Funny, just a few minutes ago, the streets were jam-packed with people staring up in disbelief.

One of the great features of NetFlix is the ability to look at a list of Academy Award-Winners, or AFI lists, or even Razzie award-winners, and then with one click add them to your list. The biggest problem with Netflix is that when you have a ton of movies in your queue, it’s gonna take months to get it, and what you might want to watch one day isn’t necessarily what you want to watch some other time. Months and months ago, I’d made an effort to add all the movies from AFI’s 100 comedies list that I hadn’t seen… even the black and white movies that Dan generally dispises. Surprisingly, “Bringing Up Baby” was pretty awesome farce, if you can get past the fact that Katherine Hepburn is way too obnoxious in this movie for anyone today to even consider this character a plausible love interest. “Some Like it Hot” is pretty fantastic, despite the fact that the more sympathetic of the two guys doesn’t get the girl in the end. “It Happened One Night” and “The Apartment” kinda dragged a bit, even though “The Apartment” was shot really well.

In any case, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the funniest of these that I ended up with were actually some silent movies from the 20s. Remembering the AFI special showing this silent movie with a guy, Harold LLoyd, hanging from a clock on a building, and them saying he was actually hanging from such and such heights, I was pretty interested in finding what this title was. Unfortunately, I think that Netflix has the wrong disc on it, or “The Freshman” somehow was on the AFI list instead, and I ended up with one that had some of his other stuff on it, which was actually very interesting, especially with the Leonard Maltin commentaries on. I didn’t end up getting the disc with the film I’d been looking for, “Safety Last“, until this weekend, and I got through two features and one short yesterday.

The short, “An Eastern Westerner”, was perfectly serviceable, with some great gags but not too much of a story. Somehow a big-city guy ends up in a corrupt western town, and they don’t take too kindly to him. It ends with a decent-length chase scene in which Harold outwits the entire village (the people are all dressed in robes resembling the KKK), but really isn’t anything more than a few minutes distraction.

The feature length (about an hour and twenty minutes I think), “Girl Shy” is exceptional. Harold plays a small-town taylor who’s writing a pretty terrible book about dozens of love affairs he’s supposedly had, even though he’s incredibly inept around women. On a train to take the book to the publisher, he meets and falls in love with a rich city-girl. Their love story develops after the train ride, but when he doesn’t get the book deal, he rejects her, knowing that she couldn’t very well marry a poor taylor. She ends up engaged, and when some details come out about the guy she’s marrying, Harold races to the city by any means necessary, in (considering when this was shot), one of the greatest chase scenes ever filmed. “By any means possible” probably describes it better; He unsuccessfully tries to hitchhike three times, then steals a car belonging to bootleggers, another car, a horse, a motorcycle, a cable car, and a horse-drawn carriage. The choreography and detail of this extended chase is remarkable, and what makes you invest in it all the more is the time given to explain the motivations for the actions, and to the akward-yet-sweet love story.

Not as remarkable from a story standpoint (but close) is “Safety Last”, usually considered Lloyd’s masterpiece. “Safety Last” concerns a poor department store worker trying to woo a girl and make ends meet. When his boss offers $1000 (in 1923 money) to anyone who can bring a large amount of people to the store, he decides that he’ll have his friend, an expert building climber, scale the building in a much publicized event. What he’s not counting on, is a police officer with a vendetta against the friend, who’s come out in search of the human fly. When the cop spots the friend, the plans changes so that Harold will climb up one floor and meet the friend inside. The friend will put on Harolds clothes and finish the climb. Unfortunately the real climber is unable to ditch the cop on his tail, and Harold is forced to go the whole way himself. What follows is a harrowing and hilarious series of perils and obstacles, many shot more than 15 stories up, without proper safety equipment.

I watched it with the Leonard Maltin/”Some guy from Lloyd’s estate” commentary track on, as there’s not much to lose by not hearing a silent movie, and it was insightful and interesting. Having watched some of these movies without commentary, I would think it safe to say that you miss a lot without them. There are so many small, throwaway gags that completely fly under the radar without people saying “I love this little thing coming up here”, and I think it has to do with just not being used to watching silent movies. Plus you would never know that he was actually missing his thumb and half of his index finger on his right hand, and wore some sort of prosthetic glove, or that they shot the building he was climbing on a few 18 foot tall facades they built next to the edge of a real building to get the vista shots, and that they only had some mattresses on the roof, in case he fell.

But there are a lot of little bits that you would miss, and I think it has to do with the nature of the medium today. You can put something on in the background and listen and do something else and half pay attention. These silent films were meant to be watched in a dark theatre and have the audience hang on every action. There’s something alienating about watching silent movies, usually because you’re sitting around silently watching something with just music, and you have to actively participate in the viewing, but for some reason, after the first twenty minutes of “Girl Shy” I found myself reeled into the characters, even if the action was sparse. Once that chase scene started, though, I was glued to the set.

[rate 4.5]

The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection, Volume 1, Disc 1 (or what I’ve seen of it at least) gets 4.5 stars for the amount of content (Two features, Three 20 minute or so shorts, for about four hours of movies), the quality of the content itself (both the great video quality, and the actual quality of the movies themselves), and the very insightful commentary on “Safety Last”