The 20 Best Public Domain Movies You Can Watch Free Tonight

Howard Hawks took a stage play about two male reporters, made one of them a woman — the star reporter ex-wife of a scheming editor — and turned it into the fastest comedy ever put on film. Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell talk over each other so relentlessly that Hawks had the dialogue written with deliberate overlaps. Eighty years on, most modern comedies still feel slow beside it.

Buster Keaton plays a Southern railroad engineer whose locomotive — and girlfriend — are stolen by Union spies, and who chases them across enemy territory more or less single-handed. Every stunt is real, including a genuine train crashing through a burning bridge. Its reputation has only grown; it now routinely ranks among the greatest films of the silent era.

George A. Romero shot it in and around Pittsburgh on a shoestring budget, and in the process invented the modern zombie: slow, relentless, and hungry. Seven strangers barricade themselves in a farmhouse while the dead close in. Its casting of Duane Jones, a Black actor, as a capable lead who is never defined by his race was quietly radical in 1968, and its ending still lands like a blow.

F. W. Murnau’s unauthorised version of Dracula changed the names and very nearly got away with it; a court ordered every print destroyed, and the film survived only because copies had already spread abroad. Max Schreck’s Count Orlok — bald, rat-toothed, all fingers and shadow — is still the most frightening vampire in cinema, and most of the genre’s visual grammar starts here.

Audrey Hepburn plays a widow in Paris discovering that her late husband stole a fortune, and that everyone around her wants it back — including the charming stranger played by Cary Grant, whose name seems to change every twenty minutes. Stanley Donen’s film is often called the best Hitchcock movie Hitchcock never made: a romantic thriller with real wit, real suspense and glorious 1960s colour.

Made by the poverty-row studio PRC in a matter of days, Edgar G. Ulmer’s film follows a hitchhiking piano player into a chain of disasters that fate seems to have arranged personally. Ann Savage’s performance as the woman who picks him apart is one of the most ferocious in noir. It was added to the National Film Registry in 1992 — the rare B-movie that turned out to be a masterpiece.

A cinema projectionist who dreams of being a detective falls asleep and walks straight into the film he is screening, where the cuts keep changing the world around him. Keaton’s special effects were done in-camera, and nobody has fully explained some of them since. At around forty-five minutes, it is also the perfect introduction to silent comedy for anyone who thinks they don’t like silent films.

Orson Welles directs himself as a Nazi war criminal hiding in plain sight as a schoolteacher in a sleepy Connecticut town, and Edward G. Robinson plays the investigator on his trail. It is Welles at his most commercial, but his eye for a composition never switches off — and it was the first Hollywood feature to include documentary footage of the concentration camps.

Harold Lloyd dangling from the hands of a clock high above a Los Angeles street is one of the most famous images in all of cinema, and seeing the whole climb in context is far more nerve-wracking than any still suggests. The build-up is a warm, funny story about a small-town boy pretending to be a big-city success; the payoff is twenty minutes of pure vertigo.

Edward G. Robinson plays a meek cashier and Sunday painter who falls for a young woman and is systematically fleeced by her and her boyfriend. Fritz Lang had remade Jean Renoir’s La Chienne, and his version is so bleak that it ran into trouble with local censors. It is one of the darkest films Hollywood released in the 1940s, and one of the best.

A laid-off newspaper columnist invents a letter from a fictional “John Doe” who plans to protest the state of the world by jumping off City Hall — and then has to hire a real man to play him when the stunt goes national. Frank Capra, Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck turn it into a surprisingly sharp film about media manipulation that feels more relevant every year.

The original, and in some ways still the most affecting. Janet Gaynor is the farm girl who becomes a Hollywood star; Fredric March is the fading actor who makes her and then comes apart. William Wellman shot it in early three-strip Technicolor, and every later version — 1954, 1976, 2018 — has followed its outline closely.

A fairground showman, a sleepwalker who can predict the future, and a string of murders in a town built entirely of painted, crooked sets. Robert Wiene’s film is the founding document of German Expressionism, and its twist ending was a century ahead of its time. Watch it for the look alone: nothing in it is straight, and nothing is quite safe.

Carole Lombard plays a small-town woman wrongly told she is dying of radium poisoning, who happily lets a New York paper turn her into a national tragedy — and a free trip to Manhattan. Fredric March is the reporter who discovers the truth too late. Ben Hecht’s script is gleefully cynical about journalism and sentiment alike, and it is shot in lush Technicolor.

Fleischer Studios — home of Betty Boop and Popeye — made this as Paramount’s answer to Snow White, and it was only the second feature-length American cel-animated film ever produced. Gulliver himself was rotoscoped from live footage, which gives him an uncanny weight against the rubbery, cartoonish Lilliputians. Children still love it, and animation fans love it for its craft.

Four masked strangers who have never seen each other’s faces pull off an armoured-car robbery, and the innocent delivery driver framed for it goes after them one by one. Phil Karlson’s tight, brutal heist film is often cited as an influence on Reservoir Dogs, and it has one of noir’s great rogues’ galleries, including a young Lee Van Cleef.

A brother-and-sister song-and-dance act take their show to London during the 1947 royal wedding. The plot is featherweight; the reason to watch is Fred Astaire, who in one number dances with a hat stand and in another dances up the walls and across the ceiling of his room — a trick achieved by rotating the entire set around him and the camera.

Before the stage musical and the 1986 film, there was Roger Corman’s scrappy original, famously shot in just a couple of days on sets left over from another production. A nebbish florist’s assistant raises a plant that feeds on human blood, and things escalate. Look out for a very young Jack Nicholson as a dental patient who enjoys the drill a little too much.

An expedition to a South American plateau finds dinosaurs still alive, and brings a brontosaurus home to London with predictable results. The stop-motion effects are by Willis O’Brien, who would animate King Kong eight years later, and seeing them on a big screen explains exactly why audiences of 1925 were stunned.

The one modern film on the list. Nina Paley retells the Hindu epic the Ramayana from Sita’s point of view, intercut with the story of her own divorce, and sets episodes to 1920s jazz recordings by Annette Hanshaw. She animated nearly all of it herself, in several deliberately clashing styles, and it is funny, heartbroken and unlike anything else.