ABSTRACT
One of the most successful movies of 1923, the year that also saw the publication of Wallace Stevens’ first book of poems, Harmonium, is called Safety Last. A classic in the history of American silent comedy, it survives in the collective imagination especially through the image of Harold Lloyd in a characteristically precarious position. As the film critic Richard Schickel explains,
no illustrated history of the movies—indeed, of the social history of twentieth-century America—seemed complete without that famous still from Safety Last… of Lloyd hanging from the hands of a clock, its face itself dangling from the huge timepiece’s mainspring, some twelve stories above a busy downtown street. (qtd. in Jacobs 152)
