Free 1920s movies, cartoons and shorts

235 titles on the air now, made between 1920 and 1929 - about 153 hours of viewing in all. 89 are feature-length (40 minutes or more) and 146 are shorts. 182 are silent films presented with a public-domain (CC0) piano score.

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Every title from the 1920s that is on the air at Starlite TV right now, across all of our channels, sorted by year. Films published before 1931 are in the U.S. public domain because their copyright terms have expired.

Starlite TV works like broadcast TV, so these play on schedules: open a title to see when it airs next in your time zone, or jump into a channel live.

Where to start

Prime-time headliners and titles with full background guides.

• Battleship Potemkin (1925) 73 min · Silver Screen
  Battleship Potemkin was commissioned for the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1905, and its young director, Sergei Eisenstein, then still in his twenties, chose one episode from that year to stand for the whole: the mutiny aboard the battleship Potemkin of the Black Sea Fleet.
• Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) 143 min · Adrenaline
  Long before Charlton Heston drove a chariot in the 1959 version, there was this: the original big-screen Ben-Hur, and the most expensive film of the silent era.
• The General (1926) 79 min · Laugh Track
  The General is Buster Keaton's Civil War comedy, inspired by a real event: the Great Locomotive Chase of April 1862, when Union raiders stole a Confederate train in Georgia and were pursued by its crew.
• The Gold Rush (1925) 87 min · Laugh Track
  Charlie Chaplin wrote, produced, directed and starred in The Gold Rush, and he often said it was the film he most wanted to be remembered for.
• The Kid (1921) 53 min · Laugh Track
  The Kid was Charlie Chaplin's first feature-length film as a director, and it was a gamble: a full-length story that mixed slapstick with genuine sadness. An unmarried mother, unable to care for her baby, leaves him in a wealthy car with a note asking whoever finds him to love and care for him.
• The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) 91 min · Case Files
  The Lodger is where Alfred Hitchcock became "Hitchcock". It was his third feature as a director and his first thriller, and he later called it the first true "Hitchcock picture".
• The Lost World (1925) 68 min · Rocket Age
  Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, published his adventure novel The Lost World in 1912. It introduced the explosive Professor George Edward Challenger, who insists that dinosaurs still survive on a remote plateau in South America — and leads an expedition to prove it.
• The Man Who Laughs (1928) 111 min · Graveyard Shift
  Universal had scored huge hits with Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, and studio head Carl Laemmle wanted another lavish Gothic melodrama from a classic novel.
• Man with a Movie Camera (1929) 65 min · Doc Vault
  Dziga Vertov was a Soviet documentary filmmaker and the leader of a group who called themselves the "kinoks" ("cine-eyes").
• The Mark of Zorro (1920) 74 min · Adrenaline
  In 1919 the pulp writer Johnston McCulley introduced a new hero in a serial called The Curse of Capistrano: Zorro, a masked swordsman defending the poor of Spanish California against corrupt officials.
• Metropolis (1927) 119 min · Silver Screen
  Metropolis is the most ambitious production of Germany's silent era. Director Fritz Lang and writer Thea von Harbou, who were married at the time, built the story from von Harbou's novel of the same name.
• Nosferatu (1922) 92 min · Graveyard Shift
  Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was made in Germany in 1921 and released in 1922 by Prana Film, a short-lived studio co-founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and the occult-minded artist Albin Grau. Director F. W. Murnau and screenwriter Henrik Galeen based it, without permission, on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula.
• The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) 82 min · Silver Screen
  The Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer was invited to France to make a film, and he chose Joan of Arc, who had been canonised as a saint in 1920 and was enjoying a wave of renewed popularity. Rather than a sweeping epic about her battles, Dreyer made a film about her trial.
• The Phantom of the Opera (1925) 92 min · Graveyard Shift
  Universal's The Phantom of the Opera adapts Gaston Leroux's 1910 French novel about a masked figure who haunts the Paris Opera House and secretly coaches a young singer, Christine Daaé, to stardom.
• Safety Last! (1923) 74 min · Laugh Track
  Safety Last! is the film that gave silent comedy one of its most famous images: Harold Lloyd, in his trademark round glasses and straw boater, hanging from the hands of a giant clock high above a busy Los Angeles street. The title is a play on the workplace slogan "safety first".
• The Skeleton Dance (1929) 6 min · Saturday Morning
  The Skeleton Dance was the first of Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies, a series of musical cartoons that ran alongside the Mickey Mouse shorts and became Disney's testing ground for new techniques. The idea came from composer Carl Stalling, a theatre organist in Kansas City who had scored Disney's early Mickey cartoons.