Well, THE DAMM FAMILY is probably the cat’s pajamas, but it’s TWO MINUTES LONG. How much depth and nuance can you develop in two minutes?
I’d love to borrow THE CHEAT from you, but only after I finally watch the copy of HEARTS OF THE WORLD (1916) you loaned me a few weeks back. Perhaps it will supplant BROKEN BLOSSOMS as my earliest.
Cat: Don’t forget HOLLYWOOD REVUE OF 1929. It’s got the ORIGINAL Ukulele Ike (not the cheap ersatz SDMB version) introducing “Singin’ in the Rain.”
An infinite number of rednecks in an infinite number of pickup trucks shooting an infinite number of shotguns at an infinite number of road signs will eventually produce all the world’s great works of literature in Braille.
For silent pictures, my favourite is Battleship Potemkin (1925), a classic film that influenced pretty much every director that followed. My favourite old talkie has to be King Kong (1933), still a great movie even today.
If I was discussing Lucy Lawless but I wrote Lucy Topless, would that be a Freudian typo?
Grand Illusion (1937)
Casablanca (1942)
It happened one night (1934)
And a few others I can’t think of at the moment.
“I thought: opera, how hard can it be? Songs. Pretty girls dancing. Nice scenery. Lots of people handing over cash. Got to be better than the cut-throat world of yoghurt, I thought.” - Seldom Bucket
I love old movies - due to an early addiction to the Late Late Show aided by a TV in my bedroom. I tend to avoid the silents, though, except for must-sees like Nosferatu and Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera. I like actors with good “pipes.”
Horsefeathers - “whatever it is, I’m against it!” (sung by Groucho).
Champagne for Caesar - an impecunious physics professor goes on a radio quiz show and tries to win the sponsor’s soap company. Ronald Coleman (great pipes) is the prof, Art Linkletter plays the quiz show host and Vincent Price is the wonderfully villainous soap co. owner. (At one point, Coleman gets a question on relativity “wrong” but Albert Einstein calls the radio show to say he got it right.)
The Uninvited - a ghost story with an actual ghost. Stars Ray Milland.
Laura - Waldo Lydecker! Actually, I’ll watch just about anything with Clifton Webb. Dreamboat, the Lynn Belvedere movies, Mr. Scoutmaster.
And someday, I’d like too hold the Richard Haydn film festival, starting with And Then There Were None.
I think Animal Crackers was 1930 and the brothers’ first movie, The Cocoanuts, was 1929.
My ancient favorites are: Woman Haters and Punch Drunks (1934), the Three Stooges’ first two shorts The General, about 1926
Early Our Gang shorts; they started making them at the Hal Roach studios in 1922–silents, of course. In the late 50s and early 60s we could still see some of the silents on TV. The Music Box, (sound), Laurel & Hardy Hoose Gow (silent), Laurel & Hardy Who Done It?, 1942, Abbott & Costello
