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Underworld

Josef von Sternberg
1927 • 81 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #529 Edition: Collector’s Sets

Josef von Sternberg’s riveting breakthrough is widely considered the film that launched the American gangster genre as we know it.

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The Last Command

Josef von Sternberg
1928 • 88 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #530 Edition: Collector’s Sets

Emil Jannings won the first best actor Academy Award for his performance as a sympathetic tyrant: an exiled Russian general turned Hollywood extra who lands a role playing a version of his former czarist self, bringing about his emotional downfall.

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The Private Life of Henry VIII

Alexander Korda
1933 • 96 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Charles Laughton gulps beer and chomps on mutton, in his first of many iconic screen roles, as King Henry VIII, the ultimate anti-husband. Alexander Korda’s first major international success is a raucous, entertaining, even poignant peek into the boudoirs of the infamous king and his six wives.

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Pygmalion

Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard
1938 • 96 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #85 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Cranky Professor Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard) takes a bet that he can turn Cockney guttersnipe Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller) into a “proper lady” in a mere six months in this delightful comedy of bad manners, based on the play by George Bernard Shaw.

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Stagecoach

John Ford
1939 • 96 minutes • 1.37:1 • United States
Spine: #516 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Hulu Plus, iTunes

This is where it all started. John Ford’s smash hit and enduring masterpiece Stagecoach revolutionized the western, elevating it from B movie to the A-list.

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The Thief of Bagdad

Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell and Tim Whelan
1940 • 106 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #431 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus

Prince Ahmad, cast out of Bagdad by the nefarious Jaffar, joins forces with the scrappy thief Abu to win back his royal place and the heart of a princess in Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Bagdad, an eye-popping special-effects pioneer and one of the most spectacular fantasy films ever made.

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Rebecca

Alfred Hitchcock
1940 • 130 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #135 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets

In Hitchcock’s romantic, suspenseful, elegant film, a young woman believes her every dream has come true when her whirlwind romance with the dashing Maxim de Winter culminates in marriage. But she soon realizes that Rebecca, her husband’s late first wife, haunts the de Winter mansion, Manderley.

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49th Parallel

Michael Powell
1941 • 123 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #376 Edition: DVD

A Nazi U-boat crew, headed by the ruthless Eric Portman, is stranded in Canada during the thick of World War II in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s quick-witted wartime thriller, 49th Parallel.

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That Hamilton Woman

Alexander Korda
1941 • 125 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #487 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus

Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars of the late eighteenth century, That Hamilton Woman is a gripping account of the scandalous adulterous affair between the British Royal Navy officer Lord Horatio Nelson (Laurence Olivier) and the renowned beauty Emma, Lady Hamilton (Vivien Leigh).

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Spellbound

Alfred Hitchcock
1945 • 111 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #136 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets

When the mysterious Dr. Anthony Edwardes (Gregory Peck) becomes the new chief of staff at her institution, the bookish and detached Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) plummets into a whirlwind of tangled identities and feverish psychoanalysis. Spellbound is classic Hitchcock.

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Great Expectations

David Lean
1946 • 118 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #31 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets

One of the great translations of literature into film, David Lean’s Great Expectations brings Charles Dickens’s masterpiece to robust on-screen life.

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Black Narcissus

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1947 • 101 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #93 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, iTunes

This explosive work about the conflict between the spirit and the flesh is the epitome of the sensuous style of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

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Bicycle Thieves

Vittorio De Sica
1948 • 89 minutes • 1.33:1 • Italy
Spine: #374 Edition: DVD

Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves, directed by Vittorio De Sica, defined an era in cinema.

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The Red Shoes

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1948 • 133 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #44 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, iTunes

The Red Shoes, the singular fantasia from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is cinema’s quintessential backstage drama, as well as one of the most glorious Technicolor feasts ever concocted for the screen.

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Hamlet

Laurence Olivier
1948 • 153 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #82 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, iTunes

Winner of four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor, Sir Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet continues to be the most compelling version of Shakespeare’s beloved tragedy.

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The Naked City

Jules Dassin
1948 • 96 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #380 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus

Master noir craftsman Jules Dassin’s dazzling police procedural The Naked City was shot entirely on location in New York. As influenced by Italian neorealism as American crime fiction, this double Academy Award winner remains a benchmark for naturalism in noir.

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The Third Man

Carol Reed
1949 • 104 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #64 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets

Pulp novelist Holly Martins travels to shadowy, postwar Vienna, only to find himself investigating the mysterious death of an old friend, black-market opportunist Harry Lime—and thus begins this legendary tale of love, deception, and murder.

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Rashomon

Akira Kurosawa
1950 • 88 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Spine: #138 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes

A riveting psychological thriller that investigates the nature of truth and the meaning of justice Rashomon is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made.

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Forbidden Games

René Clément
1952 • 86 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Spine: #318 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets

A timeless evocation of childhood innocence corrupted, René Clément’s mythical and heartbreakingly real Forbidden Games tells the story of a young girl orphaned by war and the farm boy she joins in a fantastical world of macabre play.

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La strada

Federico Fellini
1954 • 108 minutes • 1.33:1 • Italy
Spine: #219 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Federico Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina plays Gelsomina, a naive girl sold into the employ of a brutal strongman in a traveling circus, in this poetic fable of love and cruelty, winner of the 1956 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

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Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto

Hiroshi Inagaki
1954 • 93 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Spine: #14 Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes

In the first part of the epic Samurai Trilogy, Toshiro Mifune thunders onto the screen as the iconic title character.

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Written on the Wind

Douglas Sirk
1956 • 99 minutes • 1.77:1 • United States
Spine: #96 Edition: DVD

Bathed in lurid Technicolor, melodrama maestro Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind is the stylishly debauched tale of a Texas oil magnate brought down by the excesses of his spoiled offspring.

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The Red Balloon

Albert Lamorisse
1956 • 34 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes

Albert Lamorisse’s exquisite The Red Balloon remains one of the most beloved children’s films of all time. In this deceptively simple, nearly wordless tale, a young boy discovers a stray balloon, which seems to have a mind of its own, on the streets of Paris.

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Nights of Cabiria

Federico Fellini
1957 • 110 minutes • 1.33:1 • Italy
Spine: #49 Edition: DVD

Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, Nights of Cabiria is the tragic story of a naive prostitute searching for true love in the seediest sections of Rome.

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Mon oncle

Jacques Tati
1958 • 116 minutes • 1.37:1 • France
Spine: #111 Edition: DVD

Slapstick prevails when Jacques Tati’s eccentric hero Monsieur Hulot is let loose in the ultramodern home of his brother-in-law, and in an antiseptic factory that manufactures plastic hose. Tati directs and stars in the second entry of the Hulot series, a delightful satire of mechanized living.

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