Silent Movie:
The Thief of Bagdad (1924)
Starring Douglas Fairbanks Sr.!
Talking Movie:
Coconauts (1929)
The Marx Brothers naturally.
BTW: A Trip to the Moon (1902) is a neat movie, but just too ridiculous.
Heh. I was coming in to mention 1920’s MARK OF ZORRO, with Fairbanks: it’s all built around giving him chances to pull off entertaining stunts as the dashing and acrobatic rogue who rides around on horseback, but the best is him using swordsmanship to fight the bad guy to a standstill – and then start in on slapstick hijinks for the win, you see. (And when he gets the girl, it’s as if the movie suddenly realizes it can’t show her having an orgasm on screen and so instead has to imply it as cheerfully as possible.)
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) is overacted and kind of hokey, but visually it’s really, really cool, so I just ignore the story completely.
Lady for a Day(1933). A Frank Capra film that he later remade as A Pocketful of Miracles in 1961. The remake had a star studded cast, and introduced Ann-Margret and Peter Falk, but the original had a charm of it’s own, a very well made movie for the time. There are plenty of earlier films that I’ve seen, enjoy to some degree, but this one marked a new level of competence in film making from one of the greatest directors of all time.
Tarzan the Ape Man 1932
King Kong 1933
The Mummy 1932
Dracula 1931
Dracula is the oldest. I like all the classic horror films from the 30’s.
Agreed.
I can also go back one more year, 1926, for The General. If you can accept that the hero is a Confederate, it’s a fantastic movie.
1910 Frankenstein. It was believed lost for so long, it was amazing to watch. Not visually beautiful, but interesting to me.
Broken Blossoms (1919) starring Lillian Gish as a victim of child abuse. If this movie doesn’t make you cry, you’re heartless.
I’ve seen ***The General ***too.
Looking at a Laurel and Hardy filmography, the earliest shorts I can positively identify are Two Tars and Big Business (both silent, 1928 and '29, respectively), plus Perfect Day (talkie, also 1929).
The two full-length feature films that come immediately to mind are Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) and The Dawn Patrol (1930).
Oh Doctor!(1917) Roscoe Arbuckle is a doctor and Buster Keaton is his son. This was before Buster refined his stoneface persona. I crack up every time I see Rosco jab him with the pin.
1920 - The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.
The oldest talkie I’ve seen is The Coconauts.
I’m gonna assume the OP means “a movie you enjoyed in the sense of watching a movie” rather than “This is SO FUCKING COOL.” Because early Georges Melies films, The Kiss (1896), The Great Train Robbery (1903), etc., evoke that second response without wrapping you up in a story, identifying with characters, etc.
So, earliest movie I dig AS A MOVIE is Cabiria, the Italian epic from 1914. Good sympathetic characters…great historical plot…intertitles written by the great Decadent poet Gabrielle d’Annunzio…wonderful special effects, for 1914…and completely cool sets, colossal in size. If you liked Moloch in Metropolis, check out the Temple of Moloch scene in Calabria. Complete with babies thrown into a sacrificial furnace!
Pleanty of places to watch it free on the Internets. Here’s the Wiki article for more details.
The Astronomer’s Dream (1898)
Full length: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), I’ve only seen one other feature-length film before that though - a Chaplin film
Cabiria has been on my watchlist for a long time along with the Feuillade serials
Things to Come, 1936 is cool. Those giant aircraft!
I believe Nosferatu was released in 1928, and it is one of my top ten.
Regards,
Shodan
The Wind (1928), with Lillian Gish.
It heped that I lived in Wyoming when I first saw it.
Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927). All 5 1/2 hours of it.
Kino Video sold me a box DVD set of German Expressionist film years ago. Includes Caligari, Nosferatu, Waxworks, and The Golem.
The Golem (1920), set in the medieval Prague Ghetto, is my fave of the bunch. God, those wild sets! Those Weimar boys were Da Bomb, I’m tellin’ ya.
Saw it in Manhattan back in the mid-'80s, with full orchestra and the original triple-screen treatment. It was excellent, but I shoulda brought a snack.