Safety Last! (1923)

The logical place to start is with this.

Having learned that frightening his audiences was a way to establish his career, Harold Lloyd planned the above film after two others he'd made based on height-driven terror, Look Out Below and High and Dizzy. Hal Roach and Lloyd had discovered that filming above the "Hill Street Tunnel" gave a long high shot of Los Angeles that made people on flattened 2D film look high in the air. These two, plus Safety Last, were the best known of Lloyd's "Thrill Comedies." The spectacular physical peril of the featured film succeeded in scaring the bejeezus out of audiences, making it a hugely popular picture of the time and a classic even now.

Judging by today's standards, some of the film is tedious in places, especially the repeated gag that compels Lloyd's character to climb the outside while covering for the expert that was engaged to do it. Bits and pieces look cliched now because they've been stolen repeatedly over the last 103 years, if not directly then reworked into other concepts and such until the original suffers from having been filmed so early in film history. Later films would use the combination between stunts and stories to seize audience's imagination and sense of thrill, thus setting the stage for the action films that would not match the scope of this, really, for another 40 years. The conceptual concept of using an existing physical happenstance, the bridge over the city, to make it seem like a huge budget was spent, proved a curtailing restriction on Hollywood until the invention of the "car chase," which ballooned into extravagance in the 1960s. In large part, films of the 30s through the 50s couldn't do what Lloyd did because there was no way to add sound to the format. Safety Last works because it's a silent picture. Talkies could not do this. Lloyd didn't have to account for Los Angeles acoustically, like a film made 10 years later would have had to.