So I've been watching a lot of old movies over the last few years, largely through laserdisc collecting, and I've made threads for my top 10 films of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, but there are other old films I think are worth watching and want to talk about. I made another thread for this, but I feel like that kind of thread might get a bit unwieldy if I let it get too big, so I think I'm going to start a new one of these every 10 films or so. Some of these films will be great, some will be flawed but interesting, and some will be complete messes that are compelling to watch for whatever reason.

Two men on a whim decide to head down toward Mexico. They pick up a hitch-hiker only for him pull a gun on them. Turns out he's a serial killer who wants them to drive him to his escape route. A simple but extremely well executed noir thriller. William Talman is fantastic as the killer. The film is only 70 minutes, but with how much is packed into it, you might be surprised that what you watched was really that short.

And good news: this film is public domain, so it's very easy to find. I recommend this rather nice looking upload from the Library of Congress.

An American smuggler in Europe (Robert Arden) decides that he might be able to make himself a lot of money by blackmailing a rich Eastern European man, Gregory Arkadin (Orson Welles). To his surprise, Mr. Arkadin seems pleased with with this and explains that he has no recollection of his life before 1927 and has been wanting to hire someone to research his background. The result is a globe trotting investigation.

This is one of the many Orson Welles films where he wasn't given the final cut and feels that the film was butchered. It is indeed kind of a mess, but I feel like it still would have been to a degree even in a proper cut. A lot of the early part of the film feels like a crappy B movie, complete with bad, overdubbed dialogue, and the investigation feels a bit rushed and disjointed at times. But Orson Welles' charisma saves every scene he's in, and the film gets better and better as it goes along. I'd say the second half is overall pretty solid. Not where I'd recommend starting with Orson Welles, but still worth seeking out.

I probably should have expected Clint Eastwood's favorite movie would be this dark and unsettling. The guy made Unforgiven, after all, and this is at least as much of a deconstruction of the fantasy of the western as that film is. Word comes to town that a farmer has been shot and his cattle taken, so an angry mob forms up, calls itself a "posse," and decides that they're going to bring justice themselves, the slow court system be damned. A great film in a decade of great films, and something I'm surprised got made in the Hollywood system of the time.

Good news is that someone uploaded it to Youtube, so you can just watch it here. And I'm sure glad someone did, as my LD had trouble playing and froze up about 48 minutes in.

An IRA agent who escaped from jail gets injured in a robbery, and things go south from there. Starts off as largely a thriller, but the latter half is more about the people our dying protagonist runs into, and whether you think this film is good or great is going to largely depend on how much that second half grabs you. That part didn't quite work for me, but for those it does work for, this is sometimes considered Carol Reed's true masterpiece, above The Third Man. This might be for you if you're really into how Robert Altman likes to flesh out the nobodies in his films. In any case, this is an extremely well directed downer of a noir film filled with grey morality.

Edward G. Robinson is a college professor in a mid life crisis who hooks up with a much younger woman who he first sees in a painting, but he's attacked by her lover and kills him in self defense. But even a self defense killing could ruin his reputation, so he decides it's a good idea to try covering up the scene and hiding the body. The resulting crime and investigation often feels like a Columbo episode, and I mean that in a good way. A suspenseful, influential noir that for some is one of the defining works of the genre.

And the good news is that this is another public domain film, so you can just watch it on Youtube here.

I got myself a laserdisc player a few years ago to stream and preserve some interactive disks, then I started collecting anime on it, then I decided to use it to check out some of those old films I'd always heard I'm supposed to watch, but never did. I was legitimately surprised by how much I got out of this, to the point where it's starting to make me angry that it's hard to find films this old on mainstream streaming services. In any case, I'm far from a film scholar, and what I've seen isn't close to exhaustive (for instance, I haven't yet gotten around to The Magnificent Ambersons, though I have a copy coming in the mail), but over the next day or two, I want to share which movies of that decade I think are worth seeing and why.

So the back of the LD sleeve opens its description of the film with "When you double cross a double-crosser, it's a CRISS CROSS," which is exactly the kind of cheese that got me interested. What I found was a damn well constructed, well directed heist film. Burt Lancaster stars as an armored truck driver who decides its a good idea to team up with a mob boss to rob his own truck in order to win back his ex-wife, who's now married to said mob boss. Do I need to tell you it goes poorly? This sort of silly plotline played straight enough that it becomes a tragedy is one of the things that makes classic noir so compelling to me.

Three homeless men try to turn their lives around through setting up an illegal gold panning operation in Mexico, doing their best to avoid attention from the authorities, criminals, and other wannabe prospectors, only to find their greatest threat is each other. A cynical, often tense non-traditional Western starring one of the greatest actors of his day at his peak. Watching Humphrey Bogart become increasingly unhinged is just great.

Making a film about people coming back from the war in 1946 was a pretty obvious way to cash in on the zeitgeist, both in terms of box office draw and Oscar wins (and it sounds like work on it started before the war even ended), but when they pull it off this well, who cares? The story follows three men, one a wealthy banker who was a low rank soldier, a poor man who became a decorated war hero, and a man who lost his hands, but has worked through his disability enough that he doesn't really think it's a big deal anymore, but is afraid everyone else might. Over the course of the film, the banker has trouble adjusting back to the mindset of a capitalist, the war hero spirals into despair as the government and society fail to do anything to get him out of the hole he thought he escaped, and the last man pitied by his friends and family and treated as if he can't do anything by himself. It shouldn't surprise you at this point that the title of this movie is ironic, and while a big Hollywood film was never going to really question the military-industrial complex or capitalism in an real, in-depth way, nor would it let a film like this have anything other than a happy ending, this film still pulls off a lot.

Fun fact: Harold Russell had actually lost his hands in a dynamite accident on a military base. Despite the fact that he had no training as an actor, he won wide praise for his performance in this film. To the point where he got nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars. Possibly because they knew that no one in Hollywood was going to hire a guy with no hands in a major, non-gimmicky roll again, and he had seemingly no chance of winning against professionals, they also gave him an honorary Oscar for "bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans through the medium of motion pictures." After he was awarded this pity Oscar, he then won Best Supporting Actor and got a standing ovation. It's still the only time anyone has been awarded two Oscars for the same role in one film.

An insurance salesman falls in love with one of his potential clients and decides to help her murder her husband for the insurance money. Billy Wilder films tend to have stylized, cheesy dialogue, but somehow, once one of his films pulls you in, it somehow flows. Like seriously, lines like:

“It's just like the first time I came here, isn't it? We were talking about automobile insurance, only you were thinking about murder. And I was thinking about that anklet.”

or

“They may think it's twice as safe because there are two of them. But it isn't twice as safe. It's ten times twice as dangerous. They've committed a murder.”

just work in context. Maybe it's because everyone tries so hard to sell it that you can't help yourself from buying. In any case, this is often considered one of the best examples of film noir, and I don't disagree.