round mask faded away, the camera pulled back, and a rope hanging from the protagonist’s head, standing next to a man in uniform, and A man dressed as a priest, with depressed relatives and friends standing outside the "cell". When we thought this was going to be an execution scene, the camera was moved to the other side of the fence, and we realized that this was not a cell at all, but inside the train station, and the rope was just a tool for conveying information on the platform. This is really a cinematic opening, a magical moment of scene scheduling, a moment of jokes with a certain kind of deceit.
In fact, it is precisely this kind of scene scheduling that separates the "Lloyd Image" from the "Chaplin Image". We certainly know that Chaplin is a great "" ballet dancer of the soul". His vivid posture is almost beyond that of movies. That's why his imitators on TV and on stage are endless. Of course, Lloyd also has limbs. The performance, his clumsy, jerky but athletic performance is of course very "good-looking", but Lloyd undoubtedly went further in making full use of the camera's attributes as a "obscure method" . Contemporary authors Among them, he may only lag behind Buster Keaton in the experimentation and advancement of comedy film production technology.
The climax of the last 20 minutes of the film is really a classic in movie history. Our eyes follow Lloyd’s climbing the outer wall of the building. There are levels of levels: bullets, nets, dogs, mice, tables, daily or non-daily things. One by one appears to be a barrier to our emotions. This also reached its climax when one of the most everyday objects reached the center of the screen-the clock. He clung to the hands of the clock to avoid falling and death has become one of the most classic scenes in the silent film era. In the propaganda, Lloyd insisted that he did it himself and completed the great adventure in danger. He may have also successfully deceived the author of "The Story of the Movie" and the author of "The Story of the Movie" and Roger, who is known as the "greatest film critic". Ebert. They all thought that Lloyd had done all this under the protection of limited protection measures and built temporary scaffolding. But judging from the information circulating in recent years, Lloyd estimated that he used a variety of methods such as substitutes and borrowings to complete this great moment.
This classic movie moment has also been imitated and paid tribute by many movies of later generations . As far as I can see, there are four that can emerge: Jackie Chan's "Plan A" , a kung fu fanatic , has similar segments; another Chinese movie fan is also familiar with the action star Stallone starring "Tan Zhi Wei "Dragon" uses a movie poster as a tribute; the science fiction masterpiece "Back to the Future" also has a scene where Dr. Brown hangs on the pointer; Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" (we mentioned that he also paid tribute to Méliès) Here, the double tribute is completed by directly playing this section of "Safety First" and the subsequent plot where the protagonist is also trapped on the big clock.
There is also Lloyd's design based on his vertigo, and the last bridge before hitting the line is also great. After experiencing all sorts of difficulties, he finally climbed to the roof, but his head was bumped into the wind vane. He fell from the roof while spinning and shaking. The rope on the flagpole (think of the rope at the beginning of the movie) is not only a rope. The fate cord here has become a life-saving straw instead. The rope entangled Lloyd’s feet and carried him, and set a thrilling and beautiful arc against the background of his opponent, the city’s buildings that "imprisoned" him. Embrace of fiancee. This is a great, poetic happy ending. " Film Story" said that together with this incredible performance process and Lloyd's work as a whole, it deeply influenced the Japanese film master Ozu Yasujiro in the late 1920s.
Yes, the ending is not a lover's tears, but a lover's embrace. He climbs the stairs for his lover and takes risks. If he loves you, he doesn't care about "safety first", but puts "safety first". This is the gorgeous adventure of the movie's love. Outside the film, Lloyd also tied the knot with the heroine Mildred Davis. He also took advantage of the great success of "Safety First" and surpassed Chaplin in both the number of works produced and the commercial box office in the 1920s.
And the selection of this unit will usher in a three-shot comedy series, and in the next article we will come and go to the comedy world of sneer Buster Keaton. You may have to sit still. His aggressiveness in comedy movies and his incredible magic will make you amazed with laughter.
Section 3 World Expansion of Film Style (1918-1928)
1Dr. Caligari’s cabin Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), Robert Winet
2 Nanook of the North (1922), Robert Flahadi
3 The Kid (1921), Charlie Chaplin
4Safety Last! (1923), Fred C. Neumayer/Sam Taylor
5 Holmes II Sherlock Jr. (1924), Buster Keaton
6 The White Rose of the Railway La Roue (1923), Abel Gance
7 Greed (1924), Eric von Strohheim
8 Battleship Potemkin Броненосец Потёмкин (1925), Sergey Eisenstein
9 Metropolis Metropolis (1927), Fritz Lang
10 Sunrise (1927), F·W·Munau
11 The Crowd (1928), Kim Widow
12 The Story of Joan of Arc, La passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), Carl Dreyer
13 Armory Арсенал (1929), Alexander Dufrenko
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