Live Life Team
Genre: Comedy
Director: Fred C. Newmeyer
Starring Cast: Harold Lloyd, Mildred David
The Boy wants to better himself in order to marry the Girl, so he leaves his home town for the big city and becomes a salesman in a large department store. He shares an apartment with the Pal who is a “human fly” an expert in scaling high buildings. The Boy gets into all sorts of trouble at work, but hides this from the Girl who believes he’s already been promoted. She follows him to the city where the Boy manages to fool her by “borrowing” the general manager’s office. The boy then persuades his bosses to pay him a large sum for arranging a publicity stunt whereby the Pal will climb up the building attracting huge crowds. However, when the Pal is chased off by a policeman, the Boy has to do the climb himself. After defeating a host of life threatening hazards, he reaches the top to find the Girl waiting for him.
This story line is merely the route to the great final climb, one of the classic sequences of silent cinema, and Lloyd never revealed how he did it. He climbed to a huge height, negotiating obstructions such as pigeons, nervous spectators, a dog, a net, a malicious plank of wood, a photographer’s flash, and a collapsing clock. Each of these distractions is a comic scene in itself, and the sequence takes up a third of the classic film.
