Younger folk are now falling for famous black and white movies such as Casablanca and Brief Encounter, according to a poll by LG Electronics this week.
But they shouldn’t stop there. There’s a wealth of less well-known classics out there, just waiting to be discovered.
Many are shown on TV channels such as Talking Pictures. Let me switch on the whirring projector for some of my favourites...
A Hard Day's Night
Filmed at the peak of Beatlemania in 1964, it follows John, Paul, George and Ringo over 36 hours as they prepare for a TV show.
An instant box office and critical success, it was praised for “trying every cinematic gag in the book” and its madcap fantasy inspired copycat movies of other bands and spy film sequences.
Some Like It Hot
This madcap comedy, starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, is about two musicians who disguise themselves as women to escape from Mafia gangsters.
Monroe’s closing line is “Nobody’s perfect!”... but this winner of three Golden Globes, released in 1959, is.
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier’s thriller was adapted again in 2020 but I prefer Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 version, with Laurence Olivier playing the tortured widower Maxim de Winter and Joan Fontaine as the heroine unwise enough to become his second wife after Rebecca’s death in a “boating accident”.
Judith Anderson almost steals the show as scary housekeeper Mrs Danvers.
The One That Got Away
A Second World War film in which the Germans win. Luftwaffe pilot Franz von Werra (Hardy Kruger) was shot down over Britain in 1940 and almost escaped by stealing an RAF plane.
But he did make it to freedom via then-neutral USA, after escaping from a prison train in Canada. In real life, as the epilogue to the 1957 drama records, von Werra died within months of his return.
The L-Shaped Room
Based on Lynne Reid Banks’ novel, Bryan Forbes’ 1962 adaptation is often billed as a kitchen-sink drama but it’s more than that.
An unmarried, pregnant French woman (Leslie Caron) starts an unhappy affair with Toby (Tom Bell) and defies convention by choosing single motherhood.
Is Paris Burning?
A star-studded epic about the liberation of Paris in 1944, released 22 years later. Hitler has ordered the destruction of the French capital as Nazi forces leave but a citizen uprising forces the Germans to surrender.
The film contains real-life footage of the battle, though to my mind the most memorable part is played by Maurice Jarre’s score.
The 39 Steps
Hitchcock’s 1935 adaptation, starring Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll, is the first – and, to my mind, best – version of John Buchan’s adventure novel, with scenes on the Forth railway bridge.
It tells the story of Richard Hannay’s fight to expose a German spy ring, culminating in a coup de theatre in the London Palladium.
I'm Alright, Jack
A wonderful satire on British industrial strife in 1959, when unions were strong and workers struck at the drop of a flat cap. Peter Sellers won a BAFTA for his portrayal of shop steward Fred Kite, who leads a walk-out at a missile factory.
His wife leads a nationwide housewives’ protest against the strike.
Whisky Galore!
Based on a real incident – the wartime wreck of a ship carrying 50,000 cases of whisky off a Scottish island that has run out of Scotch.
The ensuing fight between islanders to plunder the beached vessel and the excise enforcers out to stop them descends into farce in this 1949 Ealing comedy, starring Basil Radford and Joan Greenwood.
The Big Sleep
Humphrey Bogart stars as drawling detective Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as femme fatale Vivian Rutledge.
Howard Hawks’ 1946 adaptation would be just another crime movie with an impossibly convoluted plot and many memorable lines (“dead men are heavier than broken hearts”) were it not for the fascinating Bogie and Bacall dynamic.
Saturday Night & Sunday Morning
Brash young engineering worker Arthur (brilliantly realised by Albert Finney) lives a devil-may-care life of booze and women. “All I want is a good time, all the rest is propaganda” is his motto.
But in Karel Reisz’s 1960 drama, he is caught by steady girlfriend Doreen (Shirley Anne Field), reluctantly settling for domestic bliss.
Closely Observed Trains
My favourite foreign movie is a 1966 Czech comedy which combines satire against authoritarianism with a war drama that ends in tragedy.
It’s about the coming of age of a naive young train despatcher on a rural railway station, whose fumbling efforts to lose his virginity almost end in suicide. Some of the funniest scenes in cinema.
