Old Movies.

I don’t watch nearly as many television shows or series as I once did. I tend to watch movies. That’s partly because I would watch the first season of a show only to find it cancelled, and that gets tedious to learn about a world that never gets to finish its story. With a film, even a bad film, there are no meddlesome executives that can stop the film part-way through.

To find a steady stream of films worth watching, I tend to rely on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), as the other movie channels I have access to have more time-limited offerings, where TCM draws on a larger back-catalog. I recently watched The Sound of Music for the first time, for example.

I’m not sure why the movie channels I subscribe to don’t run as many film choices. Some of it is when I grew up. The films on TCM are from before I was born, so my chances of having watched them is low. The films on movie channels tend to be either new or from the period I was alive, and that latter set I’ve seen many of.

But watching old movies can be comforting. They were made during a period when the shared values were better known, even if they weren’t better practiced. Sometimes you get a nice dose of stand-up-for-democracy. I can’t recall a new film with that in it, but I don’t see as many of the new films so I can’t say they aren’t there.

You learn things watching old films. Bits of lingo, for sure. Or that if you build a bank so it has a rat infestation, the rats disappearing can be a clue there’s a robbery attempt in progress. (The Day They Robbed the Bank of England) Things like that. Practical ideas.

One drawback to finding older films are that it can be harder to recognize which films are good. Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t have as good data about older fare, so you rely more on the blurb to decide if it’s to-taste.

Anyway, here’s a list of ten old movies I liked:

1. Shanghai Express (1932)
2. It Happened Tomorrow (1944)
3. Ikiru (生きる) (1952)
4. King Rat (1965)
5. Le Samouraï (1967)
6. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
7. Get Carter (1971)
8. Scarecrow (1973)
9. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974)
10. Three Days of the Condor (1975)