Adelaide Screenwriter: Free movies #1

The Kid

There are hundreds of free movies available online, if you know where to look. Most of them are old, and out of copyright, including many classics. Here are just a few:

A Dog’s Life (1918) – This endearing short film tells the story of underdogs, human and canine, succeeding despite the odds.

A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995) – The famed director Martin Scorsese takes viewers on a thoughtful tour of classic American films.

Alexander Nevsky (1938) – A historical drama film directed by the great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962) – French short film directed by Robert Enrico. Won awards at Cannes Film Festival and Academy Awards.
Angel on My Shoulder (1946) – A gangster comedy starring Claude Rains and Paul Muni.

Battleship Potemkin (1925) – Directed by the great Russian director, Sergei Eisenstein. One of the most influential propaganda films of all time.
City Lights (1931) – The funny and moving tale of a tramp who falls in love with a blind girl, City Lights is one of Charlie Chaplin’s greatest works. A silent film released two years after the arrival of “talkies,” it was a huge popular and critical success. Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky all placed City Lights on their list of the ten greatest films ever made.

Virginia Cherrill

Dick Tracy (1937) – A 15 episode film series that brought Dick Tracy to the silver screen.

Frankenstein (1910) - The first time Mary Shelley’s creation was brought to the big screen. It took J. Searle Dawley three days to shoot the 12-minute film (at a time when films were shot in just one day), at Edison Studios, the production company owned by Thomas Edison.

Greed (1924) – Erich von Stroheim directed silent drama. Considered one of the great lost films of movie history.

Hiroshima mon amour (1959) – Major French film directed by Alain Resnais and written by Marguerite Duras. This acclaimed film is the documentation of an intensely personal conversation between a French-Japanese couple about memory and forgetfulness. It was a major catalyst for the Nouvelle Vague, making highly innovative use of miniature flashbacks to create a uniquely nonlinear storyline.
His Girl Friday (1940) – Directed by Howard Hawks. A classic comedy with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, it is still considered the benchmark for rapid-fire dialogue. Quentin Tarantino wrote at the start of Pulp Fiction concerning the two characters in the opening scene: Their dialogue is to be said in a rapid-pace "HIS GIRL FRIDAY" fashion.

Claudette Colbert

It Happened One Night (1934) – Directed by Frank Capra, with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. This is one of the three romantic comedies most often mentioned as the gold standard of the form, the other two being Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940). I would add My Man Godfrey (1936). It Happened One Night picked up five Oscars – Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Writing.

Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914) – It’s the film in which Charlie Chaplin’s iconic Little Tramp character makes his first appearance.

La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) – Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer and starring Renée Jeanne Falconetti, this film is considered a masterpiece from the silent era.

Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902) – French science fiction black and white film. Loosely based on two popular novels by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.
M (1931) – Classic film directed by Fritz Lang, with Peter Lorre. This film is a highly structured and stylized film about a serial killer. It created the serial kill genre, which includes such entries as Psycho and Silence of the Lambs. Alfred Hitchcock was a disciple of Lang as were Jacques Tourneur (The Leopard Man, 1943) and Michael Powell (Peeping Tom, 1960). M was not only the originator of the genre, but arguably remains it preeminent entry. (In German and high def.)

Peter Lorre

Menilmontant (1925) – When Pauline Kael, longtime New Yorker film critic, was asked to name her favorite film, this was it. French silent film.
Metropolis (1927) – Fritz Lang’s silent German expressionist science fiction film. A landmark film.

Night and Fog (1955) – Alain Resnais’s film on the Holocaust. Truffaut called it the greatest film ever made.

Night of the Living Dead (1968) – A cult horror classic.

Philip K. Dick: A Day in the Afterlife (1994) – BBC documentary revisits the (sometimes troubled) life of sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick and his sprawling body of literary work – 44 novels and 121 short stories in total.

Scarface (1932) - American gangster film starring Paul Muni and George Raft. Directed by Howard Hawks.

Stagecoach (1939) – John Ford’s landmark western with John Wayne. Highly influential film that Orson Welles watched more than 40 times while making Citizen Kane.

Robert Donat

The 39 Steps (1935) – One of Alfred Hitchcock’s first hits. This British thriller is based on novel with same name by John Buchan.

The 400 Blows (1959) – François Truffaut. One of the defining films of the French New Wave cinema.

The Bell Boy (1918) – Featuring Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton. Fatty Arbuckle worked with Mabel Normand and Harold Lloyd. He mentored Charlie Chaplin, and discovered Buster Keaton and Bob Hope. Buster Keaton was recognized as the seventh-greatest director of all time by Entertainment Weekly. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Keaton the 21st-greatest male star of all time.

The Big Combo (1955) – Directed by Joseph Lewis, this film is considered a noir classic, in part for the cinematography of John Alton.

The Birth of a Nation (1915) – Directed by D.W. Griffith. A landmark work in film history with racist undertones.

Marlene Dietrich

The Blue Angel (1930) – The Weimar classic that made Marlene Dietrich an international star.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) – This silent film directed by Robert Wiene is considered one of the most influential German Expressionist films and perhaps one of the greatest horror movies of all time.

The Divorce of Lady X (1938) – British romantic comedy film starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon.

The General (1926) - Orson Welles said that Buster Keaton’s The General is “the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made.” A 2002 worldwide poll by Sight & Sound ranked Keaton's The General as the 15th best film of all time.
The Gold Rush (1925) – Charlie Chaplin wrote, produced, directed and starred in The Gold Rush. He said that this is the film he most wanted to be remembered for.

The Great Train Robbery (1903) – Early western film by Edwin S. Porter. A landmark in narrative filmmaking.

The Immigrant (1917) – Charlie Chaplin plays an immigrant coming to the United States who gets accused of theft along the way.

The Kid (1921) – Charlie Chaplin’s first full-length film as a director, and the one I find most moving. The kid was played by Jackie Coogan, who played Uncle Fester in The Addams' Family on TV in the 1960s.

Charlie Chaplin

The Lady Vanishes (1938) – British thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Stars Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) – One of Hitchcock’s silent classics. A landlady suspects her lodger is a murderer killing women around London.

The Sheik (1921) – Silent film with Rudolph Valentino.

The Street Fighter (1974) – One of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite karate films.

The True History of the Traveling Wilburys (2007) – Willy Smax tells the fascinating story of the short-lived 1980s supergroup.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) – A 1964 French musical film directed by Jacques Demy, starring Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo.

Triumph of the Will (1935) – The major Nazi propaganda work by Leni Riefenstahl. With subtitles.
Un Chien Andalou (1929) – Salvador Dali and Louis Bunuel’s short, silent surrealist film.
Yellow Submarine (1968) – The animated feature film based on the music of The Beatles.

If there's something in particular you're looking for, try these websites:

Thursday, 15 March 2012

Free movies #1

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