Like fine wines, mature cheeses, and George Clooney, some things just get better with age. Old films can be dismissed for being bereft of the CGI and slick cinematography that makes modern movies so visually arresting. But what they might lack in technical flair they often make up for in character-driven drama, and Hollywood served up some of the finest films ever crafted between the 1910s and 1960s – the studios’ so-called ‘Golden Age’.
These famous flicks are just as fabulous today as when they first flashed across the silver screen...
1. Casablanca, 1942 A perfectly pitched blend of sadness and sentimentality, romance and tension, hope and cynicism, Casablanca’s reputation precedes it, and it’s packed with famous quotes you probably never knew were from the movie (“Here’s looking at you, kid”). Set in Morocco during WWII – and released while the war was still going on – the flick is as much historical artefact as cinematic masterpiece.
2. Psycho, 1960 The film that made us definitively fear bathrooms, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho sees the master of suspense at perhaps his most suspenseful and influential – particularly thanks to the infamous Janet Leigh shower scene. Hitchcock was a genre unto himself and could probably fill this list alone, but he filmed most of his later masterpieces (Vertigo, Rear Window, North By Northwest) in full technicolour.
For Psycho he went back to black and white, partly for artistic reasons, partly due to budget. 3. It H.