C14| Saturday/Sunday, September 7 - 8, 2019 ** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.**
ICONS
IN THE 1920S, AS SILENT-FILM comedy in
America was reaching its pinnacle, sad sacks
and stone faces dominated the screen. As the
puckish but endearing Little Tramp, Charlie
Chaplin embodied the plight and pluck of
early 20th-century immigrants, while Buster
Keaton—known everywhere as the “Great
Stone Face”—personified the stolid stoicism of
the little guy swept up in history.
Concurrent with the ascent of Chaplin and
Keaton, another star of silent-film comedy rep-
the early days of his film career, he was sad-
dled with playing characters that were dull
copies of the Little Tramp, but he emerged as
his own man after he dreamed up a character
whose defining accessory was a pair of eye-
glasses. “The glasses gave you an idea of stu-
dious or academic appearance, but I belied
those,” Lloyd said in an interview with Robert
Robinson. “I didn’t live up to what the glasses
more or less promised.”
Indeed, with his circular eyewear and buoy-
ant demeanor, Lloyd’s creation called to mind
a gung-ho bookworm. In his 1968 history of si-
lent cinema, “The Parade’s Gone By...,” Mr.
Brownlow summarized the antecedents of the
“glasses character”: “His bespectacled eager-
beaver epitomized the young American of the
era—the sort of character popularized in fic-
tion by Harry Leon Wilson, Homer Croy, and
the Horatio Alger stories,” Mr. Brownlow wrote.
In “Safety Last!”—the funniest and fleetest
of the “glasses character” features—Lloyd stars
as a young man of modest means who makes
the trek from a small burg to a bustling big
city with the goal of hitting the big time. In-
stead, Lloyd—called by his own name in the
film—manages to get hired as a mere depart-
ment store clerk. Nonetheless, he is a busy bee:
Mistakenly carried off in the back of a truck
before his shift begins, he tries to hop aboard
a trolley and even fakes an injury to secure an
ambulance ride in order to return to work.
Despite his low-level status, Lloyd misrepre-
sents himself as a success to his girlfriend
(Mildred Davis). In a dazzling sequence, when
Mildred makes an appearance at the store,
Lloyd is forced to maintain her impression of
him as the store’s supposed general manager—
for example, leading him to commandeer the
office of his boss just after he’s been threat-
ened with dismissal. The film’s most cele-
brated scene, though, comes at the close. Ea-Edgar Degas found inspiration
in the singers, dancers and
audiences of Paris.
ger to capitalize on an offer of $1,000 to raise
the store’s profile, Lloyd engages in a publicity
stunt that calls for him to ascend the exterior
of the tall building that is home to the store.
Lloyd contends with pigeons and spectators
peering from windows, but when he ap-
proaches the summit, the real danger begins:
In an unforgettable image, Lloyd swings peril-
ously from the hand of a clock. Catapulting
himself up farther, he almost bites the dust
when a mouse scampers inside his pant leg
and causes him to nearly fall backward. Yet he
survives these and other near misses to make
it to the roof, where he is embraced, dizzy and
windswept, by Mildred.
Lloyd had the well-defined facial features
and graceful athleticism of a matinee idol, but
he was willing to jeopardize his body for
laughs. As Lloyd recounted in “The Parade’s
Gone By...,” the finale of “Safety Last!” was ac-
complished without back projection. “When
you see me climbing, I’m really climbing,” he
said. “We had platforms built below the sky-
scraper windows—they were about ten to fif-
teen feet below, covered with mattresses.”
Lloyd’s prosperous, largely charmed adult
life led critic Andrew Sarris to accuse him of
lacking in the personal anguish purportedly
necessary for comedy. “Lloyd’s face did not
gain in wisdom or pathos or resignation as it
aged,” Sarris wrote in “The American Cin-
ema.” “It seemed as smug and complacent in
the end as it had in the beginning.” Yet
“Safety Last!” is genuinely revivifying in its
endorsement of the all-American ethic of
bootstrapping. Lloyd seems to be saying that
you, too, can start as a sales clerk, survive a
close call with a clock and get the girl.Mr. Tonguette writes about the arts for nu-
merous publications, including the Columbus
Dispatch, National Review and Humanities. SHUTTERSTOCKBYTOBIASGREY
A
Painter
Goes to
The
Opera
Harold Lloyd, a
contrast to
contemporary stars
like Chaplin and
Keaton, heads this
paean to self-reliance.The Onscreen Follies of
A Homegrown Go-Getter
resented an altogether different kind of charac-
ter: the homegrown go-getter. Given the moni-
ker the “third genius” in a 1989 documentary
by film historians Kevin Brownlow and David
Gill, Harold Lloyd starred in a wave of bright,
energetic comedies propelled by his bound-
lessly hopeful disposition, including his great-
est achievement, the breathlessly exhilarating
triumph “Safety Last!” (1923). Co-directed by
Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, the film func-
tions as a feature-length paean to self-reliance,
a concept Lloyd intuitively understood.
Like Chaplin, Lloyd lived through a chal-
lenging, vagabond-like
childhood. Due to his
father’s inability to
hold a job, Lloyd re-
sided in a dizzying
number of towns in his
home state of Ne-
braska and beyond, ac-
cording to biographer
Annette D’Agostino
Lloyd (no relation to
the performer). Yet
Lloyd resisted the put-
upon persona of Chap-
lin or Keaton. DuringBYPETERTONGUETTE
A
mong the impressionist painters who
emerged in the 1860s, Edgar Degas
(1834-1917) was an outlier in his un-
quenchable desire to represent modern
urban life. Racecourses, laundry shops,
brothels and the circus all fueled his imagination. But
it was the Paris Opera, especially its ballet, which kept
him coming back time and again. The appeal of mod-
ern ballet for Degas, who started out as a history
painter, was to be found in its classical roots. When
Degas’s American patron Louisine Havemeyer asked
him why he made so many ballet paintings, he replied:
“Because, Madame, it’s all that is left us of the com-
bined movements of the Greeks.”
This link between the modernity Degas sought at
the Paris Opera and his perception of its ancient ori-
gins is the focus of a new show at the Musée d’Orsay
in Paris. “Degas at the Opera,” which marks the 350th
anniversary of the Paris Opera, runs from Sept. 24 to
Jan. 19, 2020. It then moves to the National Gallery of
Art in Washington, D.C., where it will be on display
from March 1 to July 5, 2020.
The Paris show is curated by Henri Loyrette, a for-
mer director of the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre
Museum, who has written several books about Degas.
Mr. Loyrette has chosen about 200 works from public
and private collections that illustrate the varied media
Degas learned to master, including oil paint, pencil,
pastel, monotype, engraving, sculpture and photogra-
phy. “The Opera became a kind of laboratory for Degas where the range
of subjects led him to look for the most appropriate medium to portray
each of them,” Mr. Loyrette said.
Degas’s interest in the classical world was established in early sketches
inspired by the art of the Renaissance, but its most vivid expression can
be found in his oil painting “Young Spartans Exercising,” which he began
in 1860 and finally completed around 1881. Its inspiration was Plutarch’s
“Life of Lycurgus,” which recounted the demanding training that young
girls from Sparta underwent. “For me it represents the first dance paint-
ing Degas did,” Mr. Loyrette said. “Later on we can see that he transposed
scenes of history painting onto scenes of contemporary ballet.” “Spar-
tans” has its own modern twist: Instead of giving the youths typical Greek
faces, Degas portrays them with the features of Parisian street urchins.
Degas grew up surrounded by music. His banker father held a salon
in the family’s Paris apartment where he invited his friends to listen
to baroque and classical performances. A highlight of the exhibition is
Degas’s oil painting ”Lorenzo Pagans and Auguste de Gas” (ca. 1869).
In it the artist (who changed the spelling of the family name) pays
homage to his aging father Auguste, who listens intently as Pagans, a
tenor at the Paris Opera, accompanies himself on the guitar. “We can
imagine that Degas like any boy of a respectable family went to the Op-
era from a young age,” Mr. Loyrette said. “But it’s really at the end of
the 1860s that he begins to visit the Opera regularly—something which
continues throughout
his career.”
Degas’s first critical
success as an artist
was a painting com-
missioned by the mu-
sician Désiré Dihau,
who played bassoon
for the Paris Opera.
“The Orchestra at the
Opera” (ca. 1869),
which is on display at the Musée d’Orsay, contrasts
the grave, somberly dressed musicians (Dihau
among them) in the orchestra pit with the luminous
white tutus of the dancers on the stage. “There is adesire for realism, but at the same time everything
that Degas paints is artificial,” Mr. Loyrette said.
“His orchestra is artificial, just as later on we see
that his pastels of dancing classes are figments of
his own playful sense of reality.”
Degas never painted in the Opera itself. “He relied
on his memory, invented or got dancers to pose for
him in his studio,” Mr. Loyrette said. But Degas’s uni-
verse wasn’t an idealized one. He didn’t shy away
from depicting the less salubrious sides of the ballet,
particularly the way older men preyed on young danc-
ers. In the monotype “Virginie being admired while
the Marquis Cavalcanti looks on” (ca. 1880/1883),
which has been lent by the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C., there is a satirical edge to Degas’s
work reminiscent of the caricaturist Honoré Daumier.
“We didn’t want to ignore any aspect of the Op-
era,” Mr. Loyrette said. “One thing Degas could
never understand was why Gauguin loved to travel
to places like Martinique and the Marquesas Islands
because he felt that he could find everything he
needed at the Opera. There was history, mythology,
exoticism, all in one place.”MASTERPIECE| ‘SAFETY LAST!’ (1923), CO-DIRECTED BY FRED NEWMEYER AND SAM TAYLOR, STARRING HAROLD LLOYD
Above, Edgar
Degas’s ‘The
Orchestra at the
Opera’ (ca. 1869).
Left, Degas’s
‘The Loge’ (1880).REVIEW
FROM TOP: RMN-GRAND PALAIS (MUSÉE D’ORSAY)/HERVÉ LEWANDOWSKI; THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON/ALBERT SANCHEZ