Harold Lloyd: Dangling From a Clock With Half a Hand

The most famous death-defying stunt in silent film history shows a man in round glasses dangling from a skyscraper clock. Now imagine doing it while missing half your dominant hand, concealed beneath a specially built prosthetic glove.This episode tells the story of Harold Lloyd, the third genius of silent film and the highest-paid film performer of the 1920s. We follow how a scrappy Nebraska kid built a comedy empire, survived a bomb blast, and fiercely guarded a legacy that nearly faded from cultural memory.How he snuck past a studio gatekeeper in disguise during a shift change to break into the movie businessThe 1919 prop-bomb explosion that severed his thumb and forefinger and temporarily blinded himWhy his everyman glass character outshone Chaplin's tramp by embodying 1920s American ambitionThe 1943 nitrate film vault fire that nearly killed him as he rushed into toxic chlorine gas to save his workHis refusal to let his films air with cheap piano scores, pricing himself out of television and cultural memory