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Classic Cinema

Classic films, silent and sound, in the public domain in the US and free to watch online. The silent films play without music (except Sunrise, with its 1927 recorded score), as copies with newer scores have their own copyright. Some run over 2 hours, so mind your data on a phone.

  1. Metropolis

    1927 · Germany · Fritz Lang · silent, about 2 hours 25 minutes in this copy

    Fritz Lang’s science-fiction epic, from the story by Thea von Harbou: a city of the future where the rich live high in the towers and the workers tend the machines far below, the master’s son who falls for a young woman who preaches to the workers, and an inventor who builds a machine in her likeness. It opened in Berlin on January 10, 1927. This copy is the shorter American version, “adapted by Channing Pollock” with new English title cards and new names for the characters (Joh Fredersen is John Masterman, his son Freder is Eric, Maria is Mary), printed from a copy preserved by the National Library of Australia.

    Watch free on the Internet Archive

  2. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

    1927 · USA · F. W. Murnau · silent, about 95 minutes, with its 1927 recorded music and sound effects

    “This song of the Man and his Wife is of no place and every place,” its opening title says: two country sweethearts, a sophisticated woman from the city who comes between them, and a near tragedy, from a story by Hermann Sudermann. William Fox brought Murnau from Germany to lend his studio prestige, and for his first American film Murnau built a village on Lake Arrowhead and a city on the Fox lot. It came out with a recorded Movietone score, with crowd noises, bells and a storm. At the first Academy Awards it won for Unique and Artistic Production and for its cinematography, and Janet Gaynor’s Best Actress award was partly for this role.

    Watch free on Wikimedia Commons

  3. The Wind

    1928 · USA · Victor Sjöström · silent, about 75 minutes

    Lillian Gish as Letty, a young woman from Virginia who comes west to live with her cousin on the arid, windswept plains of Texas, where she faces a jealous wife, insistent suitors and a wind that never stops. Gish pitched the film to MGM’s Irving Thalberg herself, and Sjöström (credited as Seastrom) shot it in the Mojave Desert in heat over 100°F, with airplane engines whipping up the sand. It was the last silent film for both of them. On the National Film Registry since 1993. This copy is from a 2007 DVD, without the DVD’s newer music.

    Watch free on the Internet Archive

Sources

Film details are from these sources and from the films’ own credits, and the copies’ histories from their Internet Archive records.