Safety Last! (1923)

Safety Last! arrives from 1923 with a title that puns on workplace safety regulations and a premise that involves a young man dangling from a clock face above moving traffic. There is no social consciousness to speak of here, no contemporary progressive framework, and no lecture. What we have is a bespectacled clerk, a department store, a policeman who refuses to leave, and a building that must be climbed. The film's ambitions begin and end with the gag, and it executes them with a precision that modern sermonizing cinema could not hope to match.

The romantic plot is a delivery mechanism for stunts. Mildred waits, Harold exaggerates his success in the city, and the deception escalates until the only way out is straight up the facade of the De Vore Department Store. The store is not a symbol of capital extraction. It is a place where a floorwalker can be impersonated and a crowd can be assembled for a publicity stunt. Nobody in this film has a body politics or an identity to interrogate. The peril is the point, and the peril is physical. A pigeon, a net, a wind gauge, a dog, a mouse: these are the antagonists, and they carry no message beyond the next laugh.

For our purposes the ledger stays blank. There is no representation commentary, no queerness, no feminist reading the film itself supports, no racial consciousness, no climate anxiety, no anti-capitalist argument, no body acceptance, no neurodivergence, no revision of history, and no instruction of any kind. The Library of Congress preserved it for being culturally significant, which it is, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the flashpoints of a century later. We are left to admire the clock, the hands, the drop, and the silence. A clean specimen.