Silent Film Festival: Safety Last! (1923)

The festival concludes with Harold Lloyd’s most satisfying slapstick comedy, featuring a nigh-incoherent story as pretext for set pieces involving brilliant pratfalls, surly retail workers, innuendo with garment scissors, and foot-stamping cops. Lloyd projects a dumb genius of everyman workplace enthusiasm that grounds him in our world more firmly than Chaplin’s Tramp or Keaton’s sad clown. This is a movie that directors Sam Taylor and Fred C. Newmeyer saddled with no pretension, and it endures as work of pure delight. Composer Liam Marchant premieres a new score for live percussion featuring Dan Bukvich.

The Second Annual Kenworthy Silent Film Festival enjoys support from Idaho Arts (ICA), Idaho Humanities Council, and UI Habib Institute for Asian Studies, and The Japan Foundation.

1 hr 14 min | Tickets: $15 GA / $10 Students / $50 Festival Pass