Fay Wray

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

When corpses drained of blood begin appearing in a small European village, the townspeople suspect a vampire. The local police chief doubts it, but the village doctor insists the supernatural is real, and suspicion falls on a simple-minded young man who keeps bats as pets. The Vampire Bat is an early sound horror film made to cash in on the success of Dracula and Frankenstein, and it borrows freely from both. It stars Lionel Atwill as the doctor, Fay Wray as his assistant, Melvyn Douglas as the skeptical policeman, and Dwight Frye, fresh off Renfield in Dracula, as the accused simpleton. The film is in the public domain because it was published without a proper copyright notice.

Horror

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

A pre-Code proto-noir directed by Josef von Sternberg, notable for its pioneering use of early sound technology and expressionistic visuals. George Bancroft plays Thunderbolt Jim Lang, a condemned gangster on death row who plots to kill the young man (Richard Arlen) in the next cell for stealing his girlfriend (Fay Wray). Bancroft received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor at the second Academy Awards ceremony in 1930. The screenplay was written by Jules Furthman with dialogue by Herman J. Mankiewicz. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Crime · Drama