The timeless comic genius of Harold Lloyd shines through in Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor’s 1923 classic Safety Last!, one more silent film championed by the Criterion Collection folks. The indelible bookish, horn-rimmed glasses, straw-hat-wearing comedian show wonderfully how he earned the moniker “the King of Daredevil Comedy”. The “third genius” of the silent era (after Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton), stars in this Horatio Alger-style story of a country boy trying to make good in the big city.
The naive Boy (Harold Lloyd) travels on a train to the big city from the small town Great Bend, promising to send for his Girl (Mildred Davis, Lloyd’s real-life wife) after he has ‘made good’ with fame and fortune. In the opening sequence, he appears behind vertical bars – presumably imprisoning jail bars, but they are actually the train station’s gate. He becomes a low-paid, bookish-looking salesman in the...
The naive Boy (Harold Lloyd) travels on a train to the big city from the small town Great Bend, promising to send for his Girl (Mildred Davis, Lloyd’s real-life wife) after he has ‘made good’ with fame and fortune. In the opening sequence, he appears behind vertical bars – presumably imprisoning jail bars, but they are actually the train station’s gate. He becomes a low-paid, bookish-looking salesman in the...
- 6/19/2013
- by Larry Peel
- IONCINEMA.com
The corporate downsizing portrayed in Ed Park's first novel, Personal Days, is happening not with a bang, but with a whimper: Not merely the last to know when they've been bought and sold, the employees of this unnamed office, whose specific work is never made clear, are subjected to a parade of new employees whose jobs are never specified, and whose authority seems limitless. At the Brooklyn Book Festival last year, Park took pains to distance his fictional creation from the site of his last layoff, The Village Voice in New York City, but the blandness of the office in question lends itself to allegory rather than to roman à clef—a little Douglas Coupland, a little George Orwell. The unnamed narrator and his coworkers toil at nothing but thrive on speculation over who will be fired next; each meeting, desk reassignment, and compliment is given an ominous weight.
- 6/26/2008
- by Ellen Wernecke
- avclub.com
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