Monte Blue

Bad Man of Deadwood is a 1941 Republic Pictures western directed by Joseph Kane, starring Roy Rogers and George "Gabby" Hayes. Rogers plays sharpshooter Brett Starr, who rolls into the town of Deadwood with Professor Blackstone's traveling medicine show, alongside singer Sally Payne. The show's tuneful pitch gets a hostile reception from the crooked businessmen who run the town and the hired guns who enforce their rule, so Starr sticks around to help the townsfolk — including a reform-minded judge's daughter — break the gang's grip. A classic singing-cowboy oater from Rogers's peak Republic years, the film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Western · Music

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

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 silent comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch for Warner Bros. Dr. Paul Giraud (Monte Blue), a respectable Parisian physician, and his wife Suzanne (Patsy Ruth Miller) become entangled in a web of romantic misunderstandings when a flirtatious dancer and her husband move into their apartment building. The film is a showcase for the "Lubitsch Touch"—the director's trademark blend of sophisticated wit, sexual innuendo, and elegant visual storytelling. The famous dance sequence, where the characters' increasingly frantic movements mirror their emotional confusion, is one of Lubitsch's most celebrated silent set pieces. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Ernst Lubitsch's first American film for Warner Bros. is the crystalline comedy of manners that critics would later call the "Lubitsch Touch" in its purest early form. Around a circle of suspected and real infidelities in Vienna, Lubitsch suggests everything and states nothing, letting a glance, a closed door, or a misplaced glove carry the joke. Florence Vidor plays a wife whose faith in her husband is tested by the scheming of her unhappily married friend, and Adolphe Menjou is the physician at the center of the misunderstandings. The film was a hit and established Lubitsch as a Hollywood director of sophisticated comedy. He remade it as the musical One Hour with You (1932). The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Comedy · Romance · Silent