A Two-Ton House Front Missed Buster Keaton by Only Inches

A house front weighing about two tons came crashing down around Buster Keaton, and an open attic window missed him by only inches. Harold Lloyd dangled from the hands of a giant clock with a thumb and a forefinger missing from his right hand. And in 1920, a young pilot named Ormer Locklear died in a night stunt filmed for a movie camera. Before computers and green screens, the thrill on the screen was often real. These are twelve silent era stars who risked their lives for a stunt: an acrobat, a comedienne, a cowboy, two young flyers, a serial queen, an escape artist, a swashbuckler, a stuntwoman, a fragile-looking heroine, a comedian, a wing walker and Buster Keaton. Every story in this video is checked against published sources. When a story comes from a single account, we say who told it. Scenes marked ILLUSTRATION are AI-generated settings. They show no real people and are not historical photographs. CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:40 #12 Richard Talmadge 1:57 #11 Gloria Swanson 3:16 #10 Tom Mix 4:34 #9 Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers 5:45 #8 Pearl White 6:37 #7 Harry Houdini 8:09 #6 Douglas Fairbanks 9:15 #5 Helen Gibson 10:46 #4 Lillian Gish 11:55 #3 Harold Lloyd 13:16 #2 Ormer Locklear 14:42 #1 Buster Keaton 16:40 Final thoughts A new Hollywood legend arrives on this channel every day. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Which of these stunts would you never have dared? Tell us in the comments. SOURCES & CREDITS Film clips: public-domain silent films from the Internet Archive (archive.org), used under narration. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, public domain unless listed below. Photo credits (CC BY 4.0): "Gloria Swanson and Minnie Barton burn the mortgage to the Bide-A-Wee home for working mothers" - Los Angeles Daily News, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi..., licensed CC BY 4.0. Illustrations: AI-generated settings (no real persons), labeled ILLUSTRATION on screen. Map: based on us-atlas (U.S. Census Bureau boundaries). Music: original instrumental score. #SilentFilm #BusterKeaton #ClassicHollywood