A Silent Comedy Legend was Horribly Injured After Mistaking a Real Bomb For a Prop

One of the all-time greats in the world of silent film comedy, Harold Lloyd, is perhaps best known for his monumental work Safety Last!, which, in addition to providing Boeing with a perfect slogan, gave us the iconic scene in which Lloyd perilously hangs from a clockface.

He also starred in classics like the college football comedy The Freshman, which no doubt served as the inspiration for Adam Sandler’s The Waterboy. 

But before both of those projects, Lloyd was the victim of a freak accident that left him horribly injured, all due to a mishap that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in one of his silent comedies. In 1919, Lloyd inked a deal with Pathe distributors to star in a new series of films, and agreed to pose for a photographer in order to promote the arrangement. During the photo shoot, Lloyd was given a trunk full of props, and one of his team of gagmen decided that it would be funny for him to light a cigarette with a prop bomb. 

The only problem was — and this is a pretty big one — it was a real bomb.

Why was a real bomb mixed in with a bunch of goofy props? Apparently Pathe had been using genuine explosives during tests for another movie that didn’t involve Lloyd. Although how one of these bombs ended up being stored with props, including several lookalike dummy bombs made of papier-maché, has never been fully explained.

The blast reportedly “tore a hole in the 16-foot ceiling of the studio” and turned Lloyd’s face into “raw meat” leaving him temporarily-blinded. Also “the thumb and forefinger of his right hand were severed.” Due to the disfigurement, doctors suggested that Lloyd “could be a photographer or a director, but not an actor” presumably while blowing cigarette smoke directly in his face. 

Then movie mogul, and former glove salesman, Samuel Goldwyn visited Lloyd and proposed that his relatives could “come up with a prosthetic” to “hide the injury.” So Lloyd was outfitted with a “revolutionary prosthetic device” one that required taking a mold of his left hand, then reversing the mold to “simulate the incomplete right hand.” The missing bits were then cut off of the duplicate hand and “fitted into a thin leather glove.”

Lloyd went on to make some of the best work of his career, with most audiences “unaware” of what had happened. Even in movies like the 1938 talkie Professor Beware, in which Lloyd is seen wearing an undershirt, make-up artists were able to disguise the glove.

Although one can kind of see that certain digits couldn’t fully apply the same amount of pressure in his cement impression at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. 

Lloyd never talked about the loss of his fingers publicly, not wanting his burgeoning popularity written off as “pity, or sympathy, or curiosity.” 

Lloyd’s story is an inspirational one, teaching the value of perseverance — and also, the value of never playing with something that resembles a bomb, just in case.

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