Favourite Film Era .

[Ed Gordon]

I love Film Noir, and the great noir stars of that period- Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, Richard Conte, Dan Duryea and of course the femme fatales- Marie Windsor, Joan Crawford, Shelley Winters, Lana Turner, too many to name, but all great actors and great films with really tight scripts and racing plots all less than 90 mins...

Paul, after reading your post I'll have to revise my favorite era to include the 40's. I recently watched Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past, and was pleasant surprised. It was a recent digital scan of a mint print, or negative. I enjoyed the movie, and the fact that it ran only 97 minutes, not 197 minutes.

[David Hardy]

Some interesting responses to my question there . Yes it can sometimes be a tough one to answer i agree . However paradoxically my interest in the early years of cinema of the 1920's , 30's , 40's and even some of the 50's came via TV screenings of those films and from books and magazines . It was great to catch up with a lot of them on the big screen in a cinema when they were reissued or as one day or light night show screenings . I still remember the thrill and enjoyment i got and still get from seeing films such as Metropolis , Nosferatu , Casablanca , Son Of Dracula , King Kong , Gone With The Wind , and of course Laurel and Hardy etc , for the first time as they were meant to be seen via 35mm film on reel projectors .

[Janice Glesser]

I really didn't get into watching movies until the early '80s after my sons were born. I ordered HBO and admit I used it as a babysitter. Now my boys are really into '80s and '90s movies, and a few '70s as well as my grandsons. I have collected these on optical discs and transferred them to digital files. We love to watch our favorites over and over again. The older movies from the '50s and the '60s I have some on 16 mm. I don't think the digital copies... Even if some are of better quality... are as fun to watch as on film. My favorite actors in my older films are Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and Humphrey Bogart.

[Osi Osgood]

I first started watching films in the early 70's, in the projection box in the theater with my dad, but I did fall in love with silents due to a slightly strange thing ... A Eumig P8, owned by my dad. It was and is silent, and so we watched a lot of silent films, ( Cinderella's Cinders was the first one), and so I learned to value the art of the silent film, that said so much, and everything, with silence.

[Tim Wirtz]

I would have to say from the forties back to the genesis are most fascinating to me. Although there have been tons of great movies put out in the following decades up until 2000. Only a small smattering after that. As in the previous post, we just had silent at home. I would get so hypnotized by the purr of the projector. I could really get drawn in, I swear I could hear the sound effects in my head.

[Michael O’Regan]

To be somewhat specific, my favourite era is pre-code, so up until 1934, but I could stretch that up to 1939.