I am all about pre-1960 films. Rather than the gratuitous films today, generally lacking plot, character development, script, camera angles, use of shadows… I love my oldies. But aside from greats like Casablanca, Double Indemnity, Citizen Kane…
Anyone have a gem of a classic movie not fully known?
Run Silent, Run Deep
Hour of the Wolf
I Confess
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Your suggestions?
A few that come to mind:
Twelve O’clock High
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The River
Titfield Thunderbolt
Captains Courageous (1937)
Mark of Zoro (1920)
Hells Angels (1930)
Lonely are the Brave (1962)
Crane
Stalag 17
On the Waterfront
Stalag 17 - time to see it again!
Out of the Past with Robert Mitchum and the deliciously evil and beautiful Jane Greer.
I love ‘Now Voyager’ and oh, I don’t know maybe 1 MILLION others, that I can’t think of at this moment. They will come to me, so I will post as they come to my brain.
My Man Godfrey with William Powell and Carole Lombard.
I’m watching Shadow of the Thin Man now.
I mainly watch older commercials featuring Gary Burghoff.
Ohhhhhhhhhh Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Bad Day at Black Rock
Jock Sturges
Spencer Tracy
need I say more?
mc
The Phenix City Story 1955. Not as true as they make out but based on the Assassination of Albert Patterson after he won the Democratic primary for Attorney General (in those days the general election was a mere formality).Forced the governor to declare martial law. John McIntire, Kathryn Grant (future Mrs Bing Crosby) and a jovial but ultimately chilling villain Edward Andrews. Could well be the first time the n word is used in a mainstream film. Many versions start with a 13 minute interview of locals.
Decision Before Dawn (1951) In 1944 Allied intelligence, with misgivings, recruits two German POWs to go behind German lines with an American officer to contact a German officer willing to surrender his unit. You really get a feeling on what Nazi Germany was like collapsing with ruined cities, refugees, updated check lists for traitors.
I love anything with/by Orson Wells:
[ul]
[li]Touch of Evil[/li][li]The Magnificent Ambersons[/li][li]Chimes at Midnight[/li][li]The Lady From Shanghai[/li][li]The Third Man[/li][/ul]
I don’t know what the OP means by “not fully known.” Here are some suggestions for great movies from before 1960, but none of them is obscure:
The Third Man (a favorite of mine; great cinematography, moral without being sentimental, not a false note from beginning to end, one of the greatest closing shots of all time)
Paths of Glory (early Kubrick)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Lon Chaney, 1923, silent; people seem to forget about Chaney when considering film greats)
Stormy Weather (not much of a plot, but great music with many black stars)
M (see it in the original German with subtitles)
Duck Soup (my favorite Marx Brothers movie, skewers everything and everyone)
Black Orpheus (beautifully filmed)
Bicycle Thieves (seemingly simple story has a lot of depth)
Mon Oncle (Tati showing the absurdity of modern mechanized life)
Sweet Smell of Success (Burt Lancaster plays a true S.O.B., and Tony Curtis plays a true suck-up)
The Hidden Fortress (One of Kurosawa’s most accessible movies. The original Star Wars was partly inspired by this movie.)
Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk aren’t fully known, but together they account for 10 films in this highly curated list of top 1000.
ETA: …and it’s searchable in the second box to your heart’s desire!
These are my favorite pre-1960 films, and I will allow you to decide which of them are not fully known:
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938, U.S., dir. Michael Curtiz)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, U.S., dir. Lewis Milestone)
Camille (1937, U.S., dir. George Cukor)
Casablanca (1942, U.S., dir. Michael Curtiz)
Citizen Kane (1941, U.S., dir. Orson Welles)
Duck Soup (1933, U.S., dir. Leo McCarey)
Forbidden Planet (1956, U.S., dir. Fred McLeod Wilcox)
Freaks (1932, U.S., dir. Tod Browning)
The Great Dictator (1940, U.S., dir. Charles Chaplin)
Invaders from Mars (1953, U.S., dir. William Cameron Menzies)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, U.S., dir. Frank Capra)
King Kong (1933, U.S., dir. Merian C. Cooper)
La Strada (1954, Italy, dir. Federico Fellini)
M (1931, Germany, dir. Fritz Lang)
The Maltese Falcon (1941, U.S., dir. John Huston)
Modern Times (1936, U.S., dir. Charles Chaplin)
The Searchers (1956, U.S., dir. John Ford)
Seven Samurai (1954, Japan, dir. Akira Kurosawa)
Singin’ in the Rain (1952, U.S., dir. Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen)
The Third Man (1949, U.K., dir. Carol Reed)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, U.S., dir. John Huston)
Vertigo (1958, U.S., dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
The Wizard of Oz (1939, U.S., dir. Victor Fleming)
Inherit the Wind
On the Waterfront
Mildred Pierce
Dark Victory
Million Dollar Legs – W. C. Fields as the president of Klopstokia and a super athelete.
I Walked with a Zombie – a classic zombie movie, based on Jane Eyre.
I Was a Male War Bride – Howard Hawks directing Cary Grant (in drag).
Here Comes Mr. Jordan – about a boxer who dies too early and is given a new life. Later remade by Warren Beatty as Heaven Can Wait.
Heaven Can Wait (1943) – not the Warren Beatty film. A man dies and thinks he’s going to hell, meeting with “His Excellency” – the devil. Laird Cregar is superb as His Excellency.
Hellzapoppin’ – sort of like Laugh-In, though made in the 1940s.
They Made Me a Criminal – John Garfield as a boxer framed for murder. With the Bowery Boys, who are quite good, and directed by – strangely enough – famed choreographer Busby Berkeley
I Married a Witch – the template for Bewitched
I Married a Monster from Outer Space – 50s SF paranoia
White Heat – “Top of the world, Ma!”
The Old Dark House – Invented the “strangers gathered together in a mysterious house” genre. Boris Karloff is great.
The Fatal Glass of Beer – W.C. Fields at his beat. A short subject that gets funnier the more times you watch it.
Holiday – Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn
The Monolith Monsters – 50s SF horror with an imaginative and unique monster – crystals that grow to giant size, then collapse and advance on a town.
Cabin in the Sky – An all-black cast in a movie of a Broadway musical about living a good life. Great songs and singers.
The Day the Earth Caught Fire – UK SF disaster film where the Earth is moving closer to the sun and people try to cope.
I Love You Again – William Powell as a con man who suddenly recovers from amnesia, realizing he’s living a life that’s far too tame for him.
The Thief of Baghdad – One of the best fantasy films ever made.
The Devil and Miss Jones – basically, a comedy based on the concept of Undercover Boss
Ball of Fire – a screwball comedy about lexicographers, based on Snow White.
Dead of Night – classic horror anthology movie.
Twentieth Century – classic screwball comedy, with John Barrymore and Carol Lombard as a director and actress couple who never stop acting in anything they do.
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp – The life of a UK military officer. Despite its title, it’s a very affecting drama.
Cat People and Curse of the Cat People. The first is an exercise in how to to a horror film. The second is a psychological exploration of a child with an active imagination who is ignored. They have some of the same characters and actors, but Curse doesn’t try to scare you.
The Roaring Twenties – classic gangster film.
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers – no, not porn. A classic film noir
The Naked Kiss – more film noir. Watch the opening sceneand you’re hooked.
Gorgo – one of the best of the giant monster films – made in the UK.
A Letter to Three Wives – the letter says “I’m running away with the husband of one of you.”
Pygmalion – the original Shaw play. Wendy Hiller is delightful as Eliza
Young and Innocent – early Hitchcock and an early example of his “running man” them.
The Whole Town’s Talking – Comedy with Edward G. Robinson as a notorious gangster and the mousy bank clerk who’s his exact double. Probably the best handling of the mistaken identity theme ever.
The Time of Their Lives – Abbott and Costello, though they don’t really appear together (they were feuding). A charming romance about ghosts and curses. Costello is surprisingly effective.
Mr. 880. Edwin Gwenn (Kris Kringle from Miracle on 34th Street) as your friendly neighborhood counterfeiter.
Fort Apache – John Ford directed. Henry Fonda as a martinet and John Wayne as the man trying to prevent a massacre.
La Belle et La Bette – John Cocteau’s wonderous adaptation of Beauty and the Beast has never been equaled.
Force of Evil – Film noir about the mob taking over the numbers racket.
I give a 10/10 rating to about one percent of all the films I watch. Since I started rating films on IMDb about eight years ago, only two pre-1960 make the grade:
The Third Man (1949)
M (1931)
I give a 9/10 rating to about ten percent of the films I watch. These make the cut:
Hamlet (1948) with Laurence Olivier
Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945)
The 400 Blows / Les quartre cents coups (1959)
Harvey (1950)
Rebecca (1940)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
All About Eve (1950)
Stalag 17 (1953)
Adding just a few:
Rififi (1955)—Just about every heist/caper film since copies this one.
The Killing (1956)—Early Kubrick racetrack robbery noir.
And if a Region A/1 Blu-ray ever appears:
Napoleon (1927)—Abel Gance develops a shit-ton of techniques to tell this 6-hour story. To quote Wikipedia, “The film is recognised as a masterwork of fluid camera motion, produced in a time when most camera shots were static. Many innovative techniques were used to make the film, including fast cutting, extensive close-ups, a wide variety of hand-held camera shots, location shooting, point of view shots, multiple-camera setups, multiple exposure, superimposition, underwater camera, kaleidoscopic images, film tinting, split screen and mosaic shots, multi-screen projection, and other visual effects.”
I though it was especially cool that Gance, in the time that cameras were hand cranked, developed a compressed air device to crank the camera so he could strap it on the back of a horse for a chase scene.
(I was fortunate enough to see the 6-hour version at the Paramount in Oakland a few years back, with full orchestra and three intermissions, one of them a dinner break. If they do come out with it for Region A/1, I’ll be first in line.)