In this Technicolor blockbuster,  Janet Gaynor stars as an aspiring Hollywood actress, and Fredric March as a fading movie star who helps launch her career. From all accounts, A Star Is Born was fairly faithful to the true state of Hollywood at the time, and its deeply resonant themes of achievement and personal sacrifice led to two major remakes with a third in production for 2018.

Some film historians believe that the marriage of Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay was the film’s real-life inspiration. John Bowers has also been identified as inspiration for the Norman Maine character given his similar fate. Wherever it came from, this slice of film industry life is an excellent choice for the Internet Archive Top 100.

One of Our Aircraft is Missing rises above its World War II propaganda roots, showing an RAF bomber crew bailing out over the occupied Netherlands and looking for a way to get back to England. The Dutch people who put their lives at risk to help and the thoughtful sequence of events on the way to rescue make this a true classic.

Peter Ustinov makes his film debut as a young priest, as if you needed another reason to watch this earnest, realistic entry in the Internet Archive Top 100.

This colorful Danny Kaye vehicle won a Golden Globe award for Johnny Green’s musical score. The Inspector General is loosely based on Nikolai Gogol’s play of the same name, but with the setting vaguely French instead of Russian.

Kaye plays an honest buffoon who becomes mistaken for the disguised inspector who would discover the rampant corruption in a nearby town. The mayor and other townsfolk pamper the buffoon while plotting whether to kill him. It’s a fun comedy, well worth its lofty ranking in the Internet Archive Top 100.

Frank Capra directed Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck in this classic, ranked #49 in AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Cheers list of inspiring films.

Stanwyck plays a newspaper columnist who prints a letter from an imaginary “John Doe” who writes “the whole world’s going to pot, so in protest I’m going to commit suicide by jumping off the City Hall roof.” When the column becomes a hit, she has to find someone (Cooper of course) to stand in for Doe. Capra’s earnest populism and smart characterizations push Meet John Doe to the 29th position in the Internet Archive Top 100.

There’s a good amount of film noir in the Internet Archive Top 100, but I think this is the only film noir parody. The story is told in flashback as Bob Hope, as a baby photographer, relates how he was caught up in a world of mistaken identity and subterfuge. Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney provide the humorous menace, and with Dorothy Lamour as the love interest, you might be able to guess who appears in a cameo.

The IMDb’s users don’t give comedies the high rankings they give more serious films. Adjusted for that, plus Leonard Maltin’s endorsement, it’s enough to keep this fun movie in the top 30.