A painter meets a young American woman on a ship bound for New York. This isn’t Titanic, but Love Affair definitely steers towards romance. Charles Boyer plays the French painter who, ducking notoriety, promises to meet Irene Dunne six months after they disembark. As you might guess, plenty of stuff happens in those six months.

Leonard Maltin gave this movie 3½ (of 4) stars, and you can see the high IMDb user rating above. Boyer and Dunne’s chemistry make this drama with a touch of comedy better than most, even in the Internet Archive Top 100.

I hope this won’t spoil your enjoyment of the rest of this list, but The Flying Deuces is the only Laurel and Hardy movie in the Internet Archive Top 100. Its fast pace and “Shine On Harvest Moon” dance number make it an excellent representative for the boys’ talents.

Ollie suffers a broken romance and joins the French Foreign Legion to forget. Stan comes along, of course. And of course the boys have no idea of the rough business they’ve just volunteered for. It’s a wonderful comedy, and I’m grateful that there’s at least one L&H in the IA.

Will Hay was very big in the UK in 1937, and Oh, Mr. Porter! is a good example why. Instead of his usual schoolmaster roles, here he plays a stationmaster in Northern Ireland on the border with Ireland. He renovates the station, then gets involved with gunrunners posing as ghosts.

The British Film Institute included this movie in its 360 Classic Feature Films list. TV Cream, a British nostalgia web site, listed it at number 41 of cinema’s Top 100 Films. Leonard Maltin gave it 3½ stars, which is one reason why it’s 33 in the Internet Archive Top 100.

This straight-up biography of the 17th-century painter starred Charles Laughton and was directed by Alexander Korda, a pair also involved in another biography higher up on the Internet Archive Top 100.

In giving it 3½ stars, Leonard Maltin praised Rembrandt’s “visual tableaux” and Laughton’s performance. Time Out magazine wrote that it was “less successful at the time” than that movie I hinted about “but a far better film”. You should watch and judge for yourself.

The gorgeous Technicolor adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, starring Sabu, is another one of those staples in public domain collections. The 1942 movie was the first film adaptation of Mowgli’s stories, although many others would follow decades later.

In a village in India, a tiger kills a man but his son is rescued and raised by wolves. Years later, the boy returns to the village where he learns to speak. Eventually he returns to the jungle to face the tiger. It’s a classic story for all ages, which is why it’s ranked so high in the Internet Archive Top 100.