20 best free movies on YouTube that are legitimately great

If you want to dig into a bona fide old masterpiece and don’t feel like shelling out for it, YouTube has a remarkable array of free movies to check out.

The fidelity isn’t always the greatest and, in some cases, you’ll be without subtitles (though not these picks), but for the price of a few quick pre-roll ads, a whole trove of hard-to-find masterpieces awaits you.

1. The Heartbreak Kid (1972)

Photograph: 20th Century Fox

The late, great Charles Grodin stars in Elaine May’s tartly hilarious anti-romcom. He plays a newlywed on honeymoon with his wife (the Oscar-nominated Jeannie Berlin), who has his head turned by Cybill Shepherd’s hautily flirtatious student. Neil Simon’s scalpel-sharp screenplay lets no one off the hook in a funny takedown of men. Worth watching just for Eddie Albert and Grodin going head-to-head as prospective father-in-law and squirming love rat with a fine line.

2. Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Photograph: Continental Distributing

This lo-fi George A Romero shufflerthon isn’t where the zombie genre began, but it’s definitely where it got its brains. A pervading sense of doom hangs over its starkly shot clutch of Americans escaping a creeping undead apocalypse and barricading themselves into a remote farmhouse. A symptom of a country at odds with itself or just a nerve-gnawing nightmare? Both, really. Even if the ‘Z’ word is never uttered, Romero seizes onto zombies as an avatar for all sorts of social ills. You can’t vaccinate against these guys.

3. Steamboat Bill, Jr (1928)

Photograph: United Artists

This silent classic features one of Buster Keaton’s maddest stunts, in which a falling house front narrowly misses squashing him. During a cyclone. Married to that trademark daring-do, Keaton’s brand of effervescent deadpan just never gets old – and this is one of his best, despite being a flop when it came out. He plays a paddle steamer captain at war with a rival on the river, until that storm hits and threatens them all. The film’s HD restoration will look pinsharp even on a crappy old laptop.

4. Scum (1979)

Photograph: World Northal

Famous for a snooker ball scene that absolutely does not involve snooker, Alan Clarke’s landmark Brit drama is brilliantly acted – not least in its central turn by a young Ray Winstone. Playing borstal inmate Carlin, he looks about 16 (though was actually 22 at the time) and exudes a reined-in ferocity as he pursues alpha status in a block run by cruel, bullying screws. Somehow the film’s anger never overwhelms its craft, with Clarke’s camera always in just the right place to capture its seething undercurrent of nastiness and hurt. Bruising but essential.

5. D.O.A. (1949)

Photograph: United Artists

The most hard-boiled thing on YouTube that isn’t just a video of someone boiling eggs, Rudolph Maté’s tough ‘40s flick (‘Dead on Arrival’) has everything you’d want in a noir: a twisty plot, femme fatales, blokes in suits spitting tough-guy dialogue at each other, unimpressed cops. Its high concept – a man (Edmond O’Brien) reports his own death to the police – had ‘80s Hollywood reaching for the remake button. Thanks to a clerical error its copyright lapsed and YouTubers are the winner.

6. Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Photograph: YouTube

Angry sailors take to the streets in Sergei Eisenstein’s great Soviet landmark. One of the daddies of cinema, it’s most famous for its genius editing and the shocking Odessa massacre scene. It’s now almost a hundred years old but is still forever pored over by film students, directors and cineastes. Sure, it plays a little fast and loose with the history (there was no massacre on the steps) but it hardly matters: it’s stirring stuff, even for non-Bolsheviks.

7. The Kid (1921)

Photograph: First National

There’s nothing like a Charlie Chaplin movie to put a smile on your face and this 1921 effort is perhaps the smiliest of the lot. It pairs the Little Tramp up with an even littler sidekick: an orphan child (Jackie Coogan) he takes under his wing and trains up in the art of making a lot out of very little. It’s a direct inspiration for Paddington and we can’t think of a greater reference that than. The restored HD version is on YouTube.

8. The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Photograph: Carlton International Media Ltd

The premise is simple – an English lady vanishes aboard a train across Europe – but the execution sublime in Hitchcock’s timeless locomotive caper. Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave play two inquisitive Brits who try to uncover what has become of kindly old music teacher Miss Froy (May Whitty) when she suddenly disappears. Goes down easier than a cup of Earl Grey on a rainy day, though the Hitchcock cameo is quite tricky to spot in this one.

9. The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

Photograph: RKO Radio Pictures

If you haven’t seen any Ida Lupino films, do yourself a favour and settle down with a sweltering road movie noir that the south Londoner wrote and directed. It takes its inspiration from the real-life crime spree of Billy Cook in 1950, with William Talman delivering an all-time study in deranged villainy as Emmett Myers, a gun man on the run with two hostages (Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy). In an inspired character tic, Myers literally sleeps with one eye open.

10. The Witchfinder General (1979)

Photograph: Tigon Pictures

Vincent Price is spectacularly sinister as a travelling witchfinder in Cromwellian England, roaming East Anglia with a view to hanging anything warty. Up against him is a Roundhead soldier (Ian Ogilvy) who twigs that he’s actually a corrupt old sadist using his power in malevolent ways. Directed by Michael Reeves with a satisfying eye for tavern-based bawdiness and chilling violence, it’s right up there with The Wicker Man in the annals of British folk horror.

11. The 49th Parallel (1941)

Photograph: General Film Distributors LTD

Powell and Pressburger proved themselves masters of the propaganda film in this effort designed to sway American public opinion against the Nazis. A crew are left marooned when their U-boat is sunk in the Hudson Bay. They try to make their way across Canada to the 49th Parallel and the freedom of a still-neutral America, but don’t count on a series of doughty Canadians standing in their way. The casting is joyously off-beat, with Anton Walbrook as a farmer and Laurence Olivier as a trapper, and while the message is hardly subtle, the thrills are enduring.

12. His Girl Friday (1940)

Photograph: Columbia Pictures

This classic screwball is a timeless classic with machine-gun patter provided by a pair of screenwriting giants, Charles Lederer and Ben Hecht, and Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant doing the rest as two jousting exes and colleagues on a big city newspaper. Watching Russell’s fast-talking star reporter Hildy and Grant’s exasperated editor running rings around each other is one of the purest joys of ‘40s Hollywood.

13. Stalag 17 (1953)

Photograph: Paramount Pictures

William Holden steals the show as fast-talking wheel-dealer JJ Sefton in Billy Wilder’s hard-boiled POW thriller. When two escaping prisoners are shot, it’s clear there’s a rat in the prison hut – thanks to his cosy relationship with the German guards, the finger is pointed at Sefton. Somehow Wilder manages to accommodate a sense of world-weary cynicism with Hogan’s Heroes-style comedy and real tension in one gripping package.

14. Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Photograph: imdb.com

Noirs don’t get much, well, noirer than this Robert Aldrich effort. It stars Ralph Meeker as hard-boiled gumshoe Mike Hammer who comes into possession of a mysterious box and a bad case of everyone-wants-to-kill-him-itis. It’s a key movie for everyone from French new wave filmmakers to Quentin Tarantino, whose Pulp Fiction briefcase might just have owed something to Meeker’s mystery box.

15. Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)

Photograph: Universal Pictures

A romantic comedy done the John Cassavetes way, Minnie and Moskowitz is loose and strangely lingering. The two central characters – museum curator Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands) and parking attendant Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel) – have a craving for love that pushes them together with all the gentle magnetism of two out-of-control bumper cars. Less of a meet-cute, more of a collision.

16. The Hustler (1961)

Photograph: 20th Century Fox

Paul Newman – Hollywood god and salad dressing tycoon – picked up an Oscar nomination for his tour de force performance as pool hustler ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson. Full of shady New York pool halls, populated with larger-than-life supporting turns from the likes of Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie and George C Scott, and with a smoky score from jazz composer Kenyon Hopkins, it’s a still-edgy slice of Gotham cool.

17. Gaslight (1940)

Photograph: Anglo-American Film Corp.
This British thriller hardly bothers to hide its big twist, confident that its terrors lose not a wit of their power for being carried out in full view of the audience. And for that it can thank Anton Walbrook, who is all slippery menace as a man who sets about making his wife (Diana Wynyard) feel like she’s losing her mind as they settle into their new Pimlico pile. An edge-of-the-seat adaptation of a stage play, it got a starry but slightly less effective American remake four years later (though that one isn’t on YouTube).

18. Nosferatu (1922)

Photograph: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek

Much spoofed and homaged but never bettered – even by Werner Herzog’s admirable 1979 remake – FW Murnau’s silent chiller follows long-fingered vampire Count Orlok (Max Schreck) across Europe, plague and pestilence in his wake. The film is a riff on Bram Stoker’s Dracula rather than an adaptation – a nuance that didn’t deter the Stoker estate legal team from suing and having nearly every copy destroyed. Thankfully for cinephiles, a few survived.

19. Notorious (1946)

Photograph: RKO Radio Pictures

A hard-edged Hitchcock, this one – the kind that would come up to you in the pub and spill your drink just for the hell of it. It’s got Nazi spies, exotic locations, a deadly McGuffin, an imperilled blonde (Ingrid Bergman) and Cary Grant trying to shelve the trademark charm in favour of a glint-eyed ruthlessness. Can love endure through all that? It’s a bumpy ride.

20. Rebecca (1940)

Photograph: United Artists

You could watch the remake on Netflix or just head straight for the timeless first version here. Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel has four stars: Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, Judith Anderson, and the big, foreboding Cornish mansion of Manderley (actually built on a Hollywood soundstage). The old pile hosts a gothic thriller that will have you gripped right from its famous opening line (‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’).