Welcome to The Greatest Movies You've Never Seen

I love the public domain. The idea that works of a certain age can be freely remixed, adapted, and resold is something that appeals to me immensely. You may not think about it, but it's practically impossible to live a day without encountering something inspired by or directly from the vast body of work known as the Public Domain. Wannabe young princesses watch Disney films based on fairy tales written down by Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault, like The Little Mermaid and Cinderella. Their older siblings go to school and receive classic books to read such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Frankenstein. Then they might head to a movie theater over the weekend to catch a new superhero movie featuring Thor, a character originally from ancient Norse mythology. (And let us not forget the immortal classic Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, taking ideas not just from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, but also presumably from George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.)

So what am I going to be doing with the vast library of the public domain? I'm going to be taking a look at the great public domain movies in existence.

Okay, I'll admit that "great public domain movies" is a bit of an oxymoron. The only movies guaranteed to be in the public domain are those made before 1923, and while most of the best books ever written were published before 1923, the movie industry was still just getting started at that time. For movies made after that to go into the public domain, the copyright owners generally had to let the copyright expire. This led to a lot of shoddy works ending up in the public domain because the owners didn't care about them, and few really good works being viciously guarded from ever going into the public domain. (Cough cough Disney, cough cough.) Mystery Science Theater 3000 built an entire TV show around all the bad public domain films in existence.

However, despite all this, there are some superb films--both before and after 1923--in the public domain. Night of the Living Dead, for instance, fell into the public domain upon its release, simply because the distributors failed to put a copyright notice on the title card. (Works today do not need an explicit copyright notice to be copyrighted.) Night of the Living Dead may be the most famous film now in the public domain, but others, like Pygmalion and Cyrano de Bergerac, have even won Academy Awards.
(The most famous film ever to be in the public domain was It's a Wonderful Life, which gained its popularity after falling into the public domain and hence becoming easy material for low-budget TV stations to pass the time with around Christmastime. Through some convoluted proceedings, though, it ended up back under copyright. Maybe I'll write a blog post about that story later.)

There are other public domain films that, while not masterpieces of cinema, are nonetheless fascinating because of their origin, circumstances, and making.
Max Fleisher's Gulliver's Travels, for instance, was created as a direct response to Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs--a feature-length film rushed through production to compete with Disney's studio.

Likewise, the 1930s Sweeny Todd is not a particularly beloved movie that I know of, but is interesting as an early adaption of a story that would someday be adapted into a Broadway musical and Johnny Depp film, as well as showcasing a performance by the little-remembered once-iconic cinematic villain Tod Slaughter.

These are the movies I'll be researching and talking about on The Greatest Movies You've Never Seen, and I hope you'll join me for this exciting journey.
Until next time...

Ben Wesley