![]() ![]() One scene shows Musidora lying on her back between railroad tracks while 52 freight cars pass over her another has her plunging head over heels down a rope from a ninth-floor attic to the ground… The fall is seen in a single, unbroken trajectory, and whether or not this was accomplished through trickery, it is an awesome sight to behold.” - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader, Oct. “Most of the stunts were performed by the actors themselves. Writing for Cinémagazine years later, she stated, “No one can say I used a stand-in for the scenes that my sex entitles me to turn down.” A strident feminist, Musidora saw her work in film as a way to defy conventions. Musidora, born Jeanne Roques, was a former acrobat and performed many of the serial’s stunts herself, including a sequence in which she tumbles down the side of a tall building wrapped in an unfurling length of rope - a stunt mimicked by no less than Jackie Chan. Louis Feuillade’s French serial Les Vampires stars Musidora as a black catsuit-clad criminal named Irma Vep who carries out her nighttime criminal activities on the rooftops of Paris. “Buster, hardly more dazed during the cyclone than at any other time, walks out of buildings as they collapse, stands in others that blow away, gets his pants caught on an uprooted tree and is deposited in the river and has a score of other sensational experiences.” - Edgar Waite, San Francisco Examiner, May 21, 1928 Keaton later claimed filming this scene was the thrill of his life, but that he “was mad at the time, or I would never have done the thing.” If he’d missed his mark by an inch, he’d likely have been crushed. Keaton had done iterations of this same stunt in his shorts Back Stage (1919) and One Week (1920), but here he used a genuine, two-ton building façade. features perhaps his most iconic - during a cyclone, Keaton survives the façade of an entire house falling on him via the outline of the attic window. Of the silent film comedians, Buster Keaton was the biggest daredevil of them all, with each of his films filled with jaw-dropping stunts. “Whether she is falling down a well, leaping through an upper window in a ball gown or visiting New York, is startling, vivacious, girlish, and always funny.” - Julian Johnson, Photoplay, April 1919īuster Keaton – Steamboat Bill, Jr. Mickey became the highest-grossing film of the year. Using the language of cinema to trick viewers, Normand climbed the taller tower in one scene, but in a tighter match cut hangs off of the shorter one, all the while maintaining the suspense of an impending fall. The building had two corner towers, one far off the ground and the other close to it. According to SilentLocations, Normand achieved this stunt through forced perspective and match cuts. Produced by Normand and Mack Sennett, 1918’s Mickey features a breathtaking stunt in which Normand hangs onto the eaves of what was the Castle Towers Apartments in the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles. Mabel Normand, who is credited with launching Charlie Chaplin’s career in America, was one of the biggest stars in the 1910s. However, there are six reels of it, and it proved vastly entertaining.” - Inez Cunningham, Chicago Tribune, May 28, 1923 “Why the human race should be supposed to find entertainment and not torture in seeing another human on the point of falling to certain death is a mystery to what intelligence I possess. The result is one of the most thrilling - and funny - moments in all of cinema. He was also assisted in some of the more dangerous aspects of the stunt by a few stuntmen, including Bill Strother and Harvey Parry. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor achieved this stunt using a mixture of façade sets built on actual buildings in downtown LA, mechanical effects, forced perspective, and Lloyd’s comedy-tinged stunt work. ![]() In the film, hapless store clerk Lloyd is so desperate for money he decides to climb a 12-story building for $500. Debuting exactly 100 years ago, Safety Last! features one the most iconic stunts of all time, culminating in star Harold Lloyd hanging from the face of a clock as traffic whizzes below him.
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