Great obscure movies?

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

Any of Harold Lloyd's movies. Some of my all time favorite comedies are his movies. Most of them are silent but he did a number of talkies. Almost all his stunts he did himself.

He actually climbed this building with his bare hands. No special effects. He didn't even have a safety net or ropes.

Well yes and no. He did climb the building and he didn't use ropes, but the building isn't quite what it seems. In actual fact, it was a piece of Hollywood magic, a huge false setpiece which was built on an already existing skyscraper roof, with careful camera angles to give the illusion of death-defying height. So yes he was as high up as he looks, but there was a comforting rooftop underneath him never more than three stories away, albeit still a nasty drop.

Early Hollywood films are notorious for their total disregard for what we now call Health and Safety practises, but apart from the less-than-acceptable risk to the star's life, there was an eminently practical reason for not doing the stunt for real.

On a Sunday in August of 1919, Harold posed for a photographer. The set-up called for him to light a cigarette with a prop bomb -- the round, black, type you might see in the cartoons. The bomb wasn’t a prop at all; it exploded in his hand. It ripped open the sixteen-foot ceiling and left Harold blind and with most of his right hand missing. Doctors told him he would never see again. His career was over.

But the doctors were wrong. Eventually, his sight did return, the scars healed, and a glove was crafted to hide his handicap from his public. The comedian, known for doing all his own daredevil stunts, felt his audience would be concerned for his safety and not laugh at the movie if they knew about his injury. So he wore the glove in every movie he ever made after the accident.

So even if he'd intended to climb that building for real, only having one complete hand would have ruled it out.

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There were two movies in which Llyod climbed a sky scraper. The second time was a talkie if I remember. Do you know which one it is that you're describing? I know the second later one he did had some some shots that were obviously trick photography but the first one I thought was entirely real. I have almost all of his movies recorded on VHS when TCM devoted a whole month to him in 2003. At the beginning of each movie they had interviews with Llyod's grand daughter and I thought I remember that she said that the building climbing in the first movie was real, even despite the injured hand.