Safety Last!

This is the movie is which Harold Lloyd climbs the side of a skyscraper and accidentally hangs from a clock...


Since it was first released in 1923, that nail-biting sequence has become a solid gold piece of comedy legend, with (as far as I know) no-one but Lloyd himself daring to attempt a remake in the 85 years since.

After all – who would be such a mug? There are no visual effects in the sequence – all that traffic down below is really there – and almost a century later Lloyd still makes you gasp as he literally swings from his fingertips... despite the fact that an accident four years earlier had robbed him of one of them!

And the imagination that's gone into devising all the various objects that come out of windows at him as he climbs his way up has you really wondering what on Earth is going to knock him off-balance next.

In fact, the entire giddy sequence has become so iconic, that today scarcely anyone remembers the calamitous sequence of intense set-pieces that lead him into this predicament, and this film is full of them.

His missing a train, his hiding from his landlady, and most ingeniously his attempts to cross town and get to work on time, without using any public transport.

Harold Lloyd. Absolutely timeless. Hooray!