The image of the man hanging from the clock is still relatively common in the 21st century. The name of that man is much more obscure. However, in the early half of the 20th century, Harold Clayton Lloyd was among the most famous of movie stars, thanks to his success as one of the “Big Three” silent film comedians (the other two were Charlie Chaplin, a fellow Lamb, and Buster Keaton).
Harold Clayton Lloyd (1893-1971), was born into humble circumstances in Burchard, Nebraska on April 20, 1893. His father, James Darsie Lloyd, was a traveling sewing machine salesman. His parents divorced, however, partly due to his father’s inability to hold a long-term job. The elder Lloyd subsequently moved San Diego, CA, taking Harold along with him.
Harold had some experience working on stage as a child and found work as an extra in a one-reel comedy for the Edison Film Company in 1921. This prompted him to travel to Los Angeles to try his hand as a full-time actor. He worked his way on to the Universal Pictures lot under the guise of an extra and his work in film began in earnest. During this time, he and Hal Roach, a fellow extra, developed their friendship.
Roach moved on to start his own film studio where he created film comedies for many popular stars such as Laurel and Hardy, Will Rogers, Charley Chase, and the Our Gang/Little Rascals troupe. Harold also joined Roach and began his own regular series there in “one-reeler” films, portraying knockoffs of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp character, as the mustached “Willie Work” and “Lonesome Luke.” These did fairly well but his fortunes shifted to another gear once he put on a pair of round, horn-rimmed glasses. His “glasses character” was closer to his own personality and gave him the ability to experience circumstances any person on the street might encounter, from bad jobs to amusement parks to romantic liaisons, all with hilarious results.
This “everyman” universality appealed to a wide audience, causing his one-reel comedies to be so popular, his output expanded to two-reelers. It was at about this point in 1919 that he suffered a freak accident in which a small bomb, thought to be a prop, exploded in his hand after he pretended to use it with the fuse lit to light a cigarette. The accident left him blind in both eyes and without the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand. His sight returned over time and he elected to wear a special prosthetic glove in all of his subsequent films (he felt that audiences would recoil at his mangled hand). He commissioned this special glove from Samuel Goldfish, better-known now as Samuel Goldwyn. Goldwyn was a successful glove salesman prior to founding Goldwyn Pictures that ultimately became Metro-Goldywn-Mayer.
In 1921, Lloyd and Roach moved into well-crafted full-length feature films such as Grandma’s Boy (1922) and Safety Last (1923) which ushered in his “high and dizzy” genre films in which his character falls into all manner of dangerous hijinks. These elevated him to true superstardom. The famous clock photo comes from a scene in Safety Last. Despite Harold’s disabled hand, he performed most of his own stunts in these films. He really did hang from that building.
Lloyd left Roach to produce his own films in 1924 under the Harold Lloyd Motion Picture Company. These include Girl Shy, The Freshman, The Kid Brother, and Speedy!, notable for having been filmed mostly on location in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx in 1928. All wonderful films, they were extremely successful, serving to make him a very wealthy man. At this time, he pioneered the use of audience previews in which he used polling data from these previews to fine tune his films. He also maintained the crew’s payroll, whether he had a film in production or not. This was done years before unions came into existence.
Nineteen twenty-nine ushered Lloyd into sound films with Welcome Danger, which began as a silent and converted to sound. Box office receipts were very high, partly due to audience interest in hearing Harold’s speaking voice. Several successful talkies were produced thereafter: Feet First, Movie Crazy, The Cat’s-Paw, and Milky Way. By the mid-30s, Lloyd essentially aged out of his everyman glasses character, tastes changed, and his brand of humor wasn’t as appealing to Prohibition-era audiences. He sold his studio property to the Church of Latter-Day Saints in 1937. His final film appearance came in 1947 the Sin of Harold Diddlebock, directed by Preston Sturges and financed by Howard Hughes. While Lloyd was paid handsomely for his work, it was a production riddled with problems and a poor script. He was so infuriated by the result, he sued Hughes and the film studio.
His post-film days were spent in other media and developing his hobbies. He worked in radio and became skilled at painting and 3D photography. He made thousands of three-dimensional photographs, many of which were nudes of models including Bettie Page and stripper Dixie Evans. He lent his support to the careers of promising younger actors, including Debbie Reynolds, Robert Wagner, and Jack Lemmon. The Freemasons and Shriners also enjoyed his participation. He was selected as Imperial Potentate of the Shriners of North America in 1949. He was elected to the Lambs in 1925.
Why isn’t Harold Lloyd more recognizable today? We can thank Harold for that. Having retained ownership of all of his films, he held a tight reign on their use. Because the films were meant for orchestral or organ accompaniment, he was opposed to piano accompaniment at live screenings. For television screenings, he charged networks prohibitively high licensing fees and objected to insertion of advertising, essentially keeping his films from the public eye for decades. His granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd, undertook a project to restore all of the films and re-released them on DVD in the early 2000s. Turner Classic Movies (TCM) airs Harold Lloyd’s films on occasion and several are available to stream on various platforms.
–Beth Goffe, The Lambs