The Fantastic Four: First Steps review – Marvel regains buoyancy with wacky superhero family sitcom

In a retro-futurist version of early 1960s New York, Mr Fantastic and Sue Storm are living together as a dysfunctional family with the Human Torch and the Thing – with a baby on the way Baby steps, in fact. Marvel has rediscovered the lighthearted dimension of superheroism, the buoyant fun and the primary colour comedy – as opposed to the wiseacre supercool of, say, Guardians of the Galaxy. Here it has amusingly brought back the Fantastic Four in their early years (but not to the very beginning) in a retro-futurist version of early 1960s New York where no one smokes. Hilariously, the Four are of course living together as a family in a bizarre hi-tech apartment, like something in TV’s Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie, often wearing their comfy blue pyjama-style outfits. Scientist Dr Reed “Mr Fantastic” Richards, whose nickname rather oversells his peculiar superpower of stretchiness, is played by Pedro Pascal in a lighter vocal register than usual; he’s married to Sue “Invisible Woman”...

Don’t look down: 100 years of Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last!

Harold Lloyd’s stunts in Safety Last! make it one of the most heart-in-mouth films of all time. On its 100th birthday, his granddaughter remembers his mastery, inspiration – and the real-life love at the film’s heart

It is one of the most famous images in film history: a bespectacled man dangles from the hands of a broken clock, 12 storeys above the Los Angeles traffic. The climax of Harold Lloyd’s slapstick suspense masterpiece Safety Last!, which is about to celebrate its centenary, is also a defining image of the city, much like the construction workers perched on a steel beam in the 1932 news photograph Lunch Atop a Skyscraper is for New York. They share a sense of the giddy dangers of 20th-century urbanism, and the precarity of the working man.

Harold, the hero of Safety Last!, is just such an ordinary joe: a department store sales clerk struggling to keep his job, while boasting of a big promotion in letters home to his sweetheart, Mildred. When he spends his entire pay cheque on a gift for Mildred, Harold forlornly imagines his lunch disappearing dish by dish. Mildred surprises him by coming to visit, which is when he has the brainwave of “climbing” to the very top of the building as a romantic stunt – emphasis on the stunt as he plans to use his agile friend “Limpy Bill” as a double. In the film’s perfect final 20 minutes, Harold makes the ascent alone, beset by perils including a flock of birds, a barking dog, a broken flagpole and even a gunshot. It amounts to some of the most nerve-racking funny business ever put on screen. Variety announced: “It will make all of the nation laugh.”

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