The comic genius of silent star Harold Lloyd is eternal and the famously jaw-dropping stunts and laugh-out-loud fun of SAFETY LAST! is the perfect introduction. Experience this classic with a live organ soundtrack performed by Ben Model, one of the nation’s leading silent film accompanists!
BEN MODEL is one of the nation’s leading silent film accompanists, and performs on both piano and theatre organ. Tickets are by sliding-scale $5-$20.
Over the past 35+ years Ben has created and performed live scores for several hundred silent films, films lasting anywhere from one minute to five hours. Ben is a resident film accompanist at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) and at the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus Theatre, and performs at theatres, museums, schools and other venues around the US and internationally. This will be Ben Model’s third cine-concert at Epsilon Spires, he has previously accompanied Metropolis, and Steamboat Bill Jr on our historic Estey pipe organ.
Safety Last! (1923) Harold Lloyd will forever be associated with Safety Last! because of one of the most celebrated images in cinema -a visual metaphor for the upwardly mobile everyman of the 1920s and the extent to which he climbs to achieve the American Dream. Safety Last!—and the genius of Harold Lloyd—continues to dangle over all who attempt to fuse comedy and thrills in the movies.
Lloyd’s scaling of the building is comedy at its most inspired and suspense at its most excruciating are ingeniously interwoven—the climb is the grand finale to the superb gags that precede it. As he climbs higher and higher, more complex obstacles confront him, from a flock of pigeons to entanglement in a net, to a painter’s trestle, to a swinging window, to the clock itself. “Each new floor is like a stanza in a poem,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning author and critic James Agee. While Lloyd navigates these travails, the audience’s hysteria escalates. It was not uncommon for 1920s spectators to hide their eyes or even faint when watching these portions of the film. Many cinemas reportedly hired a nurse or kept ambulances on call outside the theater.
