Old Movies

[Erinesque]

I'd love to chat with anyone who also loves old movies. It's really difficult to find other people who share this interest. I'm talking Charlie Chaplin, The Marx Brothers, Eddie Cantor, Danny Kaye, etc. Silent film, musicals, comedies, they're all great!

[AnaKhouri]

I posted a thread about old movies a while ago and there are a lot of people here who like them! My favorite is Casablanca

[Erinesque]

That's awesome! My favorite is City Lights.

[Ironclad Alibi]

I love the old movies. I watch the John Wayne movie Fighting Seabees on YouTube the other night. I am amazed at what is available on YouTube for older movies.

I also have DVDs of all the Charlie Chan movies, the Thin Man series, Mr. Moto, Mr. Wong, Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, a bunch of serials*, and others. The oldest I have is the 1916 version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, which I think is better than the Disney version.

*Superman, Batman, Blackhawk, Captain Marvel, Phantom, Rocketmen, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Zorro and others.

[BroSCFischer]

I quite enjoy the "Old Fogey Black & White movies" though not the silent ones quite so much. I pretty much agree with Ironclad Alibi's list.

Pretty much anything "Sherlock Holmes" related will get my attention (Wotner, Rathbone & Bruce), and I like the cheap Hour Long westerns that Wayne starred in before his career really took off (like "Blue Steel") and I have all 4 filmed versions of "12 Angry Men".

If you give me a specific title, I have probably either seen it, or heard of it. The only ones I generally don't go for are the overly cheesy sci-fi/horror ones.

SC

PS: If you get the chance, and you enjoyed the Boyer/Bergman version of "Gaslight" check out the earlier British film (from 1940). Both my mom and I think it was a better production.

[DGoddessChardonnay]

Mildred Pierce is one of my faves. Frankly, I'd love to watch anything that Joan Crawford appeared in but haven't seen her full catalog yet.

I also adore Gone With The Wind.

[Ben_Who]

When I was a kid, PBS ran a long-format show called "Matinee at the Bijou." Watching it was meant to replicate the old-time cinema experience, with a newsreel, a serial chapter or a short, a cartoon, and a main feature. They only had a 90-minute timeslot, so they usually cut the hell out of the feature and the serial, but watching that every Sunday morning gave me a hell of a classic cinema education. Most of the stuff they ran was public domain.

I decided at the time that I wasn't a huge fan of the noir genre, but I would have crawled over fire and ice to watch a comedy, especially starring a marquee brand like Abbott and Costello or the Marx Bros. The serials were okay, but to this day I still haven't seen all of Gene Autry in "The Phantom Empire."

The "Matinee at the Bijou" brand still exists, and there's been talk of finding some way to bring it online - it wouldn't be too hard to package films in sequence under the "Bijou" brand on, say, Netflix or Hulu using out-of-copyrights from their original library, for instance.

Great, now the theme song's running through my head...

[AnaKhouri]

I drive my husband crazy when we watch old movies because for some reason I know a ton of silver screen trivia and gossip. "Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre were also in The Maltese Falcon...Peter Lorre's best role though was in M, which is Fritz Lang's first sound film...that's Conrad Veidt, he fled Germany with a lot of other artists before the war, he was also in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari...Paul Henreid sadly killed himself in the 1950's...he was in a movie called Dark Victory with Bette Davis and Bogart in a small role with an Irish accent, if you can believe that...Ingrid Bergman is Isabella Rosselini's mother, you can see the resemblance, they're both beautiful...did you know Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland are sisters? They didn't speak for like 70 years because they hated each other so much..."

Gentlemen's Agreement, Double Indemnity and Anatomy of a Murder are all on Netflix now, if anyone's interested.

[Argabarga]

Anatomy of a Murder gets high marks to this day when actual legal scholars rank films that give the most accurate depictions (within reason) of the justice system.

My Mom forced me to watch some of the classics as a kid, so if for no other reason, I'd "get" a lot of references in OTHER movies...

Off the top of my head, I can recall watching Sunset Boulevard, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and the "Road to ....... " films.

[Eireann]

Oh, yes, I LOVE them! I love silent movies. I love pre-Code Hollywood. I love Hollywood after the Code and before the Code finally ended. I even love 1890s short films of people doing various activities, such as serving tea. I love them. And, like AnaKhouri, I'm a compendium of movie trivia. Questions? Fire away!

[Erinesque]

Pre-Code Hollywood is fascinating, I agree! Most of the films I've seen from that era are all Eddie Cantor movies, such as Whoopee!, The Kid From Spain, Kid Millions, Ali Baba Goes to Town, Roman Scandals, etc. Unfortunately, none of these are available on DVD at all, so I've got them on VHS.
The silent films I've seen are mostly all Chaplin's, but have seen Eddie Cantor's Kid Boots, which has a young Clara Bow in it. In fact, I think it's interesting that he did a lot of his films with Ziegfeld's girls, one of whom was Lucille Ball.
I mentioned earlier that I had a cousin who was an actor. He was Edward Everett Horton; and I've been trying to watch some of his films, such as Top Hat, Arsenic and Old Lace, etc.

Eireann, I love the spelling of your name, by the way; I wish my parents had spelled my name that way instead of the Anglicized way.

[Sapphire Silk]

One of my favorite old movies is The Court Jester. Danny Kaye and a very young and drop dead gorgeous Angela Lansbury. It's a musical comedy.

The pellet with the poison is in the vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true!

[Blue Ginger]

One of my favorite old movies is The Court Jester. Danny Kaye and a very young and drop dead gorgeous Angela Lansbury. It's a musical comedy.

The pellet with the poison is in the vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true!

Thanks Sapphire Silk, I have been trying to figure out the name of that movie for years. I watched it on school holidays when I was a kid and didn't stop laughing at the energy and oddness.

I'm a sucker for old movies too. My grandfather had a lot of Laurel & Hardy and 3 Stooges movies on video and on reels. When we were being too noisy and it was nearly bedtime, he would set them up. Fastest way to get 8 kids to shut up and sit still.

He also ran the little cinema in his town during WWII, so he had a lot of the movies from that time and before. Most of which are still in watchable condition, including a few Charlie Chaplin one's.

I also spent a lot of time watching movies during school holidays and weekends growing up. I have probably seen every Elvis movie, most of the movies with John Wayne, Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis, Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, Shirley Temple, Katherine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn and a lot of the song and dance movies from the 40's, 50's and 60's.

[Erinesque]

I love Danny Kaye, too! I'm watching The Inspector General right now!

I don't know if any of you have ever heard of this one movie that has Humphrey Bogart, Eddie Cantor, Edward Everett Horton, most of the cast of Yankee Doodle Dandy, Errol Flynn, Betty Davis, Ida Lupino, Olivia de Havilland, Dinah Shore, Spike Jones, and lots more, called Thank Your Lucky Stars. It's a war-time morale boosting movie that Warner Brothers did in 1943, and I discovered it when I was on my Eddie Cantor kick, and was thrilled to find Bette Davis singing and dancing the Jitterbug, Errol Flynn singing and dancing (quite well, too), Ida Lupino and Olivia de Havilland doing a jive number, and of course, Spike Jones doing Hotcha Cornia.

I'd like YouTube on these, but I'm not sure how to edit the links to be succinct yet, but if you go on YouTube, just type in Thank Your Lucky Stars, and enjoy!

[Eireann]

I grew up before the cable giants stomped out the independent stations, so I watched all kinds of good stuff on TV. We had a station that played movies uncut (including Frenzy, and those of you familiar with it will be understandably astounded by that one), though they did have commercial breaks. I was glued to the TV, as a child. There were far fewer shows in those days, so everything was rerun almost immediately, and channels relied heavily on old movies.

I love the silent stars - movies that even the fans here might not have heard of. Henry B. Walthall, Charlie Farrell, John Gilbert, and the incomparable Buster Keaton are among them.