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SAFETY LAST
August 7, 2018  | By David Bianculli

TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET

 

August is “Summer Under the Stars” month for TCM, when a different actor is saluted each day of the month with an all-day compilation of his or her work. Today it’s film star Harold Lloyd, whose masterpiece of physical prowess and perfectly timed comedy, 1923’s Safety Last (pictured), is saved for the opening prime-time slot. (Whenever I show the climax of this particular Lloyd classic in my Film Appreciation class at Rowan University, my students invariably start babbling excitedly about a similar climax in Back to the Future. Indeed. As I keep telling my students, most filmmakers began as film fans.) Other Lloyd movies worth seeing, and imitating, today include 1924’s Girl Shy (9:30 p.m. ET), 1925’s The Freshman (11 p.m. ET), and 1928’s Speedy (12:30 a.m. ET), with other Lloyd films presented all day and night. Oddly, though those films range from 1919 to 1938, one of the movies not included is 1920’s Haunted Spooks, the movie during which Lloyd, during a promotional still-photography shoot, lit and exploded a prop bomb that turned out to be real enough to sever his thumb and forefinger of the hand holding it.

 
 
 
 
 
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