Best Classic Movies
by jadomaha | created - 11 Aug 2020 | updated - 10 months ago | PublicMovies up until 1980
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1. Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
Passed | 110 min | Drama, Film-Noir, Romance
A writer falls in love with a young socialite and they're soon married, but her obsessive love for him threatens to be the undoing of them both as well as everyone around them.
Director: John M. Stahl | Stars: Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price
Votes: 14,786
2. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Approved | 170 min | Drama, Romance, War
Three World War II veterans, two of them traumatized or disabled, return home to the American midwest to discover that they and their families have been irreparably changed.
Director: William Wyler | Stars: Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, Fredric March, Teresa Wright
Votes: 70,600 | Gross: $23.65M
3. Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
Passed | 81 min | Crime, Drama, Mystery
A one-armed stranger comes to a tiny town possessing a terrible past they want to keep secret, by violent means if necessary.
Director: John Sturges | Stars: Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Anne Francis, Dean Jagger
Votes: 24,269
4. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
PG | 161 min | Adventure, Drama, War
British POWs are forced to build a railway bridge across the river Kwai for their Japanese captors in occupied Burma, not knowing that the allied forces are planning a daring commando raid through the jungle to destroy it.
Director: David Lean | Stars: William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Sessue Hayakawa
Votes: 233,447 | Gross: $44.91M
5. Peyton Place (1957)
Approved | 157 min | Crime, Drama, Mystery
A peaceful New England town hides secrets and scandals.
Director: Mark Robson | Stars: Lana Turner, Lee Philips, Lloyd Nolan, Arthur Kennedy
Votes: 6,620 | Gross: $25.60M
6. An Affair to Remember (1957)
Not Rated | 115 min | Drama, Romance
A couple falls in love and agrees to meet in six months at the Empire State Building - but will it happen?
Director: Leo McCarey | Stars: Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Richard Denning, Neva Patterson
Votes: 33,094
7. Kings Row (1942)
Passed | 127 min | Drama
The dark side and hypocrisy of provincial American life is seen through the eyes of five children as they grow to adulthood at the turn of the century.
Director: Sam Wood | Stars: Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, Ronald Reagan, Betty Field
Votes: 5,044
8. Storm Warning (1950)
Approved | 93 min | Crime, Drama, Film-Noir
Marsha Mitchell, a traveling dress model, stops in a southern town to see her sister who has married a Ku Klux Klansman. Marsha witnesses the KKK commit a murder and helps District Attorney Burt Rainey bring the criminals to justice.
Director: Stuart Heisler | Stars: Ginger Rogers, Ronald Reagan, Doris Day, Steve Cochran
Votes: 2,665
9. Sabata (1969)
PG-13 | 111 min | Action, Drama, Western
A master gunfighter sides with a banjo-playing drifter and a Mexican tramp to foil the dignitaries of Daugherty, who want to use stolen army money to buy land that the railroad will cross.
Director: Gianfranco Parolini | Stars: Lee Van Cleef, William Berger, Ignazio Spalla, Aldo Canti
Votes: 5,651 | Gross: $0.23M
10. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)
G | 144 min | Adventure, Family, Fantasy
A down-on-his-luck inventor turns a broken-down Grand Prix car into a fancy vehicle for his children, and then they go off on a magical fantasy adventure to save their grandfather in a far-off land.
Director: Ken Hughes | Stars: Dick Van Dyke, Sally Ann Howes, Lionel Jeffries, Benny Hill
Votes: 50,742 | Gross: $7.50M
11. Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
G | 181 min | Drama, Family, Musical
In pre-revolutionary Russia, a Jewish peasant with traditional values contends with marrying off three of his daughters with modern romantic ideals while growing anti-Semitic sentiment threatens his village.
Director: Norman Jewison | Stars: Topol, Norma Crane, Leonard Frey, Molly Picon
Votes: 47,907 | Gross: $80.50M
12. A Bridge Too Far (1977)
PG | 175 min | Drama, History, War
Operation Market Garden, September 1944: The Allies attempt to capture several strategically important bridges in the Netherlands in the hope of breaking the German lines.
Director: Richard Attenborough | Stars: Sean Connery, Ryan O'Neal, Michael Caine, Laurence Olivier
Votes: 61,599 | Gross: $50.80M
13. The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
PG | 129 min | Adventure, Drama, War
In 1880s India, two former British soldiers decide to set themselves up as Kings in Kafiristan, a land where no white man has set foot since Alexander the Great.
Director: John Huston | Stars: Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, Saeed Jaffrey
Votes: 52,066
14. Sunset Blvd. (1950)
Passed | 110 min | Drama, Film-Noir
A screenwriter develops a dangerous relationship with a faded film star determined to make a triumphant return.
Director: Billy Wilder | Stars: William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson
Votes: 236,599
15. Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949)
Approved | 93 min | Comedy, Musical, Romance
Two turn-of-the-century baseball players, who work in vaudeville during the off-season, run into trouble with their team's new female owner and a gambler who doesn't want them to win the pennant.
Director: Busby Berkeley | Stars: Frank Sinatra, Esther Williams, Gene Kelly, Betty Garrett
Votes: 4,077
16. The African Queen (1951)
PG | 105 min | Adventure, Drama, Romance
In WWI East Africa, a gin-swilling Canadian riverboat captain is persuaded by a strait-laced English missionary to undertake a trip up a treacherous river and use his boat to attack a German gunship.
Director: John Huston | Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Robert Morley, Peter Bull
Votes: 84,351 | Gross: $0.54M
17. Inherit the Wind (1960)
Passed | 128 min | Biography, Drama, History
Based on a real-life case in 1925; two great lawyers argue the case for, and against, a Tennessee science teacher accused of the crime of teaching Darwin's theory of evolution.
Director: Stanley Kramer | Stars: Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Gene Kelly, Dick York
Votes: 32,790
18. Now, Voyager (1942)
Passed | 117 min | Drama, Romance
A frumpy spinster blossoms under therapy and becomes an elegant, independent woman.
Director: Irving Rapper | Stars: Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Gladys Cooper
Votes: 19,028
19. Strangers on a Train (1951)
PG | 101 min | Crime, Drama, Film-Noir
A psychopathic man tries to forcibly persuade a tennis star to agree to his theory that two strangers can get away with murder by submitting to his plan to kill the other's most-hated person.
Director: Alfred Hitchcock | Stars: Farley Granger, Robert Walker, Ruth Roman, Leo G. Carroll
Votes: 141,092 | Gross: $7.63M
20. The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
Not Rated | 99 min | Comedy, Drama, Romance
Two employees at a gift shop can barely stand each other, without realizing that they are falling in love through the post as each other's anonymous pen pal.
Director: Ernst Lubitsch | Stars: Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Frank Morgan, Joseph Schildkraut
Votes: 38,532 | Gross: $0.20M
21. Stalag 17 (1953)
Not Rated | 120 min | Comedy, Drama, War
After two Americans are killed while escaping from a German P.O.W. camp in World War II, the barracks black marketeer, J.J. Sefton, is suspected of being an informer.
Director: Billy Wilder | Stars: William Holden, Don Taylor, Otto Preminger, Robert Strauss
Votes: 58,832
22. Heaven Can Wait (1943)
Passed | 112 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy
An old roué arrives in Hades to review his life with Satan, who will rule on his eligibility to enter the Underworld.
Director: Ernst Lubitsch | Stars: Gene Tierney, Don Ameche, Charles Coburn, Marjorie Main
Votes: 12,378
23. The Public Enemy (1931)
Passed | 83 min | Crime, Drama
An Irish-American street punk tries to make it big in the world of organized crime.
Director: William A. Wellman | Stars: James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Edward Woods, Joan Blondell
Votes: 23,032 | Gross: $1.01M
24. The Petrified Forest (1936)
Passed | 82 min | Drama, Thriller
A waitress, a hobo and a bank robber get mixed up at a lonely diner in the desert.
Director: Archie Mayo | Stars: Leslie Howard, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Genevieve Tobin
Votes: 14,945
25. The Shootist (1976)
PG | 100 min | Drama, Romance, Western
A dying gunfighter spends his last days looking for a way to die with a minimum of pain and a maximum of dignity.
Director: Don Siegel | Stars: John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, James Stewart
Votes: 26,846
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