Probably a vintage film newbie’s biggest challenge will be learning the names and faces
Much like today, you instantly recognize Matt Damon, Chris Hemsworth, and Hugh Jackmon.
You have to get equally familiar with the actors in older films. Learn the characters that they typically played. It adds to the enjoyment of the movie.
There’s perhaps a dozen actors you’ll see repeatedly in older films and they always play very similar characters. The faces & names change from decade to decade.
Anything by Laurel and Hardy, especially
***Helpmates
Going Bye-Bye
Below Zero
Perfect Day
Towed in a Hole
Come Clean
Be Big
The Midnight Patrol
Blockheads
Sons of the Desert
Brats
The Music Box
Blotto
Them Thar Hills
Tit for Tat***
The inside joke is that the actress is Matthau’s daughter Lucy.
In addition to the other classic horror movies mentioned above, try The Island of Lost Souls (1933), as much for Charles Laughton’s delightfully over-the-top performance as crazy old Dr. Moreau as for the monster stuff. This flick was banned in Great Britain until the 1970s on the basis of being “excessively horrifying.”
My favorite war movie is The Train (1964), starring Burt Lancaster as a French Resistance fighter and Paul Scofield as a Nazi colonel with a soft spot for “degenerate” art, who’s trying to steal France’s greatest 19th-20th century paintings for Der Vaterland at the end of WWII. A very different sort of war film, asking who Art really belongs to, and whether ordinary people are more important than great art.
And I’d like to speak up for the Brits, because movie nuts so rarely do: The 1930s-50s films of The Archers (Michael Powell and Emil Pressburger) are uniformly excellent, but vary widely in theme: The Red Shoes; Black Narcissus; The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp; 42nd Parallel; A Matter of Life and Death.
Also the Ealing Studios comedies, anything with Alec Guinness in it: Kind Hearts and Coronets; The Lavender Hill Mob; The Man in the White Suit; The Ladykillers.
You can say that again. Sometimes those boys didn’t seem to have any ethics at all.
Seriously, though, they are must-sees. I would skip the later MGM releases (everybody loved the first two in the mid-30s, but they seem kinda mild today). Stick with the anarchic Paramount catalogue, especially Monkey Business; Horse Feathers; Duck Soup.. (The first two, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, are great if you like watching Broadway stage plays that somebody aimed a camera at; the latter three are pure Hollywood product.)
Whatever happened to baby Jane
Hud
An occurrence at owl creek bridge
(Not a movie, but well worth seeing, Netflix has it in the original twilight zone episodes)
Night of the living dead.
Cool hand Luke
War
Attack (1956)
Horror
Night of the Demon (1957)
Onibaba (1964)
Disaster
Deluge (1933)
San Francisco (1936)
Random & Worthwhile
Detour (1946)
*Invasion of the Body Snatchers *(1956)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
The Big Combo (1955)
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Touch of Evil (1958)
Creation of the Humanoids (1962)
Seconds (1966)
Using the pre-1974 cutoff and what seems to be your dispositions, things that haven’t yet been mentioned:
If we relax the year standard to 1977 for a movie most haven’t seen - Cross of Iron. It’s Peckinpah’s only war film. It’s not his best film. Using real military equipment for most of the scenes he produces some of the best armor scenes in the history of cinema. It’s also kind of sloppy and overly slow in other parts. There’s plenty of discomfort to go around outside the trademark slow motion vilence - rape, violent retribution for the rape, death of a Russian child soldier, and a careerist officer blackmailing a homesexual subordinate with threat of taking official notice. That’s before we consider that the protagonists are WWII Germans. It can be both riveting and hard to watch. It’s not for everyone. It’s different enough from the mainstream war film it at least considers consideration.
For some reason, this is the first movie I thought of when reading the OP.
I’m going to suggest skipping Metropolis, Casablanca and Charlie Chaplin films.
Watch The Heroes of Telemark.
No, Jacking Chan is the Keaton of his age!
I suppose I should clarify; there are a few versions of this, but the 1963 version won best short at Canne and the Oscars.
A Bridge Too Far
The Guns of Navarone
Gallipoli
The Dirty Dozen
12 Angry Men - one of the best dramas about the legal system and the importance of the jury. Great cast.
Panic in the Streets - Elia Kazan made this moody 1950s suspense film with an unusual hero (a uniformed officer of the U.S. Public Health Service), played by Richard Widmark, who usually played somewhat unhinged gangsters. Jack Palance is a thig who becomes infected with the bubonic plague in New Orleans, and Widmark has to track him down before he infects the whole city. Filmed entirely on location in 1950s New Orleans.
The Swimmer - Burt Lancaster plays a wealthy, country-club suburbanite who decides one day to “swim” back to his home through the suburbs - hoping fences and swimming through his neighbor’s pools. Very odd but engrossing flick as Lancaster’s backstory is gradually revealed with each new encounter with his neighbors.
**The Haunting **(the original by Robert Wise, not the crappy remake) If I had to pick the best example of a horror film that achieves its chills through suggestion and sound, this is it. A masterpiece.
Curse of the Demon (UK title: Night of the Demon) - Based on a short story by M.R. James.
The Devil’s Bride (UK Title: The Devil Rides Out) Christopher Lee in a rare role as a good guy, helping a WWI buddy who is being recruited into a satanic cult. The special effects are a little dated, but a fun movie which still holds some chills.
The Innocents - Deborah Kerr is a governess hired to watch over two creepily precocious children in an isolated mansion, who may (or may not) be possessed by the spirits of two departed servants.
The Black Cat - The original Universal version with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi (and even a cameo by John Carradine). Unlike most Universal horror films which are set in a hazily unstated place and time, this is set after WWI, as a honeymooning American couple get swept up in a feud between two WWI vets, one of whom is a black magician. Lugosi and Karloff really look like they hate each other in this, and cheerfully chew the scenery. The set design is amazing - instead of a creepy Gothic castle, Karloff’s mansion is a brightly-lit gorgeous Bauhaus creation, built on the graves of thousands killed in the war. (Now that I think of it, the villains in this, the Devil’s Bride, and Curse of the Demon were all based on the same man - Aleister Crowley.)
7 Days in May - Very apropos for our times. In the middle of a worsening international situation, the military plans a coup against a deeply unpopular president. A junior officer and a reporter (who are not fans of the president) become aware of it and have to decide whether to let it happen or protect the political process, regardless of how they feel about the president…
The Manchurian Candidate - A presidential candidate is a communist agent. Frank Sinatra, a Korean War POW, has to figure out what is going on.
Day of the Condor - Robert Redford is a CIA political analyst who becomes a fugitive when his entire research section is wiped out.
The Parallax View - Warren Beatty is an investigative reporter investigating the assassination of a political candidate who learns of a secret corporation that apparently recruits the mentally unhinged as assassins, and goes undercover. The film-within-a-film that is used to test his aptitude to be an assassin is amazing.
Seconds - A John Frankenheimer film wherein a middle aged executive, trapped in a loveless marriage, happens upon a secret corporation that will stage your death, then surgically construct you into a younger, more handsome man and place you in an exciting new identity - but there’s a catch. Rock Hudson is surprisingly good in this, and Will Geer (Grandpa Walton) plays the folksy psychopath who runs the corporation
Winter Kills - Jeff Bridges places the young scion of a Kennedy-like family trying to resolve the assassination of his two brothers earlier in the decade. Wicked political satire from Richard Condon, who also wrote Manchurian Candidate and 7 Days in May.
The Conversation - Gene Hackman is a withdrawn expert in electronic espionage, who gets drawn into a conspiracy when he is hired to bug a young couple’s meeting and finds himself getting personally involved.
Fail Safe - A serious view of the same situation that happens in Dr. Strangelove. Interesting ending.
The Andromeda Strain - again, find the 1970s Robert Wise original, not the awful remake. A satellite sent to capture micro-organisms in space crashlands in New Mexico, wiping put an entire town with an unknown malady. A secret government protocol brings 4 scientists into an underground installation to try to find an answer. Shot in a low-key, almost documentary style, one of the few films where the characters have to use real science and the scientific method to save the world.
Colossus: The Forbin Project - An SDI-type computer system designed to create a nuclear defense shield quickly links up with its Soviet counterpart and decides to create a better world for us, whether we like it or not. Pretty chilling. Based on the first novel of a D.F. Jones trilogy, too bad they didn’t make the last two.
1984 - the version actually made in 1984. Absolutely perfect adaptation of George Orwell’s novel, with great performances by John Hurt and Richard Burton.
Quatermass and the Pit (US Title: 5 Million Years to Earth) Made around the same time as 2001: A Space Odyssey, and with a similar theme with a darker handling: a crashed prehistoric spaceship is found while excavating a London subway. Dr. Quatermass and his team discover that the aliens inside boosted human intelligence and altered our DNA, but for the purpose of constructing a slave race - and the ship’s computer is becoming active again… Screenwriter Nigel Kneale wrote quite a few very good scifi series and movies, in which alien life was inimically hostile to us - see also Quatermass II
Fantastic Planet - French animated film showing a very alien planetary ecology.
Allegro Non Troppo - An Italian take-off on Fantasia, lots of fun and some very good animation.
That should hold you. May think of some more later.
I thought she was his daughter-in-law, but looking her up at imdb, she was his step-daughter.
I also didn’t realize she died in 2003. Too bad.
Vincent Price made some great movies, some were great B-grade, and some weren’t.
I particularly like House on Haunted Hill, Theater of Blood, and Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.
Someone mentioned Peter Lorre; I’d also suggest Mad Love. Truly suspenseful.
Some other vintage scifi and horror:
Lathe of Heaven (the original, not the remake) - George Orr, an apathetic citizen of an overpopulated Seattle in the near future, begins having “effective dreams” - whatever he dreams becomes true, altering the reality of the world. An ambitious government-appointed psychiatrist takes advantage of him to try to create a perfect world, with gradually worsening results.
Phase IV - Ants begin to show evidence of new intelligence and cooperation and begin to force humans out of their habitats. A two-scientist team sets up a lab in the Arizona desert to try to understand what is going on. Made by Saul Bass, who was known for creating amazing title sequences for other directors. After you see it, find the deleted end sequence on YouTube, which is amazingly visually trippy.
The Illustrated Man - a not-too-bad adaptation of the Ray Bradbury anthology. Rod Steiger is good in the tile role, as a circus performer whose tattoos come to life at night and tell frightening tales of the future.
It Came From Outer Space - based on a Ray Bradbury script, originally a 3D movie about an alien craft of shape-shifters that crashes in the Arizona desert. They aren’t especially hostile, but just want to get off our world. The SFX hold up, and the use of the eerieness of the southwestern desert’s empty space is especially good,.
Privilege - a pop star is recruited by a socialist government in near-future England to mold the views of the young. Amazing pop score, and like all of Peter Watkin’s movies, is shot as a mockumentary. See also his “The War Game”, showing the effect of a nuclear strike on London.
A Boy and His Dog - Based on the Harlan Ellison novella, which is about as non-PC as you can imagine nowadays, in which a young teen and his telepathic dog have to survive any way they can in a post-nuclear future.
The Damned - A middle-aged American becomes involved with the sister of a psychotic street gang leader (played by Oliver Reed). All 3 are unaware of a sinister government operation in the area to create children capable of surviving in a post-nuclear future. Gave the band its name. and Oliver Reed’s character was probably influential on Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange”.
The movie you are thinking of is Three Days of the Condor. You are probably confusing the title with Day of the Jackal, which is an even better film.
Just to confuse the issue further, the novel the film is based on is Six Days of the Condor. Because of the low budget set by the studio, the filmmakers were only able to buy the rights to the first half of the book.
Okay, that last part isn’t true.
It also became an episode of Twilight Zone.
***The Lion in Winter
Becket
A Man for All Seasons
Anne of the Thousand Days
The Adventures of Robin Hood
The Sea Hawk
Captain Blood
Captain from Castille
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The African Queen***
A few others I forgot to mention:
The Hustler (1961) with Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, and George C. Scott.
Two heist movies starring Sterling Hayden: John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Kubrick’s** The Killing** (1956).