Curated category
American black-and-white films
- Psycho (1960 film)Psycho, the 1960 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, opens on a specific Friday: December the Eleventh, in Phoenix, Arizona.
- Othello (1951 film)Orson Welles's Othello opens not with a battle or a wedding but with a funeral. Two bodies are carried in procession while Iago hangs in an iron cage above…
- The Day the Earth Stood StillIn 1951, a flying saucer landed on the National Mall in Washington D.C. The United States Army surrounded it with tanks and soldiers.
- City LightsCity Lights opened on the 30th of January 1931 at the Los Angeles Theater, with Albert Einstein and his wife sitting as guests of honor.
- Flash Gordon (serial)Alex Raymond launched the Flash Gordon comic strip in 1934, introducing readers to a hero who would soon conquer cinema.
- Citizen KaneCitizen Kane opens on a dying man in a vast Florida mansion called Xanadu, clutching a snow globe as he whispers one word: "Rosebud." That single utterance…
- Macbeth (1948 film)Orson Welles shot Macbeth in 23 days. Not 23 weeks, not 23 months. Twenty-three days to film an entire Shakespeare tragedy, on sets borrowed from cowboy…
- Paths of GloryPaths of Glory opens in 1916, in the trenches of Northern France, with a snare drum playing rhythms that recall wartime newsreels.
- The Birth of a NationThe Birth of a Nation arrived in American theaters in 1915 and immediately changed what cinema could do. D. W. Griffith directed this silent epic, and within…
- High NoonHigh Noon opens on a town marshal who has just gotten married and is minutes away from a peaceful retirement when word arrives that a killer named Frank…
- The General (1926 film)The General, released in 1926, was Buster Keaton's most ambitious film and, at the time, his most catastrophic financial disappointment.
- A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935 film)Max Reinhardt arrived in the United States as a refugee from Nazi Austria before directing his 1934 stage production at the Hollywood Bowl.
- Operator 13Operator 13 is a 1934 American film that asks its audience to believe one woman can be both a spy and a romantic lead, both a fugitive and a heroine, all…
- The Red Badge of Courage (1951 film)The Red Badge of Courage, the 1951 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer war film directed by John Huston, arrived in theaters having already survived a war of its own.