my favorite movies of 1923:

(1) Safety Last!

(2) Our Hospitality

favorite of 1923:

Safety Last!

(Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Bill Strother. Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor.)

Harold Lloyd hanging from a clock on a building in Safety Last! inspired the scene of Back to the Future (my favorite movie of 1985) where Doc (played by Christopher Lloyd — no relation) hangs from the Hill Valley clock tower. That scene is foreshadowed at the very beginning of Back to the Future before any characters speak, when we see Doc’s messy lab with a sprawling clock collection that includes a miniature of … Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock in Safety Last! (That’s right at the beginning of this video.)

You can watch Safety Last in the YouTube video above, or stream it on the Criterion Channel, which has lots of extras including commentary. (If you don’t subscribe, try a free 14-day trial.)

 

2nd favorite of 1923:

Our Hospitality

(Buster Keaton, Natalie Talmadge, Joe Roberts. Directed by Keaton, John G. Blystone.)

Due to a longstanding feud between the Canfields and the McKays (a satire of the real-life feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys), the Canfield patriarch and his sons want to kill a young and naive McKay (Buster Keaton), but the Canfields’ moral code of Southern hospitality won’t allow them to kill him as long as he’s in their house. Keaton ends up performing some daring acts, never using a stunt double.

On Ebert’s website, Jim Emerson writes:

“Our Hospitality” is Keaton’s first feature as auteur and his first masterpiece. … It isn’t his fastest, funniest or most dazzlingly inventive picture … but it is my sentimental favorite because of its serene, nostalgic beauty — a vision of a halcyon world (America, circa 1830) that was already, of course, charmingly old-fashioned by 1923 standards. …

The journey of the Out-Bound Limited from New York to Appalachia is one of my favorite passages in all of cinema. It’s like a memory inside a dream: a locomotive that looks like an antique children’s toy (but is, in fact, a replica of the 1829 Stephenson’s Rocket, an early steam engine), pulling a string of what look like eccentric stagecoaches outfitted for rail conveyance. Keaton loved trains, and while “Our Hospitality” can be seen as a forerunner of “The General” [1926] … this vehicle is not one of the powerful, speeding behemoths of Keaton’s Civil War-era epic. Instead, the OBL rolls along at a leisurely pace (slow enough that [Keaton’s] dog can walk between its wheels), which is a good thing because whoever put down the tracks lazily draped them right over any logs and boulders that got in the way. …

“Our Hospitality” … displays some magnificent pictorial compositions, worthy of John Ford: the Out-Bound Limited seen from under a silhouetted outcropping of rock; Keaton scampering across a mountain, with a hazy valley stretching out below him. Again and again Keaton will place the camera in the most natural and unobtrusive place and then, in the course of the shot, allow reality to reveal itself in all its wonder — whether it’s looking down a tangle of railroad tracks at the possible trajectories available; or spying an absconder in drag from the rear; or peeking through a bedroom door. … What is first viewed through the frame is not always what it appears to be. But these aren’t just tricks or sight gags (though they’re often really funny); they are the very fabric of Keaton’s constantly transforming cosmos.

You can watch the whole movie at the above video, or stream it on the Criterion Channel.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.