Safety Last!

You know the image even if you've never seen the film: a bespectacled man dangling from the hands of a clock high above a city street. That's Harold Lloyd in the climactic sequence of a comedy that still makes audiences grip their armrests. Lloyd plays a small-town boy trying to make it big in the city, who concocts a publicity stunt involving a building climb — only for everything to go spectacularly wrong. The twelve-story ascent, performed largely without trick photography on actual buildings in downtown Los Angeles, is one of the greatest sustained set pieces in all of cinema. Lloyd did his own climbing, and he did it missing a thumb and finger from a prop explosion two years earlier. Pure physical comedy at its most thrilling and inventive.