On 4 February Carl Davis returned to his long-time collaborators the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg to conduct his scores to two classic Harold Lloyd silents: An Eastern Westerner and Safety Last. The following morning he conducted a second programme featuring Chaplin’s A Dog’s Life and The Adventurer.
2023 will mark the centenary of Safety Last, one of the masterpieces of the genre. Inspired by the 'human fly' phenomenon of the time when men climbed sky-scrapers unaided as publicity stunts, Lloyd plays the Boy, who comes to the big city and wins his fortune and his girl. The orchestration of Davis's score (22 players) is based on the line-up of the Paul Whiteman Band, and is inspired by the popular music of the Twenties. An Eastern Westerner has the same orchestration so that the two films can be run as a double bill.