Felix E. Feist

The first great disaster movie. When unexplained earthquakes unleash a catastrophic storm and tidal wave that obliterates New York City — footage later recycled into serials and films for decades — lawyer Martin Webster (Sidney Blackmer) is separated from his family and left to survive in the ruins. On a devastated coast he meets swimmer Claire Arlington (Peggy Shannon), and the two must contend with looters and lawless survivors in a Hobbesian world. Produced by RKO and directed by Felix E. Feist, its miniature work and destruction sequences were astonishing for 1933. The film's copyright was not renewed; it is in the public domain in the United States.

Sci-Fi · Drama

Kirk Douglas plays a timber baron who arrives in California's redwood country in 1900 planning to strip it bare, only to run up against a Quaker community whose land sits on the biggest trees. The land scheme he builds with the help of a saloon singer and a treacherous foreman slowly collapses as he falls for the widow who leads the settlers and starts to see what the forest is worth. Directed by Felix E. Feist for Warner Bros and shot in Technicolor among the real redwoods, it is a conservation western a generation before that was a genre. It entered the public domain after its copyright was never renewed.

Western · Drama

A wealthy woman in the middle of a divorce shoots her husband, and calls the one person she trusts to help her cover it up: her boyfriend, a San Francisco police lieutenant. He helps her hide the body, and then has to keep the investigation away from the crime, which is hard because the detective assigned to the case is his own younger brother. Lee J. Cobb plays the lieutenant who bends the law for love and then watches the walls close in, and Jane Wyatt is the woman who pulls him down with her. The film was shot on location in San Francisco, and the city's hills and stairways become part of the chase. It was the first independent production of Phoenix Films, run by Jack M. Warner, the son of Warner Bros. chief Jack L. Warner. The film entered the public domain due to non-renewal of its copyright.

Crime · Noir