Free classic drama and romance movies
42 titles on the air now, made between 1916 and 1954 - about 66 hours of viewing in all. 42 are feature-length (40 minutes or more) and 0 are shorts. 14 are silent films presented with a public-domain (CC0) piano score.
The complete Silver Screen lineup: silent masterpieces, early talkies and golden-age dramas. Each is in the U.S. public domain, with the evidence on its page.
Silver Screen runs 24/7, with headline films in prime time (7-11pm Pacific).
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. - Intolerance (1916) 197 min · Silver Screen
After the enormous commercial success of The Birth of a Nation (1915), D. W. Griffith was the most powerful director in America — and one of the most criticised. The NAACP and many others condemned The Birth of a Nation for its racist stereotypes and its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. - 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. - 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. - A Star Is Born (1937) 111 min · Silver Screen
A Star Is Born is Hollywood's most famous story about Hollywood, and this 1937 film is the original. Producer David O. Selznick, who two years later would make Gone with the Wind, made it in full three-strip Technicolor at a time when colour features were still rare and expensive. - Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) 94 min · Silver Screen
After the international success of films like Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, the German director F. W. Murnau was lured to Hollywood by William Fox, who gave him enormous resources and creative freedom. Sunrise was his first American film. - The Ten Commandments (1923) 136 min · Silver Screen
Cecil B. DeMille is famous for the 1956 Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston — but more than thirty years earlier, he made this silent original, and it was one of the biggest hits of the 1920s. - A Farewell to Arms (1932) 78 min · Silver Screen
- The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) 77 min · Silver Screen
- The Wind (1928) 75 min · Silver Screen
