Looking for movies to borrow or otherwise watch

[carbonel]

(sent to my entire friends list, but really mostly meant for locals, I suppose)

Specific movies, that is. For the last (eep!) 12 years, I've been slowly working my way through Leonard Maltin's 4-star movie list, almost exclusively via Netflix rentals. ("Slowly" because I've been alternating it with other stuff -- plus all the current material on my DVR.) I'm now about halfway through the list -- alphabetically, at least, because I suspect the back half of the alphabet contains fewer titles. If anyone's interested, I could post the list here.

But while the availability of movies on the list from Netflix started out a bit thin in 2000 but has increased gratifyingly, there are still a number of movies that just aren't available from there; either they were available once but went out of print, or were never acquired by Netflix for some reason, or were never released on DVD. (Elia Kazan's America, America just came available last year, so I still hold out hope.)

To celebrate finishing through the letter L, I'm posting my "haven't found yet" list here. If anyone has any of these to lend me, in any usable format, I'd be most grateful. I can play DVD and videotape, and for these will borrow Blu-Ray or videodisc as necessary.

Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940)
The Big Parade (1925)
Cavalcade (1933)
The Crowd (1928)
Day in the Country, A (1946)
Days of Thrills and Laughter (1961)
Dead of Night (1945)
Die Nibelungen (1924)
Docks of New York (1928)
Every Man for Himself and God Against All (1975)
For Heaven's Sake (1926)
4 Clowns (1970)
Golden Age of Comedy, The (1957)
Greed (1925)
Harvest (1937)
Innocent, The (1976)
John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning, Day of Drums (1964)
La Chienne (1931)
La Traviata (1982)
Lili (1953)
Magic Box, The (1951)
Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942)
Memory of Justice, The (1976)

Comments

[msmoat.livejournal.com]

I have Lili on VHS. Clearly a sign for the need for a bashette sometime!

[carbonel]

Yay! One down, 22 to go. Yes, definitely a bashette sometime.

Continued in e-mail.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I don't think I have any of these.

My advice: play with Worldcat (http://worldcat.org) to locate copies in libraries. Maybe some of these films are borrowable from a library near you (give Worldcat your zipcode and it'll sort to find the nearest copies).

For tougher cases, Interlibrary Loan has worked for me in the past.

[carbonel]

Thanks, this was a great suggestion. With the help of Wikipedia and IMDB, I've been able to hunt down some version of all of these on WorldCat. And it turns out two of them are actually available from Netflix -- one newly available (Docks of New York), and one under another title (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser aka Every Man for Himself...).

These were mostly the tough cases: out-of-print compilations, silent movies, and foreign films.

I suspect I'll have to go to ILL for most of these, but at least I now have a WorldCat list I can hand a librarian.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I have a project similar to yours. A while back, I read Jerry Beck's (), which attempts to list every animated feature film ever released in the U.S.

I realized I could scrape the list off Mr. Beck's Web site (http://www.cartoonresearch.com/feature.html), dump it into Excel, add the four-star ratings from the book, and mark both whether I had seen a movie and, if not, a rating expressing the strength of my desire to see it.

After sorting, I have a handy list of "animated movies I have a strong desire to see."

Later I added a column for "films my wife K has seen." Was surprised to learn that she has seen nearly as many cartoons as I have.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Damn, I came very close to being able to say "I've never even heard of any of those". But then The Magnificent Ambersons turned up. Ah well.

Don't have copies of any of them, anyway, sorry.

[carbonel]

Most of them are pretty obscure -- silent films, foreign films, or compilations.

Lili and The Magnificent Ambersons are the only ones I'd expect someone who's not a film buff to recognize. Possibly there have been rights issues that kept those two from being issued in DVD format. Or lack of interest, I suppose, but that seems unlikely given how many more obscure films have been released in DVD.

I think libraries (and interlibrary loan) are going to be my best bet.