I caught the end of Journey Into Fear (1943) the other day on TCM – there’s a sequence in which Joseph Cotten is navigating a ledge on the outside of a high-rise while chasing a ‘bad guy’, who subsequently falls to his death – and it made me think of Harold Lloyd (naturally) and his death-defying climb of that skyscraper in Safety Last! (1923). Then other images of actors in similar peril on the outside edges of tall buildings or on rooftops sprang into my head and I thought that the subject might make an interesting “Didya ever notice” (movie characters perched on a ledge?) post for this week’s blog.

Upon further review, however, as I started to compile a list of these memorable cinematic moments, I realized that there was a much larger topic to be explored.  The real subtext to Lloyd’s tantalizing effort those 85 years ago – the reason that it’s the best remembered of the silent screen comedian’s many (and typically more frenetic) physical antics – is that he’d exploited our inherent fear of falling for entertainment purposes.  While he may not have been the first to do this, the picture of Lloyd hanging from a clock hand (while city traffic passes uninterrupted beneath him) is among the most iconic of its era, and today.

Filmmakers have utilized this “fear of falling” to their advantage ever since:  writers and directors of crime dramas, action adventures, thrillers and comedies have used falling off a building as a convenient way to kill off their villains, put their protagonists in danger to tease us with the possibility, or find a way to make us laugh (even if uncomfortably) at the predicament.  Alfred Hitchcock was not just the “master of suspense”; he excelled in exploiting our various fears.  It’s therefore no surprise that one of his most revered films today is Vertigo (1958), in which the director had James Stewart hanging perilously from a gutter many stories above the street (after a chase that resulted in someone falling to his death) within the opening minutes of the film which deals with the subject throughout its story.  Not only had Stewart been similarly imperiled in an earlier collaboration with the director (wheelchair bound, by Raymond Burr’s character in Rear Window (1954)), but Hitchcock’s other 4-time leading man – Cary Grant – was also twice involved in falling fear sequences:  the rooftop in To Catch a Thief (1955) and on Mount Rushmore with Eve Marie Saint and Martin Landau in North by Northwest (1959).  Though known for his proclivity to cast cool blondes in his movies, it seems that Hitch was also somewhat obsessed with this particular fear (spoilers):

• Jamaica Inn (1939) – Charles Laughton jumps to his death after escaping up a ship’s mast
• Rebecca (1940) – Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers threatens to push Joan Fontaine out a window to the courtyard cement below
• Saboteur (1942) – In the climactic scene, Norman Lloyd’s character slips from Robert Cummings’ fingers off the Statue of Liberty
• Spellbound (1945) – the revelatory (Salvador Dali) dream sequence of Gregory Peck’s suppressed memory includes a falling death that ends with impalement on a fence

By the 1960s, the director had moved on to “stairways for death”.

Impalement is one of the many concluding variations of the falling death:  Orson Welles famously ends The Stranger (1946) with such a scene.  Some other clichéd conventions associated with falling death sequences are the turn away, which almost always follows the aforementioned impalement, and the bouncing body:  anybody that happens to fall off a cliff inevitably finds at least one outcropping of rocks to impact with on the way down (before their body finds its final resting place at the bottom, usually after splashing into the ocean).  Once a body careens off the first impediment (or after an impalement), the director invariably features a turn away sequence:  a person that witnessed the event turns away from the fall and towards the camera so that the audience can see their grimace of horror at having seen such a terrible sight.  Another falling cliché that is not necessarily associated with death involves ladders, whether it is advancing forces being repelled by those charged with keeping them from surmounting the protective wall – from fictional Gunga Din (1939) to the historical The Alamo (1960) – or John Belushi’s titillated Bluto falling backwards to the ground in National Lampoon’s comedy Animal House (1978).

Fear of falling is real, hence we’re morbidly fascinated by trapeze artists (like watching auto racing for the crashes) and others that try to defy it.  The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Story of Three Loves (1953), and Trapeze (1956) all featured stories about fallen flyers.  Also, we devour comic book (and other similarly fantastic) characters that can fly (Superman (1978)) or cheat death through technology (Spider-Man (2002)); I can think of several times in which movie’s James Bond found a way to survive a fatal fall situation (once after having been thrown out of an airplane without a parachute!).  Of course, parachute sequences are riddled with clichés mostly revolving around pulling the pin just in time.  I’m also reminded of another falling ‘bad guy’ cliché:  when a villain falls (or is pushed) off a precipice, he’ll frequently grab hold of the hero’s (or his lady’s) ankle on the way down, leading to a struggle and more screen-time for exploiting the falling fear.

For the purposes of this article, I’ll ignore suicide – jumping to one’s death can’t really be classified as overcoming one’s fear of falling – except to mention a clever sequence from the original Lethal Weapon (1987) in which Mel Gibson’s slightly crazy and previously suicidal police sergeant character saves the life of such a jumper.  Another potentially fatal decision to jump (off a cliff) worked out for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), at least temporarily; the actors’ profane scream on the way down helped to make the scene unforgettable.

Lastly, there’s that other falling fear, famously first sung about by Marlene Dietrich in 1930’s Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel):

“Falling in Love (Again)”