Curated playlist
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. A real estate secretary named Marion Crane has just stolen forty thousand dollars from her employer and is driving…
- 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 crowd. It is a striking inversion of Shakespeare's play, which ends with those…
- The Day the Earth Stood StillThe Day the Earth Stood Still begins with a flying saucer touching down on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The United States Army surrounds it within moments, soldiers and tanks pressing in from every side. A humanoid figure in a…
- 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. The audience gave it a standing ovation. That night, a silent film was being celebrated at the height…
- Flash Gordon (serial)Flash Gordon arrived on American screens in 1936 as a 13-chapter science-fiction serial. It was the first film adaptation of a comic-strip character who had existed for just two years. Buster Crabbe played the title role, navigating the…
- 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 launches a film-long investigation into the life of Charles Foster Kane, and the…
- 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 pictures, with costumes rented from a shop that mostly outfitted Western movies. The…
- Paths of GloryPaths of Glory opens in 1916, in the trenches of Northern France, with a snare drum playing rhythms that recall wartime newsreels. Stanley Kubrick's 1957 film follows Colonel Dax, a French officer who watches soldiers sent into an…
- 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 weeks it had been screened at the White House, cheered by the entire Supreme…
- 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 Miller is on the noon train. The year is 1952. The film is American. The director is…
- 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. With a budget of $750,000 supplied by Metro chief Joseph Schenck, the picture earned only $474,264 in…
- A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935 film)A Midsummer Night's Dream, Warner Bros.' 1935 adaptation of Shakespeare's comedy, set a record on release that no studio would want. Theaters had contracted to screen the film, then pulled out in unprecedented numbers: 2,971 cancellations,…
- 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 while the Civil War rages around her. Marion Davies plays Gail Loveless, a showgirl…
- 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. Huston believed the two-hour cut he had assembled was the finest work he had ever…