Favorite Movies from Waaaaaay back (comedies, drama, mystery, western)

[spunky1]

Splendor In The Grass -with Warren Beaty and Natalie Wood.

Also, I think it was just a made for TV movie but Duel-with Dennis Weaver. . Steven Spielbergs 1st stab at directing.

But my All time fav. . and I don't know if it's old enough but it's The Sound Of Music!

[domergurl]

Originally Posted by Ohiogirl81

"The Gold Rush" -- does that go way back enough? You can't beat the scene of Charlie Chaplin delicately carving his boot sole, or twirling his laces on a fork like spaghetti.

Love Chaplin. I love "The Kid". When the tramp and the kid are reunited, it's heartbreaking.

[KimoJimo]

I love many, many older movies and can watch them anytime. Biggest favorite is GWTW... I once lived in Greenwich Village in the 50's. There was a neighborhood moviehouse on 6th Avenue and Houston Street. They ran Gone With The Wind one week and I went to see it every single night! It was the first VHS I bought, it was the first DVD I bought...

Also love anything Bette Davis did between 1935 and 1955 ("Mr Skeffington"...WOW!) "Streetcar" great! "Sunset Blvd" I can watch it anytime!

I finally bought a DVD recorder and am in 7th Heaven with TCM, FOX MOVIE CHANNEL and HBO.

I guess I'm strange!

[Jason_Els]

If you would be so kind, please give me a moment to tell you about three friends of mine, some wonderful films just waiting to be seen. Perhaps people think it's impossible to relate to them today, but I think they're among the very finest films ever made and, in that assessment, I'm not entirely alone.

I'd like to introduce you to a few silent films that I think still work and are still worth viewing at least once.

Before Hitler took power in 1933, Germany was on a par with Hollywood. For a brief time, from 1917 to about 1933, Germany was the place for innovative film making. After Hitler came to power, many of the German filmmakers left for Hollywood and created the American school of film noir. One of the top German directors went to work for Desilu and developed the three-camera system for sitcom filming that is still used today. Karl Freund, that man, is also responsible for demanding that I Love Lucy be filmed, not telecined. That's the reason it still looks so good today despite its age.

Nosferatu (1922) - The images of Count Orlok in Nosferatu are not pleasant. This vampire isn't suave and handsome, he isn't even plain. He's hideous and frightening and if you haven't seen this film, you're sure to have seen his face over the years. This is a film about atmosphere more than anything and it's great to watch on a Halloween night. The special effects of the time were amazing, but Orlok is the real deal. The first great cinema vampire. Watch for Lugosi's hand movements, they're from Count Orlok. The black and white cinematography works very well in high contrast and makes the landscapes stark and forbodeing. This is a short but wonderful movie, barely saved from a single print and the horror film that started all horror films.

Sunrise (1927) - Also made by the same director as Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau, Sunrise is a Hollywood production but don't let it fool you. It is one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful films ever made. Consistently on critics' Top 10 lists, with three Oscars, this is one of the few films that you do not forget. Others have said it better than I:

Murnau, raised in the dark shadows of expressionism, pushed his images as far as he could, forced them upon us, haunted us with them. The more you consider "Sunrise" the deeper it becomes -- not because the story grows any more subtle, but because you realize the real subject is the horror beneath the surface. - Roger Ebert

It is a pioneering, overwhelming piece of cinema that still manages to move me (ME!) after I thought I had seen everything. It is a profoundly human film which made me cry for 15 minutes solid in its first part (a reconciliation scene that has to be seen to be believed). This film has more special effects than Terminator 3, all in the service of a thoroughly poetic, bucolic, pastoral, personal, contemplative, idiosyncratic, lyrical, late romantic and expressionist vision of humanity. Its love story, poignant and comic elements have inspired, in no specific order, René Clair ('Le Million'), Jean Vigo ('L'Atalante', 'Zéro de conduite'), Charlie Chaplin (all his subsequent films), Fellini ('La Strada', 'Nights of Cabiria') and even James Cameron ('Titanic'). -Beloit Racine

And these are just the tip of the iceberg. Sunrise is worth every minute.

It has been said that the perfect film has yet to be seen even if it is has already been made, but once in a very great while fate gets cheated and the miraculous happens:

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928): This is the grand-daddy (or grand-mama) of cinema. Easily on Top 3 lists since it was released, nothing like it has been made before or since. The lead performance by Rene Falconetti is lauded as the finest performance in the history of cinema. This is her only film and given the ordeal she went through to make it, there is no wonder why.

To celebrate the canonization of the Maid of Orleans, France commissioned a few film makers to film the life of Joan of Arc. For one film they hired Danish director Carl Dreyer. This is his film.

Dreyer spent lavishly on sets but at the last minute, decided he would focus on the final days of Joan, from her trial to her execution. Compressing the story into one day, he used the actual trial transcripts for his dialogue. He then dispensed with all makeup and decided to film nearly the entire film in sxtreme close-ups using the German Expressionist style for the acting, sets, art, and cinematography. He worked with Falconetti and the other actors, more as a slavemaster than a director. He demanded take after take, forcing Falconetti to kneel for hours on hard stone floors until he got precisely the performance he wanted. The set life was not pleasant and Dreyer was fairly despised by his cast and crew.

At its first screening, the French government was shocked and unhappy with the results. After a little editing, Dreyer took the film to his native Scandinavia where it received astonishing reviews with people saying things like, "life changing," "shocking," and, "divinely inspired." Pleased with these results, Dreyer returned to France to show the government his new cut but a fire at the film vault destroyed everything in it. Film in those days was nitrate-based and highly flammable. Working from second takes, Dreyer worked again to reassemble the film, taking over a year. At its completion, Dreyer was happy but yet another fire destroyed all his working negatives. The Passion of Joan of Arc was lost.

A few surviving scraps of film were circulated under Dreyer's title but he disowned all those hack edits as nothing like his original and he bitterly resented that people were circulating something under his name that he had nothing to do with.

Decades passed and film scholars finally got an idea of what Dreyer intended and wrote about the film as best they could, imagining what it must have been like. Like the other famous lost silent, Greed, The Passion of Joan of Arc had to be reassembled and imagined like a dinosaur with only a handful of fossils left to recreate it.

In 1981 a janitor at an Oslo mental hospital was cleaning out a closet and found some cans of film.

It was Dreyer's original cut of The Passion of Joan of Arc.

It was in exceptional condition, which is all the more amazing considering nitrate film turns to dust after just a few decades.

Criterion worked with film restorers in Scandinavia to clean-up the scratches and rebuild the film.

The result blew everyone away. The Passion of Joan of Arc was really as amazing as the first reviewers thought it was, and maybe then some.

Orignially The Passion of Joan of Arc was not to have a score, but Richard Einhorn saw one of the first restored prints and decided to create an oratorio for the film together with Anonymous 4 and named it, Voices of Light, creating a libretto based on the works of medieval feminist and misogynist writers. It is agreed that even if Dreyer didn't intend a score, that Einhorn's work has contributed something very powerful to the film itself. With Criterion's DVD you can choose to view the film with or without the score, but everyone recommends to listen with it.

When I first bought the DVD, never having seen the movie, it was with money I set aside to buy DVDs of movies I've never seen. The night I watched it I could barely sleep. I was riveted by a performance and experience so emotionally draining that I found myself unprepared for the effect it had. I had no idea film could be used in such a way. I had always seen film as narratives, not as a bare, raw, device to tear away the facades of acting and staging to peer unadulterated into souls. Watching The Passion of Joan of Arc is still not easy. Put away the popcorn, keep the tissues at hand, and put your therapist on speed dial. This is an exhilerating but terrifying film, more to do with mysticism and experience than any other I've seen.

If you care anything for film and what it can do, then you have to see this. While not violent by today's standards, I wouldn't let young children watch it. The intensity is overwhelming. Do watch it through a home theater system to get the entire effect of the score.

In doubt? Here are some other opinions:

In a medium without words, where the filmmakers believed that the camera captured the essence of characters through their faces, to see Falconetti in Dreyer's ``The Passion of Joan of Arc'' (1928) is to look into eyes that will never leave you. - Roger Ebert

It's a harrowing film, claustrophobic in its use of close-ups that unblinkingly record Joan's emotional and mental state. Each frame becomes a canvas for Dreyer's unflinching portrait of suffering. - Jamie Russell

It is the gifted performance of Maria Falconetti as the Maid of Orleans that rises above everything in this artistic achievement. - Mordaunt Hall (http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html?_r=1&title1=&title2=Passion%20of%20Jea nne%20d%27Arc%2C%20The&reviewer=MORDAUNT%20HALL.&v _id=37372&pdate=19290331&partner=Rotten%20Tomatoes &oref=slogin - broken link)

It is Falconetti's transcendent work that raises the film above the level of even the most lauded films in the canon. Jeanne is a hypnotic, shimmering masterpiece, and Falconetti's performance is largely responsible for that. - Rick Curnutte

And:

"Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry." - Carl Theodor Dreyer, "Thoughts on My Craft"

See these three films and I guarantee you won't be disappointed. Each of them is unique, each powerful, each masterworks of all cinema, not just the silent era and use the silent medium as an asset, not a restriction.

Thank you for your kind consideration.

[Jason_Els]

I can't resist

Here are some other exceptional films that are often overlooked.

The Films of the Lumiere Brothers (1895-1903): Remarkable not for what they told, but for what they are. The earliest films were little more than moving postcards where the camera didn't move and there was no plot. So what? These films are over 110 years old and show us slices of history slipping further away every second. Each is very short, often less than a minute, but they show a Europe long gone from anyone's memory. Fascinating to see at least once.

Films of Georges Méliès (1903-1908): Méliès was the Spielberg of his day. Where the Lumieres thought that cinema was an artistic dead end, Méliès immeidately saw its potential. Méliès was among the first to create stories to perform for the camera. It may sound obvious to us, but at the time it was revolutionary. A stage magician by training, Méliès used elaborate sets to tell stories of fantastic adventures and used all his tricks to pioneer special effects. His stories took people to the races in Monaco, "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," magical fairy realms, and, in his most famous work, "A Voyage In the Moon." All were done on set where Méliès could control the lighting and effects precisely. Though primitive by our standards, audiences were amazed and astounded by what they saw. Remember that previously, audiences panicked and ran out of the theater when the Lumiere's, "Arrival of the Train at the Station," was first shown because people actually thought a train was going to break through the screen and run over them. Even if the effects are old and obvious, the stories are still charming, told with humor and showmanship. Though made less than a decade after the basic Lumiere films, Méliès films are light years ahead.

While film moved on to more realistic effects and better narrative technique, Méliès kept producing the same types of film and soon became forgotten. Toward the end of his life he was nearly forgotten but just before WW2 broke out, France rediscovered what is called, "The Magic of Méliès," and gave him the Legion of Honor and a small pension so he could live out his life comfortably if modestly, in recognition of his enormous contributions to cinema.

The Scarlet Empress (1934): A long time ago, Hollywood had no rules, no censorship, and made the sort of movies we wouldn't see again until Bonnie and Clyde. Just under the gun, The Scarlet Empress is a bizarre spectacle of grotesque sets, sexual predation, high camp, costumes that Trisha Biggar would harken back to in the Star Wars series, sensuous black and white cinematography, and the nova-like beauty of Marlene Dietrich. Supposedly about the rise of Catherine the Great, The Scarlet Empress has a brilliant and beautiful cast slipping into a Wonderland vision of imperial Russia. The images stay with you for a long time, particularly the uncensored scenes such as when a court physician dives under Dietrich's gowns to assure her virginity, and when Dietrich reviews her troops and it's clearly not their swords she's measuring-up. It's all very strange but very fun, and loaded with iconic images that Hollywood would go back to again and again in later films.

Todd Browning gave us the quintessntial Dracula in Bela Lugosi's iconic performance in the eponymal role, but he also gave us Freaks (1932), one of the films considered responsible for the creation of the Hayes Office and the beginning of Hollywood's censorship era. Freaks is hard to classify. It's the story of doomed love in a sideshow starring real sideshow performers who are, quite simply, freaks. Told with refreshing sensitivity without being maudlin, Freaks does the nearly impossible by making the audience come to see the sideshow performers as humans living life like anyone else. I can think of other films like Mask or Simon Birch which do not hesitate to play to pathos in the way that Freaks clearly avoids. Browning gets the audience and gets them early. By the shocking end (which many communities censored outright), the audience is cheering the freaks and thinking, "she got hers!"

It is said of Lawrence of Arabia that there are three stars in the film: Peter O'Toole, the Negev desert, and Maurice Jarre's score. There's another film like that and it's already been mentioned here, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947). All that's really needed is Gene Tierney, the oceanside, and Bernard Herrmann's (dare I say) haunting score. Herrmann was one of the world's greatest film composers and he considered his score for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir to be his best. In it we hear the ocean, we hear the strains of love, and we hear the hapiness of Lucy Muir in Gull Cottage. Listena bit more closely, however, and even from the overture, there is a subtle undercurrent; something ominous but longing, a sound of years passing, gaily at first, but then just a hair's breadth more tediously. This masterpiece of scoring is contrapuntal to the action on the screen, declaring in music what goes unsaid though is clearly seen, between Tierney and Harrison. Tierney is luminously beautiful in this film and she captures the inner pastoral quietude of Lucy Muir without being overly demure. George Sanders invented the role of slimeball and here he's as oily and charming as ever while Rex Harrison plays the role of Captain Daniel Gregg with all the salty manliness he could just staying the right side of being a gentleman, and Joseph Mankiewicz delivers his signature style of focusing on personality as well as he ever has.

But all of it really pales to Tierney, the ocean, and the score. The best scene is a montage toward the end showing the passage of years while Herrmann's score begins to be overwhelmed by those longing strains heard at the very beginning. What is longing becomes fatigue, and what is fatigue becomes weary twilight. Just at the end we almost, shall I say it?, allow ourselves to hope that Lucy will die soon. None of this feeling is generated with dialogue, it is all implied in the masterful direction of Mankiewicz, the subtle acting of Tierney, and the setting itself. By the end, the ghost isn't so much Captain Gregg, but the sense of the end of life and the welcome rest that follows. That what is unseen and unspoken, in a medium made entirely of what is seen and spoken, overtakes the actions and words of the characters. We sense what is not there and create our own ending, which Mankiewicz satisfyingly provides.

This is a movie to own and watch again and again for its subtlety is unique in American cinema of the period.

[loose cannon]

Midnight Cowboy

[ESFP]

Any Betty Davis movie, but Dark Victory (1939), with Humphrey Bogart and Ronald Reagan.

[Mooseketeer]

The Longest Day
Sabrina
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Harvey
Mr Smith goes to Washington
Bringing up Baby
The Million Pound Note
12 Angry Men
To Kill a Mockingbird
Arsenic and Old Lace
The Third Man
Casablanca
Citizen Kane
Mr Deeds goes to Town
How to steal a Million
The Franchise Affair
Kind Hearts and Coronets
The Lady Killers
Nosferatu
You can't take it with you
A man called Horse
The Great escape

So many, many wonderful movies , just too many to chose from.

[jdavid93225]

I thought I would add a few more, since some old Disney movies just came to mind:

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
Old Yeller (1957)
Swiss Family Robinson (1960)
Island on Top of the World (1974)

[Think (Freedom)]

Casablanca. I havent seen many old movies, but never in a million years wouldve thought I'd like Casablanca. Then I decided to watch it since its such a classic, and it definitely lived up to its status. Loved it.