Movies

In a vast future city, the wealthy live in pleasure gardens above ground while workers toil underground to keep the machines running. Freder, the son of the city's master, follows a woman into the workers' city and sees the human cost of his father's order. A robot built in the shape of Maria is set loose to destroy the workers' hope. Fritz Lang's film is one of the most influential ever made; its images echo through every science fiction film since, from the robot design to the towering cityscape. The film was cut down and re-edited for years after its premiere, and a near-complete restoration was assembled decades later from archives around the world. Thea von Harbou wrote the screenplay and the novel it is based on. The film is in the public domain as a pre-1930 work.

Sci-Fi · Silent

Gabby, the pompous town crier spun off from Gulliver's Travels (1939), takes charge of spring cleaning at King Little's castle and turns the job into chaos — brooms, ladders, and buckets flying as he bosses around the Lilliputian castle staff to the tune of a swing band. The seventh of Fleischer Studios' eight Gabby cartoons for Paramount, with Pinto Colvig (the original voice of Goofy) as Gabby and Jack Mercer voicing King Little. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Comedy · Short

Charlie Chaplin's first feature film and one of the greatest films of the silent era. The Tramp discovers an abandoned baby in an alley and, after trying to leave it, raises the boy as his own. Five years later, the Kid (Jackie Coogan) is his partner in a glass-replacing scam, and the two share a tender, scrappy life together. When the boy falls ill and welfare officials try to take him away, the Tramp fights to keep him. Chaplin balanced broad comedy with genuine pathos, and Coogan's performance made him the first major child star in film history. The dream sequence, in which Chaplin imagines heaven as a rooftop populated by angels and devils, is one of the most imaginative passages in silent cinema. The film was co-founded through United Artists, the distribution company Chaplin had helped create in 1919. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Drama · Silent

A 1929 American pre-Code RKO musical comedy starring Bebe Daniels and John Boles, along with the comedy team of Wheeler & Woolsey. Based on the 1927 stage musical produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, the film follows Capt. Jim Stewart (Boles), who pursues the bandit "The Kinkajou" over the Mexican border and falls in love with Rita (Daniels), though he suspects that her brother is the bandit. The film was the biggest and most expensive RKO production of 1929 and the studio's biggest box office hit until King Kong (1933). Its finale was photographed in two-color Technicolor. Rio Rita was chosen as one of the 10 best films of 1929 by Film Daily. The film united Wheeler and Woolsey as a team and made them famous.

Musical · Romance · Western

A projectionist who dreams of being a detective is framed for a theft he did not commit and banished by his rival. Back in the booth he falls asleep and walks into the film on screen, becoming the world's greatest detective, Sherlock Jr. The movie inside the movie is a parade of stunts, including a famous sequence where Keaton rides on the handlebars of a motorcycle through traffic, unaware the driver has fallen off. The scene where the screen keeps cutting to new locations while Keaton stays in place was one of the earliest jokes about editing itself. Keaton wrote, directed, and performed his own stunts, and broke his neck on the water-tower gag without realizing it for years.

Comedy · Action · Silent

Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp heads to the Klondike during the gold rush and finds himself stranded in a remote cabin through a blizzard, starving alongside a towering prospector named Big Jim McKay. The famous sequence of Chaplin boiling and eating his boot, twirling the laces like spaghetti, began here. The film follows the prospector into a frontier town, where he falls for a dance-hall girl named Georgia and tries, mostly badly, to win her regard. Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, scored, and starred, and the production was enormous: a full Alaskan town built on a Hollywood backlot, real location work in the Sierra Nevada, and a shoot that ran more than a year. The result is the film Chaplin said he most wanted to be remembered by. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Adventure · Silent

Carl Theodor Dreyer's account of Joan of Arc's trial and execution is built almost entirely from close-ups. Renée Falconetti, in her only major film role, gives one of the most studied performances in cinema history using little more than her face. Dreyer shot the film on a specially constructed set and rewrote the dialogue from the actual trial transcripts, then cut the film against the wishes of the producers, who had their own version assembled. The original negative was lost in a fire, and the cut most people know today was reconstructed decades later from a print found in a Norwegian mental institution. It is a silent film that feels nothing like other silent films: austere, relentless, and almost unbearably intimate. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Historical · Silent

A Trip to the Moon (original French title: Le Voyage dans la Lune) is a 1902 French silent film directed by Georges Melies. Widely regarded as the first science fiction film, it follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a bullet-shaped capsule, encounter the Selenites (lunar inhabitants), and return to Earth. The film features Melies's most iconic image — the rocket landing in the Moon's eye — and pioneered numerous special effects techniques including superimposition, dissolves, and hand-painted color. The film is in the public domain.

Fantasy · Sci-Fi · Adventure

F.W. Murnau's final German film is a lavish silent adaptation of the Faust legend, drawing on Goethe and older folk versions of the tale. An archangel and Mephisto wager over the soul of an aged scholar, and the devil unleashes a plague to drive Faust to desperation. The pact gives Faust youth and worldly pleasure, but the story turns on his seduction of the innocent Gretchen and the tragedy that follows. Emil Jannings plays Mephisto as a leering, theatrical tempter, while Gosta Ekman ages and de-ages across the picture. The film is a high point of German Expressionism, famous for its optical tricks, painted skies, and the surreal image of Mephisto's wings spreading over a miniature town. It was a financial disappointment on release but has been revered by critics ever since. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2022.

Fantasy · Horror · Drama · Silent

In a German village, a series of murders follows the arrival of a fairground showman named Dr. Caligari, who displays a sleepwalker named Cesare and claims he can answer any question. Cesare is made to kill at night. The story is told by a young man named Francis, and the truth of what he describes is called into question by the ending. The film defined German Expressionist cinema. Every set was painted with sharp angles and distorted perspective, with no right angles, so that the world itself looks like it is bending. The visual style was a direct influence on film noir and on horror for the next century. Werner Krauss plays Caligari and Conrad Veidt plays Cesare; both performances are unsettling and physical. The film is in the public domain as a pre-1930 work.

Horror · Silent

Chaplin's Tramp stumbles into a circus and accidentally becomes the star of the show. The audience laughs at him, not with his act but at his bumbling, and the ringmaster realizes the Tramp is the draw. The Tramp himself is oblivious, thinking he is a serious performer. He falls for the ringmaster's daughter, who in turn falls for the tightrope walker. Chaplin produced, directed, wrote, edited, and starred in the film, and composed the score years later. It won an Academy Award for versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing, and producing.

Comedy · Silent

Johnnie Gray is a railroad engineer in the South who is turned down for service when the Civil War breaks out because he is more useful driving trains than fighting. His sweetheart thinks he is a coward. Union spies steal his locomotive, The General, with Annabelle on board, and Johnnie gives chase in another engine. The chase runs in both directions and is built almost entirely from real trains, real track, and real stunts, with no miniatures. The famous shot of a locomotive plunging into a river was a single take with a real engine, and the wreckage sat in the river for years. The film was a commercial disappointment on release but is now regarded as one of the greatest comedies ever made. Buster Keaton produced, directed, and starred, and performed his own stunts.

Comedy · Action · Silent

Based on Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 novel, the film follows a group of young German schoolboys who enlist in the army at the urging of their teacher and are ground down by the realities of trench warfare in World War I. Lewis Milestone directed with a documentary plainness that was unusual for its time, and the result is one of the first great anti-war films. Lew Ayres plays Paul Bäumer, the idealistic recruit whose patriotism is hollowed out by what he sees; Louis Wolheim is Katczinsky, the veteran who teaches the new men how to survive. The film won the Academy Awards for Outstanding Production and Best Director, the first picture to take both. Published in 1930, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2026.

War · Drama

Greta Garbo's first talking picture, marketed with the slogan "Garbo Talks!" This is the German-language version MGM filmed alongside the English release, directed by Jacques Feyder using the same sets, with Garbo reprising her role opposite a German-speaking cast. Based on Eugene O'Neill's play, it follows a young woman, raised by relatives after her father abandoned her, who comes to live on his coal barge and falls for a sailor she cannot be honest with about her past. Garbo's famous first line, "Gimme a whisky, ginger ale on the side, and don't be stingy, baby," revealed a husky voice that only added to her mystique. Published in 1930, the film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2026.

Drama · Romance

Dziga Vertov's radical experiment: a day in the life of Soviet cities shot by his brother Mikhail Kaufman, assembled with every trick the silent era allowed — split screens, double exposure, freeze frames, slow motion, and editing so fast it still feels modern. Vertov's "Kino-Eye" manifesto argued the camera could reveal truths invisible to the naked eye, and the film keeps showing its own machinery, including the cameraman at work and the audience watching. Routinely ranked among the greatest documentaries ever made. The film is in the public domain.

Documentary · Silent

Widely considered one of the greatest comedy shorts ever made, One Week was Buster Keaton's first independent release as a director-star. A newlywed couple receives a prefabricated house in a box, with instructions to assemble it in one week. But a jealous rival has tampered with the numbering, and the resulting house is a surreal architectural nightmare—walls where doors should be, stairs leading nowhere, and a facade that defies gravity. The film culminates in one of Keaton's most celebrated sequences: the house, caught in a storm, is swept onto train tracks and demolished by a locomotive. Keaton's engineering genius and deadpan physical comedy are on full display in every frame. The film was selected for the National Film Registry in 2008. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

F.W. Murnau's first American film and one of the high points of silent cinema. A farmer is lured by a woman from the city into a plan to drown his wife and run away with her; the wife escapes, the husband is consumed by guilt, and the two travel by tram to the city, where their marriage is slowly, tenderly rebuilt. The story is simple, almost a fable, but Murnau tells it with layered dissolves, forced perspective, and tracking shots that move through spaces as if the camera were breathing. Charles Rosher and Karl Struss shared the first ever Academy Award for cinematography, and the film won the only Oscar ever given for "Unique and Artistic Picture." Janet Gaynor's performance is the quiet center of the film. Its copyright was renewed in 1954, and it entered the public domain on January 1, 2023.

Romance · Drama · Silent

Buster Keaton's last true silent feature, made after his move to MGM and the last film over which he retained real creative control. He plays a tintype photographer who falls for a studio secretary and decides the way to win her is to become a newsreel cameraman. The gags are built around the camera and the newsreel business: a botched assignment at a Chinese tong war, a famous single-take baseball sequence filmed at Yankee Stadium, and a runaway bedroom that rolls down a hill with Keaton trapped inside. The chemistry with Marceline Day is easy and unforced. MGM would soon team Keaton with sound pictures and a production process that ground him down, which is why The Cameraman is often called the end of his golden period. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Comedy · Romance · Silent

Herbert Ponting was the official photographer on Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition, and this film — assembled from footage he shot between 1910 and 1912 — is the most complete motion picture record of early Antarctic exploration. Ponting filmed the voyage south, life at the Cape Evans hut, and Scott's team preparing for the pole, and he lectures his own footage like a showman. The film ends before the expedition's tragic end: Scott and four companions died on the return from the pole in 1912. Made for a British expedition and released in 1924, the film is in the public domain.

Documentary · Silent

F.W. Murnau's study of a proud hotel doorman, played by Emil Jannings, who is demoted to washroom attendant and stripped of the uniform that gave him his identity. Working from a screenplay by Carl Mayer, Murnau tells nearly the whole story without a single intertitle, letting Karl Freund's unchained camera convey the porter's humiliation and fantasies of grandeur. The camera rides up elevators, swings through the hotel lobby, and tilts with the porter's drunken reeling, techniques that astonished audiences in 1924. A tacked-on happy ending, imposed against Murnau's wishes, only underscores the bleakness that precedes it. The film was a landmark of German Kammerspielfilm and a direct influence on the move toward purely visual storytelling in the late silent era. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Drama · Silent

Audrey Hepburn's husband is murdered and she discovers he was involved in a wartime gold theft. Several men who were his accomplices are after the gold, and they think she knows where it is. Cary Grant keeps turning up and helping her, but his identity keeps shifting. The film is often called the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made. The screenplay by Peter Stone has a good ear for banter. Henry Mancini wrote the score. The film failed to include a copyright notice on its prints, which put it in the public domain immediately upon release.

Thriller · Romance · Comedy

The first half of Fritz Lang's two-part adaptation of the medieval Nibelungenlied, written with his wife Thea von Harbou. Siegfried of Xanten forges a magic sword, slays a dragon, bathes in its blood to become invulnerable, and travels to Worms to woo the Burgundian princess Kriemhild. Lang stages the legend on a monumental scale, with carved forests, a mechanical dragon, and geometric compositions that turn myth into architecture. The film was a prestige production for UFA, meant to assert German cinema's ambition after the First World War, and its visual grandeur has influenced fantasy filmmaking ever since. The story continues in the companion film, Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Fantasy · Adventure · Drama · Silent

Fritz Lang's two-part criminal epic introduced cinema's first great supervillain. Dr. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is a hypnotist, master of disguise, and criminal psychologist who manipulates Berlin's decadent gambling clubs, ruins the industrialist Hull, and destroys the young Count Told — all while state prosecutor von Wenk (Bernhard Goetzke) doggedly hunts the phantom pulling the strings. Adapted from Norbert Jacques's novel and subtitled *A Picture of the Time*, the film is both a cracking crime saga and a portrait of Weimar Germany's postwar instability. Mabuse's chilling final descent into madness made him an archetype Lang would revisit twice more. Published in 1922, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Crime · Thriller · Silent

Before King Kong, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack made their name with this astonishing ethnographic documentary. They joined the Bakhtiari tribe of Persia on its annual migration — some 50,000 people and half a million animals crossing icy rivers and a 12,000-foot mountain pass in search of pasture. The scale is still hard to believe, and the sequence of the migration over the Karun River on inflated goatskin rafts is one of the great images in documentary history. Released by Paramount in 1925 and never renewed, the film is in the public domain.

Documentary · Silent

A wartime propaganda short produced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to convince American farmers to plant hemp. With Japan's 1942 occupation of the Philippines cutting off the rope fiber imports the Navy depended on, the government needed domestic production fast — this film walks farmers through planting, harvesting, and processing the crop, with hemp promised to buy war bonds at harvest. Long suppressed after the war when hemp was lumped back in with marijuana prohibition, it resurfaced as a staple of cannabis-reform lore; the USDA denied the film existed until a copy turned up in a government archive in 1989. As a work of the U.S. federal government, it is in the public domain.

War · Documentary · Short

An unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, made without securing the rights. The names were changed but the Stoker estate sued anyway and won, ordering all copies destroyed. A few survived, which is why we can watch it today. Count Orlok, the rat-faced vampire, buys a house in the fictional town of Wisborg and brings plague with him from Transylvania. Max Schreck's performance is still unsettling a century later. The film is a landmark of German Expressionist cinema and one of the earliest feature-length horror films.

Horror · Silent

A small-town clerk moves to the city to make his fortune and tells his sweetheart back home he is a success. When she visits, he has to keep up the act, and to earn real money he arranges a publicity stunt in which a friend will climb the outside of the department store. The friend is chased off by a policeman, so the clerk does the climb himself, floor by floor, dodging pigeons, a collapsing ledge, a flagpole, and finally a clock that leaves him hanging from its hands high above the street. The climb is the most famous image in silent comedy. Harold Lloyd produced the film, Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor directed, and real buildings on real streets were used with carefully placed platforms just out of frame. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Action · Silent

Paddy the Leprechaun emerges from his fairy shoe shop to mend shoes for the townsfolk at night, until he is discovered by a little girl who befriends him. A Bill Tytla-directed Noveltoons short. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Comedy · Family

Sergei Eisenstein's account of the 1905 mutiny aboard the Russian battleship Potemkin, in which the crew rebels after being served maggot-ridden meat and the uprising spreads to the port of Odessa. The Odessa Steps sequence — tsarist troops firing on civilians as a baby carriage rolls down the stairs — remains one of the most studied and imitated passages in film history, and the picture is the foundational text of Soviet montage editing. Aleksandr Antonov plays the mutiny's leader Vakulinchuk, with Vladimir Barsky and Grigori Aleksandrov. Made as a state commission to mark the revolution's twentieth anniversary, it was banned in several countries on release and is still ranked among the greatest films ever made. The film is in the public domain.

Drama · History · Silent · War

The first production to begin filming at the newly formed MGM, directed by the Swedish filmmaker Victor Sjostrom from Leonid Andreyev's play. Lon Chaney plays a scientist humiliated when his patron steals his wife and his work; he flees to a circus and reinvents himself as a clown whose act consists of being slapped by the audience, turning private shame into public spectacle. Chaney's performance is a study in dignified suffering, and the film gave early prominent roles to Norma Shearer and John Gilbert, both soon to be MGM stars. It was also the first film to feature Leo the Lion as the MGM logo. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2017. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Drama · Silent

Two sisters from a wealthy family are competing in a scavenger hunt and one of the items is a "forgotten man," a homeless person from the Depression. Irene finds Godfrey at a dump by the river and brings him to the party, then hires him as the family butler. Godfrey turns out to be more capable and more decent than anyone in the household, and he quietly puts the family's chaos in order while Irene falls for him. William Powell and Carole Lombard had been married and divorced before the film was made, and their ease with each other shows in the dialogue. The film is one of the defining screwball comedies, with a sharp script that lets the rich look ridiculous without being cruel. It was the first film to be nominated in all four acting categories at the Academy Awards. The film entered the public domain due to non-renewal of its copyright.

Comedy · Romance

The film that invented the modern zombie. Seven people barricade themselves in a farmhouse while reanimated corpses surround them. The radiation from a space probe is blamed for the dead returning to life. Romero's film is a low-budget black and white production that accidentally entered the public domain because the distributor changed the title from "Night of the Flesh Eaters" and forgot to include a copyright notice on the new prints. Duane Jones plays the lead, a Black man trying to survive both the zombies and the group's internal conflicts. The ending is still shocking. The film spawned a genre and five sequels from Romero alone.

Horror · Thriller

A mild-mannered middle-aged cashier and amateur painter is manipulated by a cynical young woman and her hustler boyfriend, who pass his work off as her own and sell it to a dealer. Fritz Lang's first of three films with Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea is a bleak noir of guilt and doom. The film entered the public domain when its copyright was not renewed.

Drama · Noir

A steamboat captain's effete college son comes home to a Mississippi river town and falls for the daughter of his father's business rival. Willie tries to live up to the image of the rough riverman his father wants, with little success, until a cyclone tears through the town. The storm sequence is the film's centerpiece, with buildings collapsing around Keaton, and it contains the most famous single shot in silent comedy: the full facade of a house drops over him and he survives only because he is standing exactly where an open window in the wall passes around his body. The real clearance was a matter of inches. Keaton's deadpan expression never changes throughout. This was his last independent production before moving to MGM.

Comedy · Action · Silent

The oldest surviving animated feature film, made by Lotte Reiniger over three years using silhouette animation. Reiniger cut every figure by hand from paper and lead, then photographed them frame by frame on a multiplane camera she and Carl Koch designed. The story draws from the Arabian Nights: Prince Achmed rides a mechanical horse, battles demons, and courts Princess Peri Banu across a world of shadow and color tinted by hand. The film is in the public domain in the United States as a pre-1930 work.

Animation · Silent · Fantasy

King Vidor's World War I epic follows a wealthy young idler who enlists on a whim, ships out to France, falls for a French farm girl, and is marched into the meat grinder of the Western Front. The film was a sensation: it became the highest-grossing silent film of the 1920s and turned John Gilbert into a major star. Vidor stages the battle sequences with a grim, ground-level realism rare for the period, and the famous march through a forest under shellfire is still studied. Beneath the spectacle is an antiwar streak that distinguishes it from the gung-ho pictures that came after. MGM made it on a large budget and a long schedule, and it paid for itself many times over. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

War · Drama · Romance · Silent

King Vidor's film about an ordinary man who believes he is meant to be somebody and discovers he is, in fact, nobody. John Sims grows up dreaming of greatness, marries, has children, and slowly drowns in the routine of office work and a marriage that curdles. Vidor opens with a montage of a boy's birth and the title "The crowd laughs with you always, but it will cry with you never," then follows John into a vast, fluorescent office floor that was built as a single set to dwarf him. The film was a departure from the glamour MGM usually sold, and Irving Thalberg reportedly backed it against his own instincts. It was not a hit, but its influence on social realism in American film is hard to overstate. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Silent

A 1969 Egyptian film and the only feature directed by Shadi Abdel Salam. Also known as The Mummy (Al-Mummia), it is ranked third on the list of Top 100 Egyptian films. Produced by Roberto Rossellini, who was instrumental in encouraging Abdel Salam to make the film, it is set in 1881 Upper Egypt and based on the true story of the Abd el-Rasuls, a clan that had been secretly robbing a cache of mummies discovered at tomb DB320 near the village of Kurna, selling artifacts on the black market. When the Antiquities Service arrives, a conflict within the clan forces one member to make a crucial decision between his community's livelihood and his cultural heritage. Regarded as one of the finest Arabic films ever made, its bold camerawork and atonal soundtrack lend an eerie atmosphere to the tale of the struggle between tradition and modernization.

Drama · History

A circus knife thrower known as "Alonzo the Armless" performs with his feet and falls for the carnival girl Nanon, who cannot bear to be touched by a man. What no one knows is that Alonzo's arms are strapped to his body to hide a double thumb that marks him as a criminal on the run. When Nanon finally overcomes her fear and turns to another man, Alonzo takes a terrible step to become what he has pretended to be. Lon Chaney gives one of his most disturbing performances, and a young Joan Crawford is the love interest in her first major role. Tod Browning, who would go on to make Freaks and Dracula, sets the whole story in a circus of grotesques. The film was considered lost until a print turned up in 1968. It entered the public domain in the United States in 2023.

Horror · Thriller · Silent

Walter Ruttmann's portrait of one day in Berlin, from the morning trains arriving at an empty city through work, meals, nightlife, and back to the factories at dawn. There is no story and no characters — the city itself is the subject, organized in five "acts" that move through the rhythms of modern urban life. Edited like a piece of music with a commissioned score meant to be performed live, it established the "city symphony" genre and directly inspired Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera two years later. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Documentary · Silent

The second half of Fritz Lang's Nibelungenlied adaptation, picking up after Siegfried's murder. Kriemhild marries the Hun king Etzel (Attila) to gather an army, then engineers a massacre of the Burgundians at his court. Where the first film was a myth of heroism, this one is a study of grief hardening into vengeance, ending in a burning hall strewn with bodies. Lang's staging of the climactic siege, with Huns setting the hall alight and Burgundians choosing death, is one of the most violent images in silent cinema. The two films together were meant as a national epic for Weimar Germany, and their ambivalence about loyalty, honor, and revenge has been read and re-read through every German crisis since. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Fantasy · Adventure · Drama · Silent

Paul Fejos's lyrical tone poem about two lonely strangers in New York City who meet at Coney Island and fall in love over the course of a single day, only to be separated by the crowd and the city's relentless pace. Glenn Tryon and Barbara Kent play the unnamed couple, whose brief connection stands in vivid contrast to the mechanized urban world around them. The film features early Technicolor sequences at Coney Island and brief synchronized sound dialogue scenes, making it a fascinating transitional work between the silent and sound eras. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

A small-town Vermont woman, Hazel Flagg, is mistakenly told she has fatal radium poisoning. A New York newspaper reporter desperate for a human-interest story brings her to the city and turns her into a celebrity, only to discover she was never sick at all. Carole Lombard and Fredric March spar through one of the great screwball comedies of the 1930s, shot in early three-strip Technicolor. The film fell into the public domain when its copyright was not renewed.

Comedy · Romance

Willie McKay travels south to claim his inheritance, unaware that his family has been locked in a generations-long feud with the Canfields. On the journey he meets and falls for Virginia Canfield, and is invited to the Canfield home, where the men want to kill him but southern hospitality forbids them from shooting a guest under their own roof. Willie stretches his stay as long as he can, then escapes into a chase that moves to a river, where he dangles from a rope over a waterfall and swings to rescue Virginia from the rapids. The falls and cliff stunts were done for real. Keaton's own father, Joe Keaton, plays the train engineer, and his wife Natalie Talmadge plays the lead. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Action · Romance · Silent

Popeye and Olive Oyl, traveling through the desert, are captured by the bandit Abu Hassan and his forty thieves, and Popeye must break loose and clean out the thieves' cave. The second of the Fleischer Studios' two-reel Popeye color specials. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Comedy · Family

A young broker learns he will inherit seven million dollars only if he is married by seven o'clock that evening. His proposal to his longtime sweetheart goes badly, so his business partner puts an ad in the paper, and soon hundreds of would-be brides in wedding veils descend on the church. Jimmie spends the second half of the film running for his life through the city, chased by the brides and then by a cascading avalanche of boulders that he dodges down a hillside in one of the great chase sequences in silent comedy. Keaton reportedly disliked the play the film was based on but bought it anyway, then let his gag men rework it. The boulder chase grew organically from a handful of rocks into the famous stampede.

Comedy · Action · Romance · Silent

The series premiere of The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the most popular sitcoms of the 1960s. Jed Clampett, a poor Ozark mountaineer, strikes oil on his land and becomes a millionaire overnight. A banker from Beverly Hills convinces him to move his family to California, where their rural ways clash spectacularly with high society. The episode introduces the iconic Clampett family: Jed, Granny, Elly May, and Jethro, and sets up the fish-out-of-water premise that would drive the series for nine seasons. The show was an instant hit, drawing 60 million viewers and becoming the #1 show in America within weeks. The episode is in the public domain due to copyright non-renewal.

Comedy · TV Series

NASA's official documentary film of the Apollo 11 mission, covering the launch, lunar landing, first moonwalk by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and safe return to Earth. The film captures the historic July 1969 mission that fulfilled President Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the Moon. The film entered the public domain as a U.S. government work.

Documentary

A 1930 American pre-Code romantic comedy directed by Frank Tuttle for Paramount, starring Clara Bow and Fredric March. Ruby Nolan (Bow) is a counter girl at a San Diego drugstore with a sailor boyfriend on every ship. When the competing sailors try to set her up with ace gunner "Bull's-Eye" McCoy (March), the inevitable happens — but misunderstandings and pride threaten their romance. The screenplay was written by Herman J. Mankiewicz, who later co-wrote Citizen Kane (1941). The film entered the public domain due to non-renewal of its copyright.

Comedy · Romance

The seventeenth-century swordsman and poet Cyrano, self-conscious about his enormous nose, loves the beautiful Roxane but helps a handsome but inarticulate rival woo her with his words. Jose Ferrer won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the role. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Drama · Romance · Adventure

Cary Grant plays a newspaper editor who discovers his ex-wife is leaving journalism to marry a safe, boring insurance salesman. He lures her back with one last story: a convicted murderer is about to be executed, and the governor may be about to pardon him. The dialogue is fast and overlapping, with characters talking over each other in a way that sounds natural and was hard to write. Rosalind Russell matches Grant beat for beat. The film was based on the play "The Front Page" but Hawks changed the Hildy Johnson character from a man to a woman, which gave the story a romantic tension the original lacked.

Comedy · Romance

Herbert Brenon's silent drama about a circus clown who adopts an abandoned girl and raises her, only to fall in love with her as she grows up and to watch her turn toward a wealthy suitor instead. Lon Chaney plays Tito, a role that lets him do what he did best: contort a face into a smile that hides a wound. The film is built around the gap between the painted grin and the man beneath it, and Chaney's performance in the final scenes is the reason the film is still watched. Loretta Young was fourteen when she played Simonetta, an early role in a career that would run for another half century. The title comes from the opera Pagliacci, and the story follows its logic to its end. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Romance · Silent

A French playboy and an American singer meet aboard an ocean liner and fall in love, though both are engaged to others. They agree to reunite in six months atop the Empire State Building to test their love. Leo McCarey's original was remade by him as An Affair to Remember and later by Warren Beatty. The 1939 version lapsed into the public domain through non-renewal.

Romance · Drama

Josef von Sternberg's first American film with Emil Jannings, made the year before they would make The Blue Angel together. Jannings plays a deposed Russian grand duke who has fled the Revolution and now scrapes by as a Hollywood extra, hired to play a general in a film about his own downfall. The role-within-a-role lets Jannings collapse the distance between his past authority and present humiliation, and the framing device is what the film is built on. William Powell plays the revolutionary who once served him and now directs him. The Last Command is a film about cinema's power to re-stage a life, and it earned Jannings the first Academy Award for Best Actor. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · War · Silent

The Scarecrow is a 1920 silent comedy short co-directed by and starring Buster Keaton, with Edward F. Cline. Keaton and Joe Roberts play farmhands sharing a room filled with Rube Goldberg-style space-saving contraptions. When Keaton is chased by Roberts after a misunderstanding involving Roberts' daughter, he disguises himself as a scarecrow. The short features one of Keaton's most celebrated chase sequences and a memorable scene where he runs through a house while it collapses around him. As a 1920 work, the film is in the public domain.

Comedy

The first Silly Symphony, and the short that proved Walt Disney's studio could do more than Mickey Mouse. Animated almost entirely by Ub Iwerks, it shows four skeletons rising from their graves in a graveyard at midnight and dancing to Carl Stalling's score, itself inspired by Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre. There is no story and no dialogue, just movement cut to music, and the timing is so sure that the gags still land nearly a century later. The picture was a hard sell at first, exhibitors balked at the "gruesome" subject, but it became a hit and launched the Silly Symphony series, which the studio used as a laboratory for the techniques that would eventually make Snow White possible. Published in 1929, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2025.

Animation · Short · Horror

One of the great silent epics, adapted from Lew Wallace's novel. A Jewish prince in Roman-occupied Jerusalem is falsely accused of treason by his childhood friend, now a Roman tribune, and condemned to the galleys. He survives, is adopted by a Roman consul, and returns to confront his betrayer in a chariot race that remains one of the most famous sequences ever filmed. Fred Niblo directed on a scale that was staggering even by 1920s standards: thousands of extras, a full-size Roman arena, and a naval battle staged with real ships. Ramon Novarro is the prince and Francis X. Bushman the villainous Messala. The film saved MGM from financial trouble and remained the studio's top earner for decades. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Adventure · Drama · Action · Silent

John Ford's silent drama about a Bavarian widow whose four sons are scattered by the First World War: three go to fight for Germany, and one emigrates to America and ends up on the other side of the lines. The film was Ford's answer to the wave of anti-war films that followed The Big Parade, and it is built around the mother waiting at home while the war absorbs her family one by one. Ford's feeling for family and loss, the thing his later films are most remembered for, is already fully formed here. The film was a hit and established Ford as a director who could handle large-scale emotional material, not just westerns and action pictures. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · War · Silent

Little Audrey tries to avoid a spanking from her teacher by hiding in a magical storybook world, where she encounters storybook characters and comic mischief. A Bill Tytla-directed Noveltoons short featuring Little Audrey. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Comedy · Family

Erich von Stroheim's adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague follows a gentle San Francisco dentist who marries the woman his best friend courted, and watches their life curdle over a lottery jackpot she hoards while he drinks. Von Stroheim shot a film that reportedly ran over nine hours; MGM cut it to roughly two, and the excised footage is believed lost. What survives is still one of the most celebrated silent films ever made, famous for its naturalistic location shooting in San Francisco and Death Valley and for ZaSu Pitts's harrowing portrait of avarice. The final crawl across the baking desert, with the two survivors handcuffed to a corpse, is one of the great endings in cinema. The film was a financial failure on release and is now regarded as a high-water mark of American silent drama. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Drama · Silent

John Huston's last war documentary and the most controversial: filmed inside a military psychiatric hospital, it follows soldiers with what the Army called "psychoneurotic" conditions — today it would be PTSD — through treatment and back toward ordinary life. Walter Huston narrates. The War Department suppressed it for more than thirty years, reportedly because it showed damaged veterans too honestly, and it did not reach the public until 1980. It is now in the National Film Registry. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the film is in the public domain.

War · Documentary

A straitlaced 1880s New York stockbroker runs his household with the same rigid discipline he applies to business, while his warm-hearted wife quietly gets her way. William Powell and Irene Dunne star in this Technicolor adaptation of the long-running play. A young Elizabeth Taylor appears as the houseguest. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Comedy · Family

A newspaper columnist about to lose her job invents a letter from a "John Doe" who says he will jump off a building on Christmas Eve to protest the state of the country. The letter goes viral, the paper hires a former ballplayer turned hobo to play John Doe, and his radio speeches about neighbors helping neighbors start a real movement. Then the publisher who owns the paper tries to turn that movement into a political machine for himself. Frank Capra's film sits between his optimistic comedies and his darker wartime work, and it argues that ordinary decency is the only thing standing between people and demagogues. Gary Cooper plays the reluctant symbol and Barbara Stanwyck the writer who created him and comes to regret what she built. The film entered the public domain due to non-renewal of its copyright.

Drama · Comedy

A sensitive, clubfooted medical student abandons his artistic ambitions in Paris to study in London, where he becomes destructively obsessed with a cold, cruel waitress who has no feeling for him. Leslie Howard and a breakout Bette Davis star in this adaptation of Somerset Maugham's novel. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Drama · Romance

7th Heaven is the romance that won Frank Borzage the first Academy Award for Best Director and helped win Janet Gaynor the first Best Actress award. She plays Diane, a young woman abused by her sister and rescued from the Paris slums by Chico, a sewer worker who invents a marriage to protect her. Their love grows real, only to be interrupted by the First World War. Borzage directs with a soaring, almost spiritual faith in love that survives distance and death. The film was a huge hit for Fox and was selected for the National Film Registry. It entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Romance · Drama · Silent

A 2010 animated fantasy short film and the third "open movie" produced by the Blender Foundation. Directed by Colin Levy and created entirely with Blender and other free/open-source software, the film follows Sintel, a lonely young woman who befriends a wounded baby dragon she names Scales. When Scales is taken by an adult dragon, Sintel embarks on a perilous quest across years and continents to find her lost friend — leading to a devastating conclusion. The film, its production files, and all source assets are released under a Creative Commons Attribution license, making it freely available for distribution, remixing, and reuse.

Animation · Fantasy

Harold Lloyd's last silent feature, and a love letter to New York City shot largely on location. Lloyd plays a young man so perpetually in a hurry that everyone calls him "Speedy," who tries to save his girlfriend's grandfather's horse-drawn streetcar from a transit monopoly bent on putting it out of business. The set pieces are built around motion: a wild cab ride to Coney Island, a baseball game at the old Yankee Stadium, and a finale in which Speedy rounds up a crowd of fans to move the horse-car to its barn before a deadline. The location footage of 1920s New York is now a documentary record as much as a comedy. Lloyd produced the film through his own company and retired from silent filmmaking as sound took over. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Comedy · Silent

The short that introduced Mickey Mouse to the world, and the first cartoon with fully synchronized sound. Walt Disney directed and voiced Mickey, with Ub Iwerks handling the animation at a furious pace to get the film finished. The plot is simple: Mickey pilots a steamboat, torments a parrot, and plays the animals like instruments to the tune of "Turkey in the Straw." What made it a sensation was the sound. Audiences had never seen a cartoon whose movements locked to a soundtrack that precisely, and it landed only a year after The Jazz Singer proved synchronized sound was viable for live action. Steamboat Willie's success bankrolled the Disney studio and set the course of animation for the next decade. The 1928 short entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Animation · Comedy

Josef von Sternberg's adaptation of Heinrich Mann's novel Professor Unrat follows a respectable schoolteacher, Immanuel Rath, who is undone by his infatuation with Lola Lola, the cabaret singer at the Blue Angel. Emil Jannings plays the professor's descent from authority to humiliation, and Marlene Dietrich, in her breakthrough role, introduces "Falling in Love Again (Can't Help It)." Von Sternberg's command of light and shadow gives the cabaret scenes a smoky opulence that defined his style. The film made Dietrich an international star and launched her seven-film collaboration with von Sternberg in Hollywood. Published in 1930, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2026.

Drama · Music

Felix the Cat visits the circus, where he tangles with performing animals and finds himself in the center ring amid a parade of sight gags. An Otto Messmer-animated Felix the Cat short, later retitled Frolics at the Circus. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Comedy

A bumbling medicine-show assistant is stranded in a small European town and mistaken for the feared Inspector General, whose arrival the corrupt officials dread. They try to bribe and silence him, while he falls for a local woman. Danny Kaye shines in this musical comedy adapted from Gogol. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Comedy · Musical

Paul Leni's adaptation of the Victor Hugo novel, made at Universal during the silent horror boom that followed The Phantom of the Opera. Conrad Veidt plays Gwynplaine, a nobleman disfigured as a child with a permanent carved grin, who becomes a fairground attraction and falls for the blind girl Dea. Veidt's fixed, grotesque smile is the image the film is remembered for, and it is widely cited as a visual reference for the Joker in Batman. Leni, a German Expressionist who came to Hollywood to design for the screen, fills the frame with baroque shadows and carnival imagery. He died of sepsis the year the film was released, making this one of his last works. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Horror · Romance · Silent

A card-dealing junkie fresh out of prison tries to go straight as a drummer, but his wheelchair-bound wife and old dealer pull him back toward heroin. Otto Preminger fought the Production Code to release the film, which broke the taboo on depicting drug addiction. Frank Sinatra gives one of his most serious performances. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Drama · Noir

A young woman with a dark childhood secret has grown into a powerful industrialist married to a weak, alcoholic district attorney. When a childhood friend returns to town, the past threatens to unravel. Kirk Douglas's film debut, alongside Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Noir · Drama

A superstitious cat tries to catch Buzzy the Crow for breakfast, but the clever crow uses the cat's belief in bad luck omens to outwit him at every turn. A Seymour Kneitel-directed Noveltoons short, marking the first appearance of Buzzy the Crow. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Comedy

A silent romantic fantasy-adventure on a scale that still startles. Douglas Fairbanks plays a thief of Bagdad who, on a whim, sneaks into the Caliph's palace, steals an apple, and falls in love with the Princess. To win her he must best rival princes in a quest across a world of magic: a flying horse, a six-armed statue, an underwater kingdom, a monstrous spider, an invisibility powder. Raoul Walsh directs from a scenario Fairbanks co-wrote under a pseudonym, and the production design draws on the illustrations of Edmund Dulac to build an Arabian Nights dreamscape out of lumber, paint, and ingenuity. Anna May Wong is a standout as the treacherous Mongol slave. The film's influence on the fantasy genre is hard to overstate. Published in 1924, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Romance · Fantasy · Adventure · Silent

A young woman from Virginia moves to her cousin's ranch on the western prairie, where the constant wind drives her to the edge of madness. Lillian Gish conceived the project herself, chose the novel, hired her leading man Lars Hanson, and assigned Victor Sjostrom (credited as Victor Seastrom) to direct, reuniting the team from The Scarlet Letter. The film was shot in the Mojave Desert with wind machines blasting the cast for days, and Gish's performance in the climactic sandstorm is one of the most physically committed in silent cinema. MGM forced a more hopeful ending than the novel's, but the film's power is in the imagery of a woman swallowed by an empty landscape. The Wind was selected for the National Film Registry in 1993. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2024.

Drama · Western · Silent

A bag of stolen cash is thrown into the back seat of a couple's car by mistake, and the wife, hungry for a better life, decides to keep it, dragging her husband into a spiral of deceit and murder. Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea star in one of the bleakest noirs of the era. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Noir · Crime · Thriller

A Is for Atom is a 1953 animated educational short directed by Carl Urbano for John Sutherland Productions, sponsored by General Electric. The film explains what an atom is, how nuclear energy is released from certain kinds of atoms, the peacetime uses of nuclear power, and the by-products of nuclear fission. The periodic table is represented as "Element Town," with each element depicted in a distinctive shape. The short ends with a majestic atomic giant straddling the earth as the narrator declares that our future "depends on man's wisdom, on his firmness in the use of that power." The film won the Second Grand Award for science films at the Venice Film Festival in 1954 and was seen by more than twelve million people in its first three years. The film is in the public domain.

Animation · Educational

A 1937 American Technicolor drama film produced by David O. Selznick and directed by William A. Wellman, starring Janet Gaynor as an aspiring Hollywood actress and Fredric March as a fading movie star who helps launch her career. The screenplay was written by Wellman, Robert Carson, Dorothy Parker, and Alan Campbell. At the 10th Academy Awards, it became the very first color film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and it received an honorary award for cinematographer W. Howard Greene. The film was remade in 1954 (with Judy Garland) and 1976 (with Barbra Streisand) and 2018 (with Lady Gaga). The supporting cast features Adolphe Menjou, May Robson, Andy Devine, Lionel Stander, and Owen Moore. The film entered the public domain due to non-renewal of its copyright.

Drama · Romance

One of Buster Keaton's greatest short comedies, co-directed with Edward F. Cline. Keaton plays a young man trying to win the hand of his girlfriend, whose father insists he must become a successful businessman first. Through a series of mishaps involving a stolen wallet, a horse-drawn wagon of furniture, and a lit bomb, Keaton finds himself pursued through the streets of Los Angeles by the entire Keystone Kops-style police force—hundreds of officers in a escalating chase of breathtaking choreography. The film's famous opening, with Keaton rejected behind a gated door, and its apocalyptic climax, with cops everywhere, make it one of the most perfectly constructed chase comedies ever made. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Al Roberts is a piano player hitchhiking from New York to Los Angeles to find his girlfriend, a singer who left to try her luck on the coast. He is picked up by a man who dies, and Al takes the man's identity and his car to avoid being blamed. Then he picks up Vera, a woman who knew the dead man and who decides to use what she knows against him. The film was shot in under a week on a tiny budget, and it is one of the bleakest films noir ever made. Edgar G. Ulmer uses voiceover, rear projection, and obvious sets to make the world feel closed in, and the story Al tells is so unreliable that the truth of what happened is never clear. The film entered the public domain due to non-renewal of its copyright.

Noir · Drama

Bela Lugosi's defining role. He plays Count Dracula, a Transylvanian nobleman who leases a ruined abbey in London and begins preying on the city's residents. The film was based on the stage play rather than Stoker's novel directly, which is why the pacing feels theatrical and the dialogue is sparse. Dwight Frye as Renfield is genuinely unhinged. The film was released during the Great Depression and was a box office hit, saving Universal from bankruptcy and launching the Universal monster franchise. Lugosi's interpretation of the Count, with his hypnotic stare and deliberate accent, set the template for every screen Dracula that followed.

Horror · Drama

Directed by Allan Dwan and based on Felix Riesenberg's 1927 novel, this silent drama was shot extensively on location in New York City, from the Bowery to Fifth Avenue to Harlem. George O'Brien stars as a man who rises from the Lower East Side slums to the world of high society, with Virginia Valli as the woman he loves and June Collyer as the socialite who comes between them. The film culminates in a spectacular maritime disaster sequence loosely inspired by the sinking of the RMS Titanic. O'Brien, fresh from his lead in Murnau's *Sunrise* earlier that same year, anchors the production with his naturalistic presence. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

Two childhood friends, Leo and Ulrich, return from military service and fall for the same alluring woman, Felicitas, with destructive consequences. Greta Garbo and John Gilbert's on-screen chemistry was matched by a real-life romance that began during filming, and the picture made them one of Hollywood's first great celebrity couples. Clarence Brown directs with a fluid, intimate camera that was advanced for its time, and the film's sensual love scenes pushed the boundaries of what censorship would allow. Based on Hermann Sudermann's novel The Undying Past, the film was a sensation at New York's Capitol Theatre, where it ran longer than any picture before it. It was selected for the National Film Registry in 2006. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2022.

Romance · Drama · Silent

A newspaper man frames a man's final year in flashback: convicted of a murder he insists was a frame-up, he is paroled into the custody of a crusading reporter who intends to prove his innocence, with the dead man's own wife falling for the prisoner along the way. Russell Hopton and Mary Brian star in this Allied Pictures drama, produced by M.H. Hoffman and directed by silent-era veteran E. Mason Hopper. It is a depression-era crime story in which the real antagonist is the machinery of justice itself. It entered the public domain after its copyright was never renewed.

Crime · Drama · Romance

A young lawyer in pre-Revolutionary France vows vengeance on the aristocrat who killed his friend in a duel, becoming a roving commedia player and then a master fencer as the Revolution engulfs them all. Ramon Novarro and Alice Terry star in Rex Ingram's celebrated silent swashbuckler. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Adventure · Romance · History

Fei Mu's 1948 masterpiece, regularly named the greatest Chinese film ever made. In a ruined house in a war-scarred provincial town, Zhou Yuwen (Wei Wei) cares for her invalid husband while drifting through a marriage emptied of love — until Zhang Zhichen (Shi Yu), her husband's old friend and her own first love, arrives as a visiting doctor. What follows is almost unbearably restrained: long walks on the ruined city wall, glances held a beat too long, and a narration that confesses what the characters cannot say. Fei Mu films adulterous longing without a single transgressive act, and the result influenced generations of Chinese-language cinema. Made on the eve of revolution and rediscovered decades later, the film is in the public domain.

Drama · Romance

The Goat is a 1921 silent comedy short co-directed by and starring Buster Keaton, with Malcolm St. Clair. Through a series of mistaken identities, Keaton becomes wanted as both a criminal and a dead man. The short features some of Keaton's most inventive chase sequences and visual gags, including a memorable scene where Keaton escapes on a motorcycle. As a 1921 work, the film is in the public domain.

Comedy

Shirley Temple stars as Sara Crewe, a wealthy girl left at a strict boarding school when her father goes off to war. Reported dead, he is presumed lost and Sara is reduced to a servant, but she clings to her imagination and kindness. One of Temple's best-remembered features, lavishly produced in Technicolor. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Family · Drama

Alfred Hitchcock considered The Lodger his first true film, the moment he found the themes that would define his career. A mysterious young man takes a room at a London boardinghouse just as a killer called the Avenger begins murdering blonde women in the fog. The landlady grows suspicious, and her daughter falls for the stranger. Ivor Novello stars as the lodger. The film is drenched in the imagery Hitchcock would return to again and again: the wrong man, the blonde in peril, the guilt that cannot be escaped. The Lodger is the earliest Hitchcock film to survive intact. It entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Thriller · Crime · Drama · Silent

The first screen appearance of Zorro, and the film that turned Douglas Fairbanks from a modern comedian into the swashbuckler who defined an era. Based on Johnston McCulley's 1919 story "The Curse of Capistrano," it follows Don Diego Vega, a foppish aristocrat newly returned to old California, who dons a mask and cape at night to fight the corrupt oppressors of the common people and court the lovely Lolita Pulido. Fairbanks's athleticism is the engine of the picture: he leaps over rooftops, fences with whip-crack speed, and carves his signature "Z" into the scenery. The masked-avenger template it set would echo through every costumed hero to follow. Produced by Fairbanks's own company, it was the first picture released through United Artists. Published in 1920, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Romance · Adventure · Silent

D.W. Griffith's lavish adaptation of Marie Corelli's bestselling novel. A penniless writer (Ricardo Cortez) is granted wealth and fame by a suave stranger (Adolphe Menjou) who is Satan in disguise, only to find that every wish brings misery, while the woman who truly loves him (Carol Dempster) stands beyond his corrupted reach. One of Griffith's most expensive productions, the film pairs its Faustian plot with opulent sets and a European cast including Lya De Putti. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A Texas cotton picker decides to stop working other people's land and farm a patch of his own, battling poor soil, a hostile neighbor, weather, and exhaustion to give his family a better life. Jean Renoir's loving, unsentimental portrait of rural American poverty was one of his favorite films. It entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Drama

Orson Welles directed and stars as a Nazi war criminal hiding in a small Connecticut town, posing as a prep school teacher. Edward G. Robinson is the investigator who tracks him down. The film is the only Welles-directed film to be a commercial success during his lifetime. It is more conventional than his other work, which is why the studio let him make it. The clock tower sequence near the end is a strong set piece. Loretta Young plays Welles's wife, who slowly realizes who her husband really is. The film entered the public domain due to non-renewal of its copyright.

Drama · Thriller

A cloistered young prince is sent to the university town of Heidelberg for his education, where he falls in love with a warm, down-to-earth barmaid named Kathi. When duty calls him back to the throne, he must leave her behind. Ernst Lubitsch directed this MGM silent for an enormous budget, and the film is an early showcase of what critics would later call "the Lubitsch Touch": the love story is built from small, specific gestures rather than grand declarations. Ramon Novarro plays the prince and Norma Shearer the barmaid, with Jean Hersholt as the tutor whose own attachment to Heidelberg is the film's quietest heartbreak. The film's copyright was renewed but it fell into the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Romance · Drama · Silent

Wings is the film that won the very first Academy Award for Best Picture, and it remains the only fully silent film to take the top prize. Directed by William A. Wellman, a former World War I fighter pilot, it follows two young American aviators who enlist in the Army Air Corps and become combat pilots in France, bound by friendship and divided by their love for the same woman. Clara Bow plays the hometown girl waiting back home. The aerial dogfight sequences were shot with real planes and real pilots, hundreds of them, and they still rank among the most thrilling ever filmed. Gary Cooper appears briefly in an early role that helped launch his career. The film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

War · Drama · Romance · Silent

Olive Oyl writes a screenplay in which Popeye plays Aladdin, who uses a magic lamp and his spinach-fueled strength to win the princess from a wicked vizier. The third and last of the Fleischer Studios' two-reel Popeye color specials. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Family · Fantasy

Ten strangers lured to a remote island mansion by the unseen "Mr. Owen" are accused by a gramophone recording of crimes the law couldn't touch — then begin dying one by one, following the nursery rhyme tacked above the mantel. René Clair's adaptation of Agatha Christie's novel keeps the jagged suspense while letting an impeccable ensemble — Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, Louis Hayward, Roland Young, June Duprez — play it with dry wit. Still the benchmark screen version of the most-read mystery novel ever written. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Crime · Mystery · Drama

William Wellman's part-talking drama about a young woman who kills her abusive stepfather and goes on the run dressed as a boy, joining a band of hoboes riding the rails. Louise Brooks, in her best American role, plays the girl; Wallace Beery is Oklahoma Red, the hobo king who takes her in; Richard Arlen is the farm boy who throws in with her. The film was made in the transitional sound period and uses synchronized music, sound effects, and a few spoken passages rather than full dialogue. Wellman shot much of it on location with real trains and real transients, giving it a grit that most studio films of the year did not have. Brooks would leave for Germany and make Pandora's Box shortly after, and her American career never recovered. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Crime

On Christmas morning an orphanage full of glum children finds their cheap toys breaking one by one, until a kindly inventor wanders in and conjures wonderful new playthings from his bag of tricks. A Fleischer Color Classics holiday short. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Comedy · Family

Colleen Moore stars as a small-town drudge who wins a newspaper beauty contest with a prize trip to Hollywood — only to discover the contest was a fraud. She stays anyway and bluffs her way onto a movie set, where chaos on the soundstage turns her into an accidental star. Directed by Alfred E. Green and based on the popular comic strip by Bill Conselman and Charles Plumb, itself a riff on Cinderella, the film was one of the biggest hits of 1926 and the peak of Moore's run as America's top box-office comedienne. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Romance · Silent

D.W. Griffith's mammoth reply to the criticism of The Birth of a Nation, intercutting four stories of intolerance across the ages: the fall of Babylon, the crucifixion of Christ, the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, and a modern labor conflict. The Babylonian sets, with their towering walls and armies of extras, remain among the largest ever built, and the cross-cutting between the strands influenced nearly every epic that followed. Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, and Constance Talmadge lead the enormous cast. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · History · Silent

Vsevolod Pudovkin's adaptation of the Maxim Gorky novel, set during the failed Russian revolution of 1905. Vera Baranovskaya plays a timid working-class mother whose son Pavel (Nikolai Batalov) joins the strike against the factory owners; when he is arrested, she takes up the cause herself and is transformed from bystander into revolutionary. Pudovkin uses montage for emotion rather than Eisenstein's intellectual collision — the famous sequence cuts the prison break to melting ice on the river, movement itself becoming hope. Made at Mezhrabpom-Rus studio, it was a huge international success and established Pudovkin as a major director alongside Eisenstein. Baranovskaya's performance is often cited among the greatest of the silent era. The film is in the public domain.

Drama · Silent

A 1927 American silent romantic comedy film directed by Sam Taylor, starring Mary Pickford and Charles "Buddy" Rogers. Maggie Johnson (Pickford) is a stock girl at Merrill's department store, where she falls for Joe Grant (Rogers), a new coworker. What Maggie doesn't know is that Joe is actually the son of the store's wealthy owner, working incognito to prove himself without his father's influence. When Joe is called back to his family, Maggie follows him and discovers the truth about his identity. This was Mary Pickford's last silent film. Rogers and Pickford later married in 1937. The film features an early uncredited appearance by Carole Lombard as a flirty salesgirl. Charles Rosher received an Academy Award nomination for his cinematography.

Comedy · Romance

A baby photographer who dreams of being a private detective gets his chance when a beautiful baroness mistakes him for the real detective next door and drags him into a plot involving a kidnapped uncle and a map to uranium. Bob Hope sends up the noir genre he loved. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Comedy · Mystery

The first feature-length documentary and still one of the most famous ever made. Robert Flaherty spent years among the Inuit of the Hudson Bay region and returned with the story of Nanook — really a hunter named Allakariallak — and his family struggling through an Arctic winter. Flaherty staged and romanticized much of it: "Nanook's" family was cast for the film, and harpoons were used after rifles had already arrived. Critics have argued about that for a century, but the film invented the documentary feature and remains gripping survival cinema. The film is in the public domain.

Documentary · Silent

A Buster Keaton short co-directed with Edward F. Cline, often described as a comic Romeo and Juliet. Keaton plays a young man in love with the girl next door, but their families are feuding and have built a fence between their tenement houses. The boy's attempts to reach his beloved involve increasingly elaborate acrobatic stunts, including a spectacular sequence where Keaton is tossed back and forth between the two families like a human projectile. The film's blend of romantic longing and breathtaking physical comedy makes it one of Keaton's most charming early shorts. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Popeye the Sailor Meets Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp is a 1939 two-reel Popeye cartoon from Fleischer Studios, distributed by Paramount Pictures. The longest of the Fleischer Popeye specials at approximately 21 minutes, the short features Olive Oyl as a storyteller recounting the tale of Aladdin, with Popeye as the hero and Bluto as the villain. The cartoon was produced in Technicolor and features elaborate set pieces and musical numbers. The film is in the public domain.

Animation · Fantasy · Adventure

Rumors is a 1943 Private Snafu cartoon directed by Friz Freleng for Leon Schlesinger Productions, produced for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Snafu overhears a rumor about an impending enemy attack and spreads it through the camp, demonstrating how rumors can spiral out of control and damage morale and military effectiveness. As a U.S. government work, the film is in the public domain.

Animation · War · Comedy

King Vidor's affectionate comedy about a small-town girl who comes to Hollywood to become a dramatic star and ends up a hit in slapstick instead. Marion Davies plays Peggy Pepper, and the role is a quiet argument for her real talent: she was a gifted comedienne whose reputation was buried under the myth that William Randolph Hearst's patronage was the only reason she worked. Vidor fills the film with cameos from real stars of the era, including Charlie Chaplin playing himself in a single scene, and stages gags that gently mock the machinery of stardom. The film was made at the very end of the silent era and is one of the best records of how a studio lot actually functioned. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Comedy · Romance · Silent

A small-town woman marries a wealthy man, finds herself out of place in his social world, and eventually sacrifices her own happiness for the sake of her daughter's future. Belle Bennett gives the definitive performance of the mother who, recognizing that her daughter will have a better life without her, steps aside and lets the girl's father and his new wife raise her. Ronald Colman plays the husband, and Lois Moran the daughter who grows up ashamed of her mother and then too late realizes what she has lost. Henry King directs with the emotional directness that made the film a major hit. The story was filmed again in 1937 with Barbara Stanwyck. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

Frank Borzage's silent romance about a destitute woman in Naples who flees the police and finds love with a struggling painter, only for the past to catch up with her. Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell were paired here for the first time and became one of Fox's most popular screen couples, making a string of films together through the early sound years. The film is one of three for which Gaynor received the first Academy Award for Best Actress, awarded for her body of work that year rather than a single performance. Borzage's direction favors a soft, fatalistic sentimentality that was out of step with the harder realism coming into fashion, but the film's emotional directness is its own thing. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Romance · Silent

The High Sign is a 1921 silent comedy short co-directed by and starring Buster Keaton, with Edward F. Cline. Although made first, Keaton shelved it, considering it too close to his earlier Arbuckle-era style, and it was released later the same year. Keaton plays a drifter who joins a secret society called the Blinking Buzzards and is hired to assassinate a wealthy man, only to end up protecting him instead. The short features Keaton's famous homemade newspaper-reading gag. As a 1921 work, the film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Crime

A spoiled rich man and the woman who turned down his proposal end up alone together on an abandoned ocean liner drifting out to sea. Neither can cook, open a can, or manage the simplest chore, and the comedy comes from watching two helpless people improvise a household on an enormous scale, rigging kitchen gadgets with ropes and pulleys. When the ship drifts near a cannibal island, Rollo has to fend off boarders in a deep-sea diving suit, and the famous underwater sequences were filmed in a real tank with Keaton inside the heavy gear. The ship was a real decommissioned passenger liner the production bought for the shoot. Keaton co-directed with Donald Crisp and performed his own stunts.

Comedy · Action · Silent

A disfigured composer named Erik lives in the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera House and falls in love with Christine, a young soprano he secretly trains. When she lifts his mask, he kidnaps her, and her fiancé Raoul descends into the cellars to find her. Lon Chaney designed his own makeup for the role, including wires to distort his nose and a technique that has never been fully reproduced. The unmasking scene, when the audience first sees his face, is one of the most famous moments in silent film; some theaters reportedly kept smelling salts on hand for audience members who fainted. The film was Universal's first horror production and helped establish the genre as a studio staple. The famous two-strip Technicolor ball sequence is included in this print. The film is in the public domain as a pre-1930 work.

Horror · Silent

A 1917 American silent drama film directed by Maurice Tourneur, starring Mary Pickford. Among the simple fisher-folk of a little island off the west coast of Scotland, Donald MacTavish rules as chieftain of his clan. When he dies at sea during a storm, his daughter Marget (Pickford) assumes the responsibilities of leadership at just 18 years old. Her sweet nature wins the affection of the clan, especially young fisherman Jamie Campbell (Matt Moore), who becomes engaged to her in a traditional ceremony. But a secret from Jamie's past threatens their happiness when the Countess of Dunstable arrives claiming Jamie as her long-lost son. Filmed on location in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with assistant direction by a young Clarence Brown. Based on the play by Eleanor Gates.

Drama · Romance

A faithful silent adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, directed by the Swedish filmmaker Victor Sjostrom (credited as Victor Seastrom) from a screenplay by Frances Marion. In 17th-century Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne is condemned to wear the scarlet letter for bearing a child out of wedlock, and she refuses to name the father, the Reverend Dimmesdale. Lillian Gish fought to make the picture at MGM and gives a restrained, dignified performance that is often cited as one of her finest. Lars Hanson plays the tortured minister, and Henry B. Walthall reprises the role of Chillingworth he had played in an earlier adaptation. Long considered the best screen version of the novel, the film entered the public domain in the United States in 2022.

Drama · Silent

A 1934 Universal science fiction serial directed by Lew Landers, spanning 12 chapters. Stanley Stanfield (Onslow Stevens) invents the Vanishing Ray, a wearable device that renders the user invisible — though his shadow remains visible. He seeks the help of Professor Carl Van Dorn to eliminate this side effect, but his plans to finance the invention by selling inherited bonds bring him into conflict with Wade Barnett (Walter Miller), the corrupt businessman who hounded Stanley's father to his death. When a struggle at the stockbroker's office ends in accidental death, Stanley is accused of murder and must use his invisibility device to clear his name and expose Barnett. The serial features what is believed to be the first appearance of a hand-held ray gun in film, along with robots and a "Destroying Ray." Added as the full 12-chapter serial (Chapter 1: "Accused of Murder").

Sci-Fi · Action · Adventure

Erich von Stroheim's lavish romance set in Vienna on the eve of the First World War, in which a penniless aristocrat falls for a brewer's daughter but is pushed into an arranged marriage for money. Stroheim directed and starred, and the production was as extravagant as everything he touched: real period uniforms, a full-scale carnival sequence, and a budget that ran far over what Paramount had agreed to. The studio cut the film down sharply, and the version that survives is only the first half of Stroheim's intended two-part story; the second half, The Honeymoon, is largely lost. Fay Wray, a year before King Kong, plays the girl he cannot marry. What remains is a film of extraordinary visual density and a director's refusal to compromise. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Romance · Silent

Underworld is the film that launched the American gangster genre. Josef von Sternberg directed it from a story by Ben Hecht, who would win the first Academy Award for Best Original Story the year the awards began. George Bancroft plays Bull Weed, a criminal kingpin whose jealous devotion to his moll, Feathers, drags him into a war with a rival and the law. Evelyn Brent is the woman caught between the gangster and the alcoholic lawyer he befriends. Von Sternberg's camera work is fluid and expressive, already showing the style he would bring to his films with Marlene Dietrich. The film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Crime · Drama · Silent

The seventh and final chapter of Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" series tells the story of America's slide into the war it had spent years trying to avoid. It traces the rise of isolationism and the German-American Bund, the growth of American industry and the draft as war grew inevitable, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that ended the argument. The film is both a defense of American values and an argument that those values could not survive a world ruled by the Axis. Made for the U.S. War Department. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the film is in the public domain.

War · Documentary

A suave jewel thief hides out in the labyrinthine Casbah of Algiers, safe from the French police, until a beautiful French tourist tempts him toward the outside world. Charles Boyer's performance inspired Pepe le Pew, and Hedy Lamarr made her American debut. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Crime · Drama · Romance

John Barrymore stars as George Bryan "Beau" Brummel, the impoverished soldier who talks his way into the friendship of the Prince of Wales and the heart of Regency London society, only to fall when the prince withdraws his favor. Directed by Harry Beaumont for Warner Bros. and based on Clyde Fitch's 1890 play, the film is a showcase for Barrymore's stage-trained intensity, from the arrogant dandy at his peak to the broken exile in Calais. Mary Astor plays the woman he cannot have. The film survives in several cuts of differing length and is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

Superman races to protect a train carrying a billion dollars in defense bonds from a gang of saboteurs who bomb the tracks, wreck a bridge, and commandeer the locomotive. The third of the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Action · Sci-Fi

Warner Oland's tenth outing as Charlie Chan sends the detective to a San Francisco mansion where Allen Colby, the heir to the Lowell fortune, has returned after being presumed drowned for seven years — and is murdered at a séance before he can reclaim a cent. Chan sifts through a household of psychics, suspicious relatives, and a butler who knows more than he says, while the killer keeps striking. Henrietta Crosman and Rosina Lawrence co-star, with Jonathan Hale as the police chief. Directed by Gordon Wiles, it is one of the more atmospheric of the Fox Chan pictures, leaning hard into spiritualism and old-dark-house menace. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal of copyright.

Mystery · Crime · Thriller

The third chapter of Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" series picks up after Britain and France declare war on Germany. It follows the Nazi capture of Denmark and Norway, the conquest of Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and the collapse of France in just over a month. The film pays blunt attention to Nazi atrocities, including the bombing of Rotterdam, and explains the German tactic of flooding roads with refugees to slow Allied armies. Made for the U.S. War Department, it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the film is in the public domain.

War · Documentary

The definitive silent adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novella, directed by John S. Robertson for Famous Players-Lasky. John Barrymore delivers a tour de force as the virtuous Dr. Jekyll, whose experiments in separating good from evil unleash the hideous Mr. Hyde. Barrymore's transformation, achieved largely through facial contortion and makeup rather than camera tricks, remains one of the most effective in screen history. Nita Naldi plays the dance hall temptress who draws Jekyll toward his darker self. The film cemented Barrymore's reputation as a serious screen actor and established the visual vocabulary for cinematic split-personality horror. The film is in the public domain.

Horror · Drama · Silent

A 1923 silent melodrama directed by Tod Browning and set in the opium underworld of Shanghai. Priscilla Dean plays Cassie Cook, an American woman smuggling opium who falls under the surveillance of a government agent disguised as a mining engineer. When she falls in love with him, she tries to leave the drug trade, but the head of the ring will not let her go. Wallace Beery plays her menacing confederate, and Anna May Wong appears in a supporting role. The film is based on the 1910 Broadway play by John Colton and Daisy H. Andrews and was produced by Carl Laemmle at Universal. It is a precursor to the stranger, darker films Browning would make later in the decade. The film's copyright expired at the end of its first term, and it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.

Drama · Crime · Silent

Directed by Edward Sloman and produced by Carl Laemmle at Universal, this silent drama tells the story of a poor Russian-Jewish pushcart peddler on New York's Lower East Side and his two sons. The elder son, Morris, ashamed of his immigrant roots, wants to become a lawyer and assimilate into American society. The younger son, Sammy, secretly becomes a prizefighter under the name "Battling Rooney" to help support the family. When the father falls ill and Morris denies his own parent at an engagement party, Sammy denounces his brother and drags him home. The film was praised for its sympathetic and detailed portrayal of Jewish immigrant life, and was a major commercial success, reportedly grossing $3 million. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A former convict is framed for a bank robbery he had nothing to do with and, to clear his name, infiltrates the gang of masked thieves on their way to a heist in Mexico. Phil Karlson's taut, hard-edged noir was a touchstone for later heist films. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Noir · Crime

A 1928 American silent crime comedy directed by Elmer Clifton for DeMille Pictures Corporation. Young Gallagher (Frank Coghlan Jr.) wants to be a newspaper reporter. One day he witnesses a murder committed by a mysterious man with only four fingers on one hand. He gives his account of the murder and a description of the killer to his hero, newsman Henry Callahan (Harrison Ford), resulting in his getting a job on the paper as an office boy. When circumstances arise that result in Callahan losing his job, he and Gallagher team up to discover the identity of the killer and help Callahan get his job back. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Comedy · Silent

Mary Pickford stars in a dual role as both the young Cedric Errol and his devoted mother "Dearest" in this adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's beloved 1886 novel. Cedric, a poor American boy living in Brooklyn, discovers he is the heir to an English earldom and is sent to live with his estranged, irascible grandfather in England, where his innocence and kindness gradually melt the old man's heart. Directed by Alfred E. Green with uncredited assistance from Jack Pickford, the film was one of Pickford's most successful productions and showcased her remarkable ability to play both a child and an adult in the same picture. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Family · Silent

A 1930 American pre-Code musical comedy directed by Ludwig Berger, starring Maurice Chevalier and Frances Dee (in her film debut). Albert Loriflan (Chevalier), a waiter in a Paris cafe, unexpectedly inherits a large sum of money from a wealthy relative. His unscrupulous boss, Philibert, refuses to release him from his long-term contract in the hope that Albert will buy him off with a large payment. But Albert refuses, and continues to work at the cafe even though he is now very rich. Before long he falls in love with Philibert's daughter Yvonne (Dee). Based on the 1911 play The Little Cafe by Tristan Bernard. Paramount also produced a separate French-language version, Le Petit Cafe, starring Chevalier, which broke records for opening-day attendance in Paris.

Comedy · Musical · Romance

A 1929 American pre-Code musical film directed by John Francis Dillon, starring Marilyn Miller, Alexander Gray, and Joe E. Brown. Sally Green (Miller) is an orphan who was named by the telephone exchange where she was abandoned as a baby. In the orphanage, she discovered the joy of dancing. Working as a waitress, she goes from job to job until she finds a job that also allows her to dance. At the restaurant, she meets Blair Farquar (Gray) and they fall for each other, but Blair is engaged to Marcia. Sally is hired to impersonate a famous Russian dancer in her Broadway debut. Based on the Broadway stage hit produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, the film retains three of the stage production's Jerome Kern songs, including "Look for the Silver Lining." Miller, who had played the leading part on Broadway, was hired by Warner Bros. for a reported $100,000. The film was shot entirely in Technicolor Process 3 and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction.

Musical · Comedy · Romance

A landmark of independent American cinema, Salt of the Earth was made by three blacklisted filmmakers — director Herbert J. Biberman, producer Paul Jarrico, and writer Michael Wilson — entirely outside the Hollywood studio system. Based on the 1951 Empire Zinc strike in Grant County, New Mexico, the film tells the story of Mexican-American miners and their wives fighting for equality. Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas stars as Esperanza, the wife who emerges as a leader when the men are enjoined from picketing and the women take over the picket line. Many of the supporting roles were played by real miners and their families from Mine-Mill Local 890. The film was suppressed upon release, denounced as communist propaganda, and effectively banned from theaters. It was rediscovered decades later and is now recognized as a seminal work of social realism and one of the first American films to present a Mexican-American community from within. The producers placed the film in the public domain.

Drama

A 2008 American independent animated musical written, directed, produced, and animated by Nina Paley. The film intersperses events from the Ramayana, light-hearted discussion of historical background by a trio of Indian shadow puppet narrators, musical interludes voiced with 1920s jazz recordings by Annette Hanshaw, and scenes from the filmmaker's own life. The ancient mythological and modern biographical plots are parallel tales, sharing numerous themes. After a prolonged copyright battle over the Hanshaw recordings, Paley released the film under a CC-0 public domain license, waiving all rights to the extent possible under law. The film has been widely distributed and shown freely online, becoming a landmark case in copyright reform advocacy.

Animation · Comedy · Musical · Drama

Sparrows stars Mary Pickford as Molly, the oldest orphan on a Louisiana bayou "baby farm" run by the cruel Mr. Grimes (Gustav von Seyffertitz). When a kidnapped baby is brought to the farm, Molly resolves to lead the children to safety across the treacherous swamplands. Directed by William Beaudine and produced by Pickford through her own company, the film is a Gothic melodrama featuring atmospheric photography by Charles Rosher, Karl Struss, and Hal Mohr, including a celebrated night sequence in the alligator-infested swamp. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent · Thriller

The Mechanical Monsters is the second of the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons, released by Paramount in November 1941. A mad inventor sends an army of flying robots to loot Metropolis — banks, jewel houses, anything they can carry — and captures Lois Lane when she stows away inside one of the machines. Superman battles the mechanical army and flies to the inventor's lair to save her from a vat of molten metal. The robot designs influenced decades of animation, from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow to a famous homage in The Iron Giant. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Action · Adventure

Episode 2 of The Beverly Hillbillies. The Clampetts arrive at their new Beverly Hills mansion and begin settling in, with predictably comic results. Granny is convinced they've moved to a haunted house, Jethro explores the mansion's modern conveniences with bewildered fascination, and Jed tries to make sense of his new surroundings. The episode establishes the running gag of the Clampetts misinterpreting every aspect of modern life, from the kitchen appliances to the swimming pool. The episode is in the public domain due to copyright non-renewal.

Comedy · TV Series

Episode 3 of The Beverly Hillbillies. While the Clampetts adjust to life in Beverly Hills, Granny struggles with homesickness for the Ozarks and threatens to return to the old cabin. The episode showcases Irene Ryan's brilliant comic performance as Granny, whose stubborn resistance to modernity provides much of the series' humor. Meanwhile, banker Drysdale schemes to keep the Clampetts happy so they won't withdraw their fortune from his bank. The episode is in the public domain.

Comedy · TV Series

Episode 4 of The Beverly Hillbillies. The Clampetts meet Mrs. Drysdale, the banker's snobbish wife, and the culture clash escalates. Mrs. Drysdale is appalled by her new neighbors' rustic ways, while the Clampetts interpret her haughty disdain as friendly eccentricity. The episode introduces the recurring dynamic between the Clampetts and the Drysdale household, with the banker caught between his wealthy clients and his embarrassed wife. The episode is in the public domain due to copyright non-renewal.

Comedy · TV Series

Episode 5 of The Beverly Hillbillies. Jed decides to try his hand at the stock market, with predictably chaotic results. His innocent questions about "buying stock" are misinterpreted by Wall Street professionals, and his down-home wisdom somehow produces better investment results than the experts can manage. The episode satirizes the world of high finance through the eyes of a man who measures wealth in terms of land and livestock rather than paper certificates. The episode is in the public domain.

Comedy · TV Series

Episode 6 of The Beverly Hillbillies. It's Halloween in Beverly Hills, and the Clampetts' rustic ways take on a spooky dimension. Granny's mountain superstitions and the family's ignorance of Halloween customs lead to a series of comic misunderstandings with their fancy new neighbors. The episode is a classic holiday-themed installment that showcases the series' talent for finding humor in cultural clashes. The episode is in the public domain.

Comedy · TV Series

Episode 7 of The Beverly Hillbillies. The Clampetts' mansion comes with a full staff of servants, and the culture clash between the hired help and their new employers provides rich comic territory. The servants are bewildered by the Clampetts' country ways, while the family can't understand why anyone would need help with simple tasks. The episode explores the class dynamics that made the series both funny and socially pointed. The episode is in the public domain.

Comedy · TV Series

Episode 8 of The Beverly Hillbillies. Jethro decides he needs an education to succeed in Beverly Hills, and his attempts to navigate the school system produce predictably chaotic results. His overconfidence and lack of formal learning clash with the structured world of education, while the family tries to figure out which grade he should be in. The episode showcases Max Baer Jr.'s comic talents as the lovably dim-witted Jethro, whose ambition always exceeds his abilities. The episode is in the public domain.

Comedy · TV Series

A celebrated film noir directed by Joseph H. Lewis and photographed by the legendary cinematographer John Alton. Cornel Wilde plays Police Lieutenant Leonard Diamond, who obsessively pursues the sadistic gang boss Mr. Brown (Richard Conte) while harboring an infatuation with Brown's girlfriend Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace). The supporting cast includes Brian Donlevy, Lee Van Cleef, and Earl Holliman as Brown's enforcers. Alton's high-contrast chiaroscuro lighting has made the film a touchstone of noir visual style. The U.S. Copyright Office rejected the film's copyright notice in 2007, leaving it in the public domain.

Crime · Thriller

Private Snafu learns the importance of not wasting food, as his gluttony in the mess hall leads to a surreal lesson in military discipline. A Frank Tashlin-directed Private Snafu training short. The film entered the public domain as a U.S. government work.

Animation · Comedy · War

A roughneck stoker on a coal-fired ship comes ashore for a single night in New York and falls for a dance-hall girl who is trying to kill herself. Josef von Sternberg's fog-shrouded portrait of the waterfront is one of the most exquisitely photographed films of the silent era, with Harold Rosson's cinematography and Hans Dreier's expressionist sets creating a world of smoke, steam, and shadow. George Bancroft is the brawling stoker and Betty Compson the weary dance-hall girl, and the film follows their brief, doomed romance through a single shore leave. The Docks of New York was selected for the National Film Registry in 1999. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2024.

Drama · Romance · Silent

A 1955 American crime drama produced by Roger Corman and co-directed by John Ireland and Edward Sampson. Ireland stars as Frank Webster, a man framed for murder who breaks out of jail and takes a rich woman's Jaguar at gunpoint, with the woman, Connie Adair (Dorothy Malone), still inside. As she tries to escape numerous times, the two soon develop feelings for each other and enter a road race that ends in Mexico. Made on a budget of just $50,000, the film was one of Corman's early productions and was distributed by American Releasing Corporation, the precursor to American International Pictures. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Drama · Action

Harold Lloyd plays a small-town boy so primed for college life that he has rehearsed his entrance greeting in front of a mirror for months. He arrives on campus full of pep and immediately becomes the patsy of the football team and the joke of the student body, all while believing he is the most popular man in school. The film builds to a football finale where he finally gets his chance on the field. Lloyd's everyman optimism was never better matched to a story, and The Freshman was one of the biggest hits of the silent era. The glasses character, Lloyd's signature screen persona, is in full form here. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Silent

The surviving masterpiece of German expressionist horror. In 16th century Prague, Rabbi Loew (Albert Steinrück) sculpts a giant of clay and brings it to life with a magic word to defend the ghetto from an imperial decree of expulsion — but the Golem (Paul Wegener, who co-directed with Carl Boese) will not remain a servant. The staggered Expressionist sets, built like crooked clay houses, and the creation sequence's Kabbalistic ritual became templates for Frankenstein and every creature feature after. This was Wegener's third Golem film and the only one to survive substantially intact. A century on, it remains genuinely uncanny. Published in 1920, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Horror · Fantasy · Silent

The film usually credited with proving movies could tell a real story. Four bandits hold up a railroad telegraph office, board the train, rob the mail car, and escape across the New Jersey countryside with a posse in pursuit — all in about twelve minutes. Edwin S. Porter made it for Edison's studio in 1903, cutting between the telegraph office, the train, and the chase in a way audiences had never seen. Its most famous image is a close-up of a bandit (Justus D. Barnes) firing his revolver point-blank at the camera, a shot exhibitors could place at the start or the end of the reel. Selected for the National Film Registry in 1990. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Western · Crime · Silent

A 1967 American documentary film directed and narrated by Peter Adair. A groundbreaking example of cinema verite, the film explores the religious fervor of a small Pentecostal congregation in rural West Virginia. The church services include snake handling (mainly copperheads), speaking in tongues, faith healing, and singing, with meetings lasting four to six hours multiple times a week. Adair's camera captures interviews with congregants who describe their experiences of salvation through the Holy Ghost, and the film culminates with a ceremonial handling of poisonous snakes — ironically, it is the preacher who gets bitten. The film has entered the public domain and is available at the Internet Archive.

Documentary

A 1920 American silent adventure romance film directed by Wesley Ruggles, starring Louise Glaum and House Peters. British secret agent John Culbertson (Peters) leads a safari from Bajuma to the kingdom of M'tela in Africa. Bound by oath to prevent him from reaching it is Madame (Glaum), a secret agent of a rival government known as "the Leopard Woman." When their safaris meet in the desert, Madame is forced to accept Culbertson's aid and unwittingly falls in love with him. After he scorns her, she orders her servant Chaké (Noble Johnson) to kill him — but when the attempt fails, she is secretly relieved. Based on the 1916 novel by Stewart Edward White, with location shooting in Palm Springs, California.

Adventure · Romance

The first episode of the 1958 Felix the Cat television series, created by Joe Oriolo. Felix strolls through the countryside carrying his Magic Bag of Tricks, a shape-shifting satchel that can become anything he needs—an escalator, a canoe, a picnic table. The Professor, watching from his laboratory, becomes obsessed with stealing the bag and uses a shrink ray to reduce Felix to miniature size. But the bag has a mind of its own, and Felix's ingenuity proves more than a match for the Professor's gadgets. The episode introduced the Magic Bag concept that would define the series across its 260 episodes, with Jack Mercer providing Felix's voice. The series is in the public domain.

Animation · Family · Comedy

A documentary film about the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where a quarter of a million people gathered to demand civil and economic rights for Black Americans. Directed by James Blue for the United States Information Agency, the film captures Martin Luther King Jr.'s historic "I Have a Dream" speech. Added to the National Film Registry in 2008. The film entered the public domain as a U.S. government work.

Documentary

Oliver Hardy invites Stan Laurel over for a home-cooked meal, but the attempt to use Mrs. Hardy's new kitchen leads to culinary disaster, a destroyed apartment, and a run-in with their neighbor. The first all-talking Laurel and Hardy comedy, directed by Lewis R. Foster and produced by Hal Roach. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Comedy

A woman who has drifted apart from her husband must track him down through San Francisco after he witnesses a gangland murder and goes into hiding, with a reporter and a killer both following her. Ann Sheridan stars in this tight, location-shot noir. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Noir · Crime · Thriller

A Noveltoons short from Famous Studios, directed by Isadore Sparber. Spunky the donkey tries to enlist in the WAGS, an elite corps of Army dogs, but is rejected after a series of physical tests deem him unfit for service. When a flea attack cripples the dog unit, Spunky proves his worth by saving the day. Released October 27, 1944, the cartoon is a wartime morale piece wrapped in barnyard comedy, produced by Famous Studios for Paramount Pictures. The film is in the public domain.

Animation · Short · Comedy · Family

A silent drama directed by D.W. Griffith, starring Lillian Gish and Robert Harron. John Logan Jr. leaves his parents and sweetheart, Jennie Timberlake, in the rural Kentucky of Happy Valley to seek his fortune in New York City. Those he left behind fall into hardship in his absence, while John is seduced by the wealth and cynicism of the city. The film was believed lost for nearly fifty years until a print was discovered in the State Film Archives of the Soviet Union in 1965 and donated to the Museum of Modern Art. Carol Dempster, who would become Griffith's leading lady of the 1920s, made her film debut in a small role as a girl John meets in New York. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A wounded gunfighter is taken in and nursed by a family of Quakers, and their gentle faith slowly wears down his thirst for revenge against the man who killed his foster father. John Wayne produced and starred; it was the first film his own company made. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Western · Romance

The Marx Brothers' second film, adapted from their 1928 Broadway hit. Groucho plays Captain Spaulding, an African explorer returning to society, who arrives at a Long Island estate at the same moment a valuable painting goes missing. What plot there is exists mainly to hang the brothers' routines on: Groucho's verbal avalanches, Chico's piano and patter, Harpo's silent anarchy, and Margaret Dumont's unflappable dignity under fire. Victor Heerman, who had directed them on stage, kept the camera out of the way and let the act play. The film's surrealist streak was admired by critics from Antonin Artaud to François Truffaut. Published in 1930, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2026.

Comedy · Musical

A small-town girl hungry for a grander life leaves her devoted sweetheart behind for a wealthy businessman's Riverside Drive apartment in Frank Borzage's silent drama. Adapted by Frances Marion from a Fannie Hurst story and produced by Cosmopolitan Productions for Paramount, the film stars Seena Owen as a woman who discovers, too late, the cost of the comfort she traded for love. Borzage's early interest in the emotional lives of working women, the thread he would pull through much of his later career, is already visible here. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

D.W. Griffith's tragic melodrama, subtitled *The Yellow Man and the Girl*, was his deliberate turn away from spectacle toward intimacy after the scale of *Intolerance*. Lillian Gish gives one of the great performances of the silent era as Lucy, the abused daughter of a brutal London prize-fighter (Donald Crisp), who finds fleeting tenderness with Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess), a Chinese shopkeeper whose dreams of peace have curdled in the Limehouse fog. The interracial romance at its center was daring for 1919, though the casting and caricature reflect the era's prejudices. Shot in hazy, oppressive studio interiors, it is among Griffith's most visually beautiful films. Published in 1919, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

Mary Henry survives a car that plunges off a bridge into a river, dragged out hours later with no memory of how she escaped. She moves to a new town to start a job as a church organist, but she is drawn to an abandoned pavilion on the shore, and she keeps seeing a pale, grinning man no one else can see. Herk Harvey made the film for around thirty thousand dollars on weekends, with a crew borrowed from industrial film work. The organ score and the empty fairground imagery give it a dreamlike dread that influenced later horror. Mary keeps slipping out of the world entirely, becoming invisible and silent to the people around her, and the film never explains why in a neat way. The film was largely ignored on release and found its audience years later through television. It entered the public domain due to non-renewal of its copyright.

Horror · Mystery

Frank Bigelow walks into a police station and says he wants to report a murder: his own. The film then rewinds to show how he got there. Frank, a small-town accountant, is in San Francisco for a few days and is slipped a luminous poison in a drink at a bar. A doctor tells him he has only days to live and no cure exists, and Frank spends his remaining hours trying to find out who killed him and why. The premise, a man investigating his own murder, is one of the tightest hooks in film noir. Rudolph Maté had been a cinematographer before he directed, and the film has a clean, hard look. The story ties Frank's death to a routine bill of sale he notarized, a small thing with large consequences. The film entered the public domain due to non-renewal of its copyright.

Noir · Thriller

A farm dog desperately needs sleep before an early morning rabbit hunt, but a scheming rabbit does everything in his power to keep the dog awake all night. A Tex Avery MGM cartoon, one of the few MGM shorts in the public domain. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Comedy

The sequel to Father of the Bride. Stanley Banks has finally accepted his daughter's marriage, only to learn she is expecting a baby, throwing him into a fresh panic about becoming a grandfather. Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, and Joan Bennett reprise their roles. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Comedy · Family

Harold Lloyd's first feature as an independent producer, and one of his best. He plays a stuttering, girl-shy tailor's apprentice who writes a bogus advice book on how to woo women, then has to live up to it when he falls for a wealthy girl visiting from the city. The film builds to a celebrated chase in which Harold races a jalopy, a horse, a trolley, and finally a stolen motorcycle (with no driver) through Los Angeles traffic to stop his beloved's wedding. Lloyd's gift was for ordinary-guy heroism, and here the romantic setup and the stunt climax feed each other perfectly. It was the first release from his own Harold Lloyd Corporation. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Comedy · Romance · Silent

A broke wanderer hops a freight train west and lands a job on a ranch where he is hopeless at everything, until he forms a bond with a dairy cow named Brown Eyes. When the herd is shipped to market, Friendless goes along to protect his companion, and the climax turns into a stampede through downtown Los Angeles as hundreds of cattle thunder through city streets and department stores. The sequence is an enormous practical stunt staged in real streets with a real herd. Keaton wrote, directed, and starred, and the film is unusually warm for him, built around a man and a cow rather than a romance. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Action · Adventure · Silent

Private Snafu grumbles about army life until a magical fairy grants his wish to be in charge, with predictably disastrous results. A Friz Freleng-directed Private Snafu training short. The film entered the public domain as a U.S. government work.

Animation · Comedy · War

A Buster Keaton short co-directed with Edward F. Cline. Keaton plays a down-on-his-luck man who decides to end it all, but every suicide attempt fails spectacularly—he can't even drown properly. A series of opportunities to better his situation arise, each ending in comic disaster, until he finally finds success in the most unlikely way. The film's famous ending—a wild diving stunt gone wrong—was considered lost for decades and was only rediscovered in the 1990s, making the film complete again. Keaton reportedly considered this his favorite of his short comedies. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and his pal ride the rails as hungry hobos, scrambling for food and finding comic misadventure in a farmer's field. A Walt Disney-directed Oswald short produced by Winkler Pictures. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Comedy

It is the film that coined the phrase "It girl" and made Clara Bow the embodiment of the 1920s flapper. She plays a department store salesgirl with plenty of "It", that magnetic self-confidence author Elinor Glyn defined on screen, who sets her sights on the store's handsome young owner. Bow's charm carries the whole picture, and the film was a sensation when it was released. Long considered lost, a print surfaced in Prague in the 1960s, and the Library of Congress selected It for the National Film Registry. The film's copyright was renewed in 1954 and expired on January 1, 2023, when it entered the public domain.

Comedy · Romance · Silent

Ernst Lubitsch's silent adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play about a respectable woman who suspects her husband of infidelity, receives a fan as a birthday gift, and finds herself at a party where the fan becomes the center of a misunderstanding that threatens her reputation. Lubitsch, working without dialogue, strips the play to its emotional mechanics and lets gesture, glance, and editing carry the wit. The result is a showcase for the "Lubitsch touch," the blend of sophistication and feeling that defined his career. Ronald Colman plays the husband and May McAvoy the wife. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

A classic Laurel and Hardy short directed by Leo McCarey for Hal Roach Studios. Stan and Ollie are escaped convicts on the run, trying to change clothes in a variety of unlikely locations. Their attempts to swap pants lead to a series of escalating comic mishaps, culminating in the famous scene where they find themselves on a girder high above a city street, still struggling with their trousers. The film is a masterclass in comic construction, building from a simple premise to breathtaking physical comedy. The skyscraper finale is one of the duo's most iconic sequences. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Short

The landmark gangster film directed by Mervyn LeRoy and starring Edward G. Robinson in the role that made him a star. Robinson plays Caesar Enrico Bandello, a small-time hood who rises to become a crime boss in the city's underworld, only to be destroyed by his own ambition and the inevitable betrayal of those around him. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. co-stars as his friend Joe Massara, a dancer torn between loyalty and going straight. Alongside The Public Enemy and Scarface, Little Caesar defined the gangster genre in early sound cinema. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Drama

Gloria Swanson stars as Tessie McGuire, a department store clerk who rises through New York's social strata after a wealthy man takes an interest in her, only to discover that high society can be as exploitative as the shop floor. Directed by Allan Dwan from a story by Frank R. Adams, the film is a sharp class comedy that gives Swanson ample opportunity to display both comic timing and dramatic depth. The film's critique of urban capitalism and its treatment of working women was unusual for a mainstream Paramount production of the period. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Drama · Silent

Carl Theodor Dreyer's intimate domestic drama about a husband who takes his hardworking wife for granted, mistreats her, and is reformed by the quiet intervention of his old nanny. After Ida is driven to leave, the nanny moves in, takes over the household, and forces Viktor to confront how much his wife did and how little he appreciated it. Dreyer, better known for his austere spiritual films like The Passion of Joan of Arc, here works in a warm, observational register, using close-ups and carefully composed interiors to build a portrait of a marriage. The film was a commercial success in Denmark and helped establish Dreyer's reputation. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A Harold Lloyd short directed by Fred Newmeyer. Lloyd plays a young man who, believing his girlfriend has rejected him for another, decides to end it all. But every suicide attempt fails spectacularly—he can't even jump out a window without landing on a fire escape. The film's masterstroke is a vertiginous sequence on a construction site, where Lloyd dangles from a girder high above the street, a precursor to his famous skyscraper climb in Safety Last! (1923). The film's dark comic premise—suicide as slapstick—is handled with Lloyd's characteristic optimism, as the boy's despair gives way to increasingly inventive physical comedy. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

The first film adaptation of J.M. Barrie's play, made with Barrie's blessing and his personal choice of Betty Bronson for the title role. Herbert Brenon's production preserves the stage business, including an animal impersonator as the Darling family's dog Nana and the crocodile, and the famous moment when the audience is asked to clap if they believe in fairies. Ernest Torrence's Captain Hook set the template for every screen Hook to follow, and the film's success helped convince a young Walt Disney that Peter Pan was worth adapting himself. Long thought lost, a copy was recovered by film historian James Card in the 1950s. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Fantasy · Adventure · Family · Silent

The Arctic Giant is a 1942 Superman animated short from Fleischer Studios, distributed by Paramount Pictures. An expedition to the Arctic uncovers a frozen Tyrannosaurus Rex, which thaws and rampages through Metropolis. Superman must stop the prehistoric creature before it destroys the city. The cartoon is notable for its dinosaur sequence, which predates similar scenes in later films by decades. The film is in the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Action · Sci-Fi

The Magnetic Telescope is a 1942 Superman animated short from Fleischer Studios, distributed by Paramount Pictures. A scientist invents a magnetic telescope that can attract meteors from space, but the device goes out of control and threatens Metropolis with a catastrophic comet impact. Superman must destroy the deadly projectile before it hits the city. The film is in the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Action · Sci-Fi

Volcano is a 1942 Superman animated short from Fleischer Studios, distributed by Paramount Pictures. When a dormant volcano on a populated island begins erupting, Superman must save the inhabitants from the lava and ash. The cartoon features spectacular destruction sequences and showcases the Fleischers' talent for cinematic action animation. The film is in the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Action · Adventure

The last of Charlie Chaplin's twelve Mutual comedies, directed by and starring Chaplin. He plays an escaped convict who rescues a wealthy family from a cave-in and is taken in as their butler. His new respectability is threatened when a detective recognizes him, leading to a spectacular chase through the city and down to the docks. The film features some of Chaplin's most celebrated physical sequences, including the famous opening escape along a cliffside and the dockside finale where he balances on a rolling barrel. The Mutual shorts are widely considered the finest work of Chaplin's early career, and The Adventurer is a fitting capstone. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

A loose, swashbuckling portrait of the 15th-century French poet Francois Villon, played by John Barrymore at the height of his stage and screen fame. Villon is a tavern brawler and versifier who runs afoul of King Louis XI, played by the German actor Conrad Veidt in a Hollywood sojourn between Caligari and his later work in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari's shadow. The production was lavish, with sets by William Cameron Menzies and an estimated million-dollar budget. The only surviving domestic print was found years later in Barrymore's own former mansion by its next occupant, Edgar Bergen, and donated to the American Film Institute. It entered the public domain in the United States in 2023.

Adventure · Drama · Silent

A 1950 American drama written and directed by George Seaton, shot on location in bombed-out Berlin barely a year after the airlift ended. Montgomery Clift plays Danny MacCullough, a C-54 flight engineer, and Paul Douglas plays Hank Kowalski, a ground-controlled approach operator whose wartime experience as a POW leaves him bitter toward the Germans they are now feeding. Danny falls for a German war widow (Cornell Borchers) whose motives are not what they seem. Nearly every military role apart from the two leads is played by actual Air Force personnel, and the film incorporates real airlift operations at Tempelhof, making it a semi-documentary record of Operation Vittles. The copyright was never renewed; this is the complete 120-minute print rather than the common 102-minute cut.

War · Drama

The relatives of the eccentric Cyrus West gather at his brooding mansion twenty years after his death to hear the reading of his will. The heir is Annabelle West, but only if she is deemed sane; otherwise the fortune passes to a successor whose name is sealed in an envelope. Before the lawyer can reveal it, he disappears, and the night brings secret passages, a escaped lunatic known as the Cat, and a growing sense that someone in the house is not what they seem. Paul Leni, a German Expressionist director who came to Hollywood late in his career, blended stylized shadows with broad comedy in a way that defined the "old dark house" genre for decades. The film was a cornerstone of Universal's early horror line and a direct influence on the 1939 Bob Hope remake. Pre-1930 films are in the public domain in the United States.

Horror · Comedy · Silent

After Ollie is rejected by the innkeeper's daughter, he and Stan join the French Foreign Legion so he can forget her, only to find themselves marching through the desert and tangled in a local rebellion. The boys' only non-Hal Roach feature. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Comedy

Robert Wiene, the director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, turned Maurice Renard's novel into a late Expressionist horror about a concert pianist whose hands are crushed in a train wreck and replaced with those of an executed murderer. Conrad Veidt plays Orlac as a man slowly convinced that the graft has passed the killer's violence into his own body, his long fingers curling and twitching as if with a will of their own. The film trades Caligari's painted sets for shadowed, realistic spaces, but keeps the same dread of identity dissolving from within. The premise has been remade twice, most notably as Mad Love (1935) with Peter Lorre, but Wiene's original remains the purest version of the body-horror idea. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Horror · Thriller · Silent

The Kid Brother is a 1927 silent comedy feature directed by Ted Wilde for the Harold Lloyd Corporation, distributed by Paramount Pictures. Harold Lloyd stars as Harold Hickory, the milquetoast youngest son of a tough sheriff, who gets his chance to prove himself when a traveling medicine show brings con artists to town. The film features some of Lloyd's most thrilling climactic set pieces, including a suspended-from-a-tower sequence. Widely regarded as one of Lloyd's best features. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Adventure

Mary Pickford stars as Angela Carlotti, an Italian lighthouse keeper's sister whose life is upended when a wounded Austrian spy (Fred Thomson) washes ashore during World War I. Believing him to be a deserter seeking refuge, Angela shelters and falls in love with him, unaware of his true mission. Directed by Frances Marion, one of the most celebrated screenwriters and one of the few female directors of the silent era, the film showcases Pickford in a more dramatic, less childlike role than her usual fare. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

The original screen adaptation of Richard Connell's 1924 short story, directed by Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack for RKO. Famed big game hunter Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrea) is shipwrecked on a remote island ruled by the urbane Russian Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks), who has grown bored with stalking animals and now hunts the shipwrecked sailors who wash ashore. Zaroff offers Rainsford a deal: survive three days as prey in the jungle, and he goes free. Fay Wray, fresh off King Kong (shot on the same RKO jungle sets), plays a fellow captive. The film's influence on the survival-horror genre is immeasurable, and its central premise has been remade and riffed on endlessly. The film is in the public domain.

Adventure · Horror · Thriller

A powerful psychological thriller crime film starring Lon Chaney and directed by Wallace Worsley. Chaney delivers one of his most memorable performances as Blizzard, the legless crime boss of the San Francisco Barbary Coast underworld. As a child, Blizzard's legs were unnecessarily amputated by Dr. Ferris (Charles Clary) during a botched operation. Now an adult, Blizzard is driven by two ambitions: revenge against Dr. Ferris and the looting of San Francisco. To get close to the doctor, Blizzard poses for a bust of Satan created by Ferris's daughter Barbara (Claire Adams). Chaney's remarkable performance includes wearing leather stumps and using crutches, demonstrating his legendary commitment to physical transformation. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Drama · Silent · Thriller

Underground gnomes must wake Old Man Winter and coax Spring to arrive, painting the landscape with flowers and greenery in a vibrant Technicolor musical. A Happy Harmonies short and the directorial debut of William Hanna, co-directed with Paul Fennell. One of only three MGM cartoons in the public domain. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Comedy · Music

A young woman is murdered at a creepy mansion and returns as a ghost to enlist the mild-mannered Cosmo Topper to find her killer, dragging the bewildered man through a house full of secret passages and suspects. The third Topper comedy. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Comedy · Mystery · Fantasy

A short documentary about the U.S. Marine assault on the Japanese-held island of Tarawa in November 1943, directed by Louis Hayward, who served in the Marine Corps. Shot in full color with no actors, it shows the landing, the fight across the beach, the casualties, and the burial of the dead at sea. The footage was so graphic that Hollywood distributors refused to release it, and only President Roosevelt's personal approval sent it to theaters. The film was meant to show Americans at home that the war was not a parade of easy victories. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the film is in the public domain.

War · Documentary

A Tale of Two Kitties is a 1942 Merrie Melodies cartoon directed by Bob Clampett for Leon Schlesinger Productions. It features two hungry cats, Babbit and Catstello — parodies of the comedy team Abbott and Costello — who scheme to catch a baby bird in a nest atop a high telephone pole. The bird is Tweety, making his first-ever appearance (then called "Orson"), who would go on to become one of Warner Bros.' most enduring characters. The film is in the public domain.

Animation · Comedy

A Hunky and Spunky cartoon from Famous Studios, the successor to Fleischer Studios. The mischievous young donkey Spunky gets into trouble when he won't stop kicking, and his mother Hunky must teach him a lesson. The Hunky and Spunky series was one of several cartoon properties Famous Studios continued after the Fleischers lost control of their studio. The film is in the public domain.

Animation · Family

Chang is a remarkable early documentary feature from the team who would later make King Kong. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack traveled to the jungles of northern Siam, now Thailand, to film a real farming family's struggle against the wilderness. Kru, his wife, and their children battle a leopard, a tiger, and a herd of elephants that destroys their home. The film is staged in places, but the danger and the animals are real, and the result has the grip of an adventure story. Chang was nominated for an Academy Award and is now a forgotten gem. It entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Documentary · Adventure · Drama · Silent

The Three Stooges are called as witnesses at a murder trial and proceed to wreck the courtroom with their chaos, accidentally helping to expose the real killer. One of the four Columbia Stooge shorts that fell into the public domain, and among the best-loved. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Comedy

Gabby Goes Fishing is a 1941 animated short from Fleischer Studios, distributed by Paramount Pictures. The seventh of nine cartoons starring Gabby, the blustering town crier introduced in the Fleischers' feature Gulliver's Travels (1939), it sends the know-it-all to a fishing hole where he sets out to teach a young boy how to land the really big ones — and ends up on the hook himself. Pinto Colvig, the original voice of Goofy, supplies Gabby's voice. The film is in the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Comedy · Family

A Harold Lloyd feature comedy directed by Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor. Lloyd plays a young newlywed whose blissful marriage is complicated when his formidable mother-in-law moves in, followed by her shiftless son and her henpecked husband. The film is structured as a series of domestic comic set pieces, culminating in the famous sequence where Lloyd tries to drive home a carload of groceries while a streetcar full of passengers watches in horror. The film's gentle satire of family life and its expertly staged physical comedy make it one of Lloyd's most charming features. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

The second collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, and one of the first sound films made in France. A man and a woman are repeatedly drawn together and torn apart by the hypocrisies of bourgeois society and the Catholic Church, in a series of incidents that range from the absurd to the blasphemous. The film scandalized Paris on its release in 1930; members of the Ligue des Patriotes threw ink at the screen and assaulted audience members, and the film was banned in France for nearly fifty years. Its mixture of deadpan comedy, religious provocation, and dream logic made it a foundational text of surrealist cinema. Published in 1930, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2026.

Comedy · Drama · Surrealist

Marion Davies plays twins separated at birth in this Monta Bell directed comedy-drama: one raised in a wealthy Dutch family, the other in the tenements, who grows up to be a musical-comedy star. The film uses the dual role to contrast old-money respectability with the rough energy of the immigrant streets, and the two worlds collide when the twins fall for the same man. Davies, a gifted comedienne whose talents were often overshadowed by her relationship with William Randolph Hearst, gets to show her range. The film includes early Technicolor and Handschiegl color sequences. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Comedy · Silent

Frank Borzage's adaptation of Ferenc Molnar's 1909 play about a carousel barker in Budapest whose doomed romance with a servant girl ends in tragedy and a chance at redemption from beyond the grave. Charles Farrell stars as Liliom, a swaggering but troubled carnival worker, with Rose Hobart as Julie, the woman who loves him despite his flaws. Lee Tracy plays the Sparrow, a heavenly marshal who oversees Liliom's posthumous trial. The film was one of several Borzage-directed romances that blended realism with spiritual fantasy, a hallmark of his career. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Fantasy

A Laurel and Hardy short directed by Lewis R. Foster for Hal Roach Studios. Stan and Ollie play two sailors on shore leave who pick up two girls and take them to an amusement park. The simple date becomes a comic nightmare as the boys discover they barely have enough money between them for one soda, let alone a full outing. The film's centerpiece is a brilliantly staged sequence on a boat ride, where the boys' attempts to impress their dates end in watery chaos. The film is a perfect example of the duo's early sound-era shorts, where their comic timing and vocal interplay were still being refined. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Short

The only film ever directed by Marlon Brando, who also stars as Rio, a bank robber betrayed by his partner Dad Longworth (Karl Malden) after a Mexican heist. Years later Rio escapes prison and tracks Dad to a California coastal town where the betrayer has reinvented himself as a respectable sheriff with a wife and stepdaughter (Pina Pellicer). Stanley Kubrick was originally set to direct before Brando took over himself, and the production became legendary for its cost overruns — but the result is a brooding, unusually psychological western shot in VistaVision along the Monterey coast. The film entered the public domain when its copyright was not renewed.

Western · Drama

D.W. Griffith's lavish silent epic, set against the French Revolution. Two orphaned sisters, the sighted Henriette (Lillian Gish) and the blind Louise (Dorothy Gish), travel to Paris seeking a cure and are swept apart by aristocratic abduction and the coming Terror, until a kindly chevalier (Joseph Schildkraut) and the rise of Danton (Monte Blue) turn the tide. Griffith built enormous period sets and staged crowd scenes on a scale to rival Intolerance, and the film marked Lillian Gish's final role for him. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A film version of Thornton Wilder's play about life, love, and loss in the small New Hampshire town of Grover's Corners at the turn of the twentieth century. William Holden and Martha Scott play the young couple whose courtship and marriage anchor the story. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Drama · Romance

Pigs in a Polka is a 1943 Merrie Melodies cartoon directed by Friz Freleng for Leon Schlesinger Productions. A parody of Disney's Three Little Pigs, the short retells the familiar story set to the music of Johannes Brahms' Hungarian Dances. The Big Bad Wolf uses various disguises to trick the pigs, with the classical music underscore driving the comedy. The cartoon was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoon). The film is in the public domain.

Animation · Comedy · Musical

During the bloodiest days of the French Revolution, a mysterious operative known as Charles D'Aubigny infiltrates Paris to recover Robespierre's "black book" — a list of intended victims whose executions would cement his dictatorship — before it can be used. Robert Cummings plays the double agent, with Richard Basehart a chilling Robespierre and Arlene Dahl as the woman caught between them. Anthony Mann shot it like a noir despite the period setting, all shadows and paranoia, on a shoestring budget for Walter Wanger. Reissued as The Black Book. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

History · Thriller · Noir

René Cardona's wildly strange Mexican Christmas fantasy. Santa lives not at the North Pole but in a castle in the sky, where he watches Earth's children through a spyglass eye and fights off the demon Pitch, sent by Lucifer to turn the kids of the world bad — starting with a poor girl who just wants a doll. The English dub distributed by K. Gordon Murray became a staple of American holiday television and a Mystery Science Theater 3000 favorite. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Fantasy · Family · Comedy

A Charlie Chaplin comedy set during World War I, released just weeks before the Armistice. Chaplin's Little Fellow enlists in the army, endures the absurdities of military training, and is sent to the trenches of France, where his bumbling courage leads him to capture a group of German soldiers and infiltrate enemy lines. The film was a risky proposition—making comedy out of an ongoing war—but it was a enormous hit with both audiences and soldiers, who appreciated its humane, anti-authoritarian spirit. Chaplin's genius for finding comedy in adversity is on full display, particularly in the famous sequence where he sleeps in a flooded trench while standing upright. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · War · Silent

The 1929 Show Boat was the first film adaptation of Edna Ferber's 1926 novel, produced by Carl Laemmle at Universal Pictures and directed by Harry A. Pollard. Laura La Plante stars as Magnolia Hawks, the daughter of a show boat captain, who falls for the gambler Gaylord Ravenal (Joseph Schildkraut). The film incorporates songs from Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's 1927 stage musical, including "Ol' Man River" and "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man." Made during the transition to sound, the film is a part-talkie with both silent intertitles and sound sequences. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Musical · Romance

Smouldering Fires is a silent drama directed by Clarence Brown for Universal Pictures. Pauline Frederick stars as Aurelie Kimball, a successful businesswoman whose much younger secretary (Laura La Plante) catches the eye of her husband, setting in motion a story of jealousy, desire, and self-discovery. The film explores the tensions between age, ambition, and romantic longing with a subtlety characteristic of Brown's direction. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

Mary Pickford plays a celebrated dual role in this Marshall Neilan drama adapted from William J. Locke's novel by Frances Marion. Stella Maris is a rich, sheltered invalid who has never been allowed to see the world's ugliness; Unity Blake is a beaten-down orphan from the workhouse who knows nothing else. When Unity is taken into the household of Stella's cousin (Conway Tearle), the two women's lives cross in ways neither understands, and Pickford's transformation into the plain, hunched Unity remains startling — she asked to be made as unbeautiful as possible. One of the best showcases of what silent-era star vehicles could do when their stars wanted to act rather than pose. Published in 1918, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A pre-Code crime drama directed by John Cromwell and produced by David O. Selznick, Street of Chance stars William Powell as a jewel thief who suffers amnesia after being struck on the head during a robbery. He awakens to find himself living a respectable life as a wealthy businessman, with no memory of his criminal past — until his old associates resurface. Jean Arthur plays his wife and Kay Francis his former accomplice. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing. As a work published in 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Crime · Drama

A 1936 British romantic comedy directed by Alfred Zeisler and starring Cary Grant, originally titled The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss and released in the U.S. as The Amazing Adventure. Based on the 1919 novel The Curious Quest by E. Phillips Oppenheim, the film follows a bored, idle millionaire (Grant) who bets his doctor 50,000 pounds that he can survive for a year supporting himself solely on what he earns, without touching his inherited fortune. The film was edited down from 80 minutes (UK) to 62 minutes (US) for its American release. As a non-U.S. film that was not under copyright in its country of origin on January 1, 1996, it was not eligible for GATT restoration and is in the public domain.

Comedy · Romance

The fourth chapter of Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" series is devoted to the British stand against Germany in 1940, from the fall of France through the Luftwaffe's campaign to destroy the Royal Air Force and the Blitz that followed. The film argues that the Royal Air Force's refusal to break saved Britain and, by extension, the possibility of a liberated Europe. It blends British combat footage with captured German material and animated maps. Made for the U.S. War Department. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the film is in the public domain.

War · Documentary

The fifth and longest chapter of Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" series covers the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Red Army's defense. Co-directed by the Russian-born Anatole Litvak, the film recounts seven hundred years of failed invasions of Russia, then traces the Nazi advance to the gates of Moscow and Leningrad and the turning point at Stalingrad. Released two years before the Cold War, it portrays the Soviet people sympathetically as allies. Walter Huston narrates, with a score by Dimitri Tiomkin drawing on Tchaikovsky and Russian folk song. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the film is in the public domain.

War · Documentary

A Charlie Chaplin short from his Mutual period, directed by and starring Chaplin. He plays a wealthy alcoholic who arrives at a spa to dry out, bringing a trunk full of liquor instead of luggage. His attempts to "cure" himself are undermined by his own ingenuity, as he shares his stash with the other patients and undermines the spa's strict regimen. The film features one of Chaplin's most celebrated comic devices—the revolving door—and a famous sequence where he accidentally gets everyone drunk at the health spa. The film's gentle satire of wellness culture and its inventive physical comedy make it one of the highlights of the Mutual series. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Three pranking brothers at Pimento University must rescue their sweetheart Dora Standpipe from the villainous Dan Backslide. A Chuck Jones-directed Merrie Melodies short, considered a landmark in animation for its limited-animation style and breakneck pacing. The film entered the public domain in 1970 through non-renewal.

Animation · Comedy

A Buster Keaton short co-directed with Edward F. Cline. Keaton plays a botanist who, through a mix-up, is hired to electrify a wealthy man's house. He installs a series of automated gadgets—an escalator staircase, a self-setting dinner table, a motorized pool table—that all go hilariously wrong. The film is a showcase for Keaton's engineering ingenuity, with each mechanical contraption designed to fail in the most spectacular way possible. The escalator sequence, where Keaton is repeatedly carried up and dumped back down the stairs, is one of his most celebrated mechanical gags. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Private Snafu learns the hard way that goldbricking—shirking duty and faking illness—has consequences when his laziness gives the enemy an opening. A Frank Tashlin-directed Private Snafu training short. The film entered the public domain as a U.S. government work.

Animation · Comedy · War

Two friends on a fishing trip in Mexico pick up a hitchhiker who turns out to be a wanted killer on the run. He forces them to drive him toward the border and lets them know that as soon as they stop being useful he will kill them. The hitchhiker has a paralyzed eye that never closes, even when he sleeps, so the two men can never tell when it is safe to try an escape. The film is based on the real-life case of Billy Cook, who killed several people on a similar spree. Ida Lupino directed, one of the few women directing Hollywood features at the time, and she keeps the film tight and tense, almost entirely inside the car. The film is a lean, real-time thriller about men trapped with someone who has nothing to lose. The film entered the public domain due to non-renewal of its copyright.

Noir · Thriller

John Ford's first large-scale Western chronicles the building of the first transcontinental railroad, framed as a romance between a surveyor's son and the daughter of a railroad boss. Ford shot on location with thousands of extras, real locomotives, and a reconstructed frontier town, giving the film a documentary weight rare for the genre at the time. The Iron Horse was a major hit for Fox and established Ford as a director who could handle epic scope, the beginning of his long association with the Western. Abraham Lincoln appears as a guiding presence, and the film treats the railroad as the fulfillment of his vision of a united continent. The Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 2011. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Western · History · Silent

The Playhouse is a 1921 silent comedy short co-directed by and starring Buster Keaton, with Edward F. Cline. The film opens with a famous dream sequence in which Keaton plays every role in a theater — the audience, the orchestra, the performers, the stagehands, and even a monkey. The sequence was achieved through multiple exposure, with Keaton filming the same scene dozens of times. After the dream, the film follows Keaton as a stagehand pursuing a romance with an actress. The opening sequence is widely regarded as one of the greatest technical achievements of the silent era. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy

Frank Lloyd's lavish silent adaptation of Rafael Sabatini's pirate novel, one of the most expensive films of its day. Four full-scale sixteenth-century ships were built for the production, and the action ranges from Cornish manors to slave galleys to the deck of a Moorish pirate fleet. Milton Sills plays an English nobleman betrayed by his half-brother, sold into slavery, and reborn as the pirate captain known as the Sea Hawk, who returns to harry the Spanish and avenge himself. The film was a huge hit and set the visual template for Hollywood swashbucklers that the later Errol Flynn version would build on. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Adventure · Romance · Silent

The final Charlie Chan film starring Sidney Toler, directed by Howard Bretherton for Monogram Pictures. When two members of a showgirl troupe vacationing at a Malibu Beach resort are garroted, detective Charlie Chan is called in to solve the case, assisted by his Number Two Son Jimmy (Victor Sen Yung) and faithful chauffeur Birmingham Brown (Mantan Moreland). Toler was stricken with cancer during filming and was so physically weak he could hardly walk or deliver his lines; he died on February 12, 1947. The film entered the public domain due to the omission of a valid copyright notice on original prints.

Mystery · Crime

Leif Eriksson leads a Viking expedition to the North American coast, where love and rivalry divide the Norsemen against the skraelings they encounter. Pauline Starke and Donald Crisp star in this early Technicolor sound feature. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Adventure · Drama

Three Ages is a 1923 silent comedy feature co-directed by and starring Buster Keaton, with Edward F. Cline. Keaton's first feature film, it parodies D.W. Griffith's Intolerance by telling three parallel love stories set in the Stone Age, the Roman era, and the modern age. In each segment, Keaton competes with a larger, more formidable rival for the affections of a woman. The film was designed so that the three segments could be released separately as two-reelers if the feature format proved unsuccessful. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Romance

The 1931 sound reissue of the 1927 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit short, re-released by Walter Lantz Productions after Lantz took over the Oswald series from Walt Disney. The original silent cartoon was fitted with a synchronized music and sound effects track to compete with Disney's sound Mickey Mouse cartoons. Oswald the trolley conductor packs his car with passengers, battles a cow on the tracks, uses a goat to climb a hill, and then loses control on the way down. The reissue was published in the United States between 1929 and 1963 and the copyright was not renewed, placing it in the public domain.

Animation · Short · Comedy

George Pal's Puppetoon short, photographed in three-strip Technicolor, tells the story of Jan and Janette, a young Dutch couple whose windmill country idyll is overrun by an army of mechanical Screwball soldiers — an unmistakable allegory for the Nazi occupation of Pal's native Netherlands. When a thunderstorm rusts the invading machines into scrap, the tulips grow again. A young Ray Harryhausen worked on the film's replacement-animation puppets. Released by Paramount in 1942, it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short and was added to the National Film Registry in 1997. The film entered the public domain because its copyright was not renewed.

Animation · War · Short

A flapper from the wrong side of the tracks falls for the son of her department store's owner, but must prove she's more than just a good time girl. A Vitaphone-synchronized silent comedy starring Colleen Moore, directed by William A. Seiter. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Comedy · Romance

An Army Air Forces short about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black military pilots in American history, made by the First Motion Picture Unit and narrated by Captain Ronald Reagan — the future president's own unit produced the film. It follows Black cadets through flight training at Tuskegee and into combat over Europe with the 332nd Fighter Group, pushing back against the Army's own official skepticism that Black men could fly fighters. Short, pointed, and a remarkable artifact of what the wartime government chose to say on film. As a work of the U.S. federal government, it is in the public domain.

War · Documentary · Short

One of the last and strangest Felix the Cat shorts, directed by Otto Messmer and produced by Pat Sullivan. Felix stays out late on New Year's Eve and gets spectacularly drunk, stumbling home through a surreal nightmare of pink elephants, dancing skeletons, and menacing apparitions before facing the greatest demon of all: his angry wife. Originally a silent film released around 1928, it was reissued by Copley Pictures in 1930 with added sound effects and music. Animation historian John Canemaker called it one of the best Felix films ever made, a final burst of creative energy from a series that would end a few years later. The film is in the public domain.

Animation · Short · Comedy

Charlie Chaplin's first serious drama, written and directed by him as a starring vehicle for his longtime leading lady Edna Purviance—Chaplin himself appears only in a brief, uncredited cameo. Marie St. Clair (Purviance) believes she has been abandoned by her lover Jean and moves to Paris, where she becomes the mistress of wealthy playboy Pierre Revel (Adolphe Menjou). Years later, Jean reappears, and Marie must choose between respectability and the glamorous life she has built. Chaplin's sophisticated approach to adult relationships, his satirical eye for high society, and his rejection of melodramatic conventions stunned audiences and critics. The film was a commercial failure but influenced directors from Lubitsch to Renoir, and is now regarded as one of the great silent dramas. The film is in the public domain.

Drama · Romance · Silent

A pampered millionaire named Alfred Butler goes on a camping trip to toughen up and falls for a mountain girl who has no patience for his softness. To win her, Alfred passes himself off as a famous boxer who happens to share his name, and the impersonation spirals toward a real fight he has no hope of winning. Buster Keaton directed and stars, and the film is one of his more plot-driven features, leaning on mistaken identity rather than pure stunt work. It was Keaton's highest-grossing picture at the box office, even if it is less celebrated today than The General or Sherlock Jr. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2022.

Comedy · Silent

A bookish high school graduate gives a graduation speech condemning athletics, which costs him the girl, who prefers the jock. Ronald follows her to college and tries to win her back by joining every sports team on campus, failing at baseball, track, and rowing in a string of set pieces built around his total lack of athletic ability. When the girl is threatened by the school bully, Ronald finally gets to act instead of fumble, sprinting and pole-vaulting across campus in a rescue that reuses every sport he failed at earlier. James W. Horne directed, with Keaton producing and doing his own stunts, including the pole vault into a second-story window. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Action · Silent

A Buster Keaton short co-directed with Edward F. Cline. Keaton plays a young man who is mistaken for an escaped convict and sentenced to death. After a series of chaotic prison sequences—including a golf game with a noose around his neck—he escapes and tries to rescue his girlfriend from a gang of criminals. The film features some of Keaton's most audacious physical gags, including a scene where he is nearly hanged for real when the prop rope was accidentally replaced with a real one. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Mary Pickford stars in this 1919 silent comedy-drama based on Jean Webster's 1912 novel. An orphan named Judy Abbott is sent to college by a mysterious benefactor she knows only as "Daddy-Long-Legs," on the condition that she never try to meet him. She writes him letters chronicling her new life, falls into a romantic triangle, and eventually discovers that her benefactor is the man she has come to love. Directed by Marshall Neilan, the film was the first under Pickford's new production deal that gave her approval over the final edit, a hard-won concession that paid off: it was one of her biggest hits. The film's blend of comedy, sentiment, and Pickford's irrepressible screen presence made it a favorite with audiences. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Drama · Romance · Silent

A sequel to The Mark of Zorro (1920), with Douglas Fairbanks now playing Don Cesar, the son of the original Zorro, in Spain rather than California. Framed for the murder of a rival archduke, he fakes his death and returns to clear his name and win back the woman he loves. Fairbanks produced and starred, and Donald Crisp directed while also playing Don Cesar's father. The swordplay is elaborate even by Fairbanks's standards, and the film leans into the swashbuckling spectacle that made him the action star of the silent era. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Adventure · Action · Romance · Silent

The last of the fourteen Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Three apparently ordinary music boxes, made by prisoners in Dartmoor and sold at auction, turn out to hide a coded message pointing to a fortune in stolen Bank of England plates. A collector who buys one of the boxes is murdered, and Holmes and Watson race a coolly ruthless woman, Hilda Courtney, to recover the other two before she cracks the code. Patricia Morison plays the villain, one of the series' most memorable, against Rathbone's weary, finally retiring Holmes. Roy William Neill produced and directed his final film before his death later that year. Released in 1946, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Mystery · Crime

The final film of Alexander Dovzhenko's "Ukraine Trilogy," and his last silent film. Earth follows a Ukrainian village through the upheaval of collectivization: the arrival of the first tractor, the resistance of the kulak landowners, and the murder of the young communist Vasyl by a hostile neighbor. Dovzhenko was commissioned to make propaganda for Stalin's farm policy, but what he delivered is a lyrical, almost pantheistic meditation on birth, death, and the soil. The film is built from images, apples in the sun, a farmer's face against the sky, a body laid out in the orchard, that have been quoted by filmmakers for decades. It was banned by Soviet authorities nine days after release. At the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, a poll of critics named it one of the twelve greatest films ever made. Published in 1930, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2026.

Drama · Silent

A Harold Lloyd sound comedy directed by Clyde Bruckman. Lloyd plays Harold Horne, a lowly shoe salesman who stows away on a ship to Hawaii to impress a girl, then must bluff his way through a series of escalating lies about his identity. The film's centerpiece is a thrilling skyscraper-climbing sequence that recalls Lloyd's silent masterpiece Safety Last! (1923), this time with the added complication of sound—Lloyd's screams and gasps amplify the vertiginous terror. Though Lloyd's sound films never achieved the critical reputation of his silent work, Feet First demonstrates that his daredevil physical comedy remained intact in the talkie era. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy

Fleischer Studios' second animated feature, an adaptation of Jonathan Swift's tale of a shipwrecked sailor who washes ashore in Lilliput, a kingdom of tiny people at war with their neighbors. Made to compete with Disney's Snow White, it was only the second American animated feature ever released. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Adventure · Family

A burglar who listens in on police radio to stay a step ahead of the law shoots a Los Angeles officer and becomes the target of a citywide manhunt. The film follows the police investigation step by step, the forensics, the informants, the dead ends, and the final chase through the storm drains under the city. It is loosely based on the real crime spree of Erwin "Machine-Gun" Walker, a former police department employee who terrorized Los Angeles in 1946. Richard Basehart is cold and precise as the killer, and John Alton's cinematography turns the night streets and the underground tunnels into something close to a nightmare. The film is also the unlikely origin of Dragnet: Jack Webb met the production's police technical advisor on set, and that conversation led him to create the radio show. The film entered the public domain due to non-renewal of its copyright.

Crime · Noir

A pair of Scottish rabbits bedevil a gullible American tourist duck named Claude Hopper in this wartime Looney Tunes short. A Norman McCabe-directed Leon Schlesinger production. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Comedy · War

Vincent Price plays an eccentric millionaire who offers five people ten thousand dollars each to spend the night in a haunted house. He locks them in and the scares begin. William Castle was famous for his gimmicks; for this film he arranged for a plastic skeleton to fly over the audience at a key moment. The film is a tight, atmospheric haunted house picture that works on its own without the gimmick. Price is in top form, clearly enjoying himself. The film has a twist ending that holds up. It was remade in 1999, but the original is better.

Horror · Thriller

Confined to the corner with a dunce cap after flubbing a history quiz, Lulu dozes off and dreams of chasing Tubby through the pages of the history book — dodging Indians, meeting pirates, and taking a dip in the Fountain of Youth. One of the best-regarded of Famous Studios' Little Lulu cartoons for Paramount, directed by Bill Tytla with Cecil Roy voicing Lulu and Arnold Stang as Tubby. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Comedy · Family

A 1953 independent drama produced and directed by Hal R. Makelim. John Agar stars as Ray Compton, the son of self-made industrial tycoon J.R. Compton (Edward Arnold, in one of his final roles). Raised on his father's ruthless creed that a man must be hard to succeed, Ray returns home torn between the ruthless empire he's expected to inherit and his conscience — a conflict that comes to a head over his father's treatment of workers and the woman Ray loves. A modest, earnest postwar drama about power and principle, the film is in the public domain.

Drama

King Vidor self-financed this Depression-era drama as a spiritual sequel to *The Crowd*, again following an ordinary young couple — John and Mary Sims (Tom Keene and Karen Morley) — crushed by unemployment. Given a failing farm, they gather a community of displaced tradesmen and try to run it as a cooperative, pooling skills to bring in one last crop. The climax, in which the whole settlement digs a miles-long irrigation ditch in a single night to save the fields, is one of the great sequences of early American cinema — pure rhythmic montage. Made outside the studio system and released through United Artists, the film's copyright was never renewed. It is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance

A pre-Code drama that marked Joan Crawford's transition from flappers to serious roles. She plays Mary Turner, a shopgirl wrongly convicted of theft who, on release, turns the law against those who jailed her through a series of breach-of-promise "heart balm" scams, until she targets the department store owner who ruined her by marrying his son. Sam Wood directed from Bayard Veiller's play Within the Law, with Robert Armstrong and Kent Douglass (in his film debut) supporting. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Drama

Popeye and Bluto run rival taxi services and race across the city to pick up fares, wrecking each other's cabs at every turn. When both drivers compete for the same passenger — Olive Oyl — the feud escalates until spinach decides the outcome. A Famous Studios Popeye cartoon directed by Seymour Kneitel and distributed by Paramount Pictures. The film is in the public domain through non-renewal of copyright.

Animation · Comedy

Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Wimpy land on an island ruled by the boastful Sindbad and his menagerie of giant beasts, and Popeye must square off against Sindbad and his two-headed giant. The first of the Fleischer Studios' two-reel Popeye color specials, made in Stereoptical 3D. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Comedy · Family