Royal Wedding isn’t in the top 10 of the Internet Archive Top 100, but it includes the most famous scene of any movie on the list.  This classic MGM musical might have been known for Fred Astaire’s dance with a hat stand, but another solo performance stands out. Near the end of the movie, an ecstatic Astaire dances on the floor of his room, then on the walls, then on the ceiling.

Oh yes, there’s a movie too. Astaire and Jane Powell play a brother and sister song and dance team at the 1947 wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten in London. It’s a fairly lightweight film, but musical fans will find a lot to enjoy here.

Woman on the Run is more than just a fine film noir with snappy dialogue. It’s also a time capsule of San Francisco and of the roller coaster at the pier in Santa Monica. Really it’s Dennis O’Keefe who does most of the running as the only witness to a mob murder. He goes into hiding, then his wife (Ann Sheridan) tries to track him down with the help of a newspaper reporter (Dennis O’Keefe). Meanwhile, the police and the mob are also searching for O’Keefe.

This movie was recently restored and preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. But this version is quite watchable, and it’s free as part of the Internet Archive Top 100.

The Stranger is just dripping with star power. Directed by and starring Orson Welles, it follows Edward G. Robinson as a war crimes investigator tracking down a high-ranking Nazi fugitive to an idyllic town in Connecticut where Loretta Young lives. It’s a film noir that captures the mood immediately after World War II, and it’s a fine addition to the Internet Archive Top 10.

“No one who worked on the film can remember any special anecdotes or problems concerning it,” wrote biographer Frank Brady. “Welles has said, since the making of The Stranger—which he completed one day before schedule and under budget—that nothing in the film was his, this despite the fact that the unmistakable Wellesian moods, shadows, acute angles, and depth-of-focus shots are pervasive.” Welles’ first film in four years was the only one he ever directed to have been a bona fide box office success upon its release.

I’m glad that a William Castle-directed horror film made it onto the Internet Archive Top 100. In the House on Haunted Hill, Vincent Price plays an eccentric millionaire who pays strangers to stay overnight in a haunted house. As the night progresses, the guests are trapped inside the house with ghosts, murderers, and other terrors.

In some theaters that showed the film, Castle set up an elaborate pulley system which allowed a plastic skeleton to be flown over the audience at the appropriate time. We don’t have that here, but Castle and Price make a great combination.

Here’s another highly regarded film noir, a phrase that matches several of the movies in the Internet Archive Top 100.  John Alton’s stylish cinematography and David Raksin’s jazz horns almost overwhelm director Joseph Lewis’s work.

The Big Combo stars Cornel Wilde, Richard Conte and Brian Donlevy, as well as Jean Wallace, who was Wilde’s wife at the time. Wilde plays a police lieutenant on a personal crusade to bring down a sadistic gangster, eventually working on the gangster’s girlfriend. The last scene shows the silhouetted figures of Wilde and Wallace in fog, considered to be one of the iconic images of film noir.