The Song of Bernadette was an adaptation of Franz Werfel’s novel that spent over a year on the New York Times Best-Seller List. It’s a fictionalization of the real-life story of a French teenage girl who encounters visions of the Virgin Mary outside the town of Lourdes in 1858.

Jennifer Jones won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance, and the movie picked up three more Academy Awards for B&W cinematography (Arthur Miller), art direction, and musical score (Alfred Newman). The movie was nominated for eight others, including director (Henry King) and best picture. Maybe it deserves to be ranked higher, but I’ve got it at 41 on the Internet Archive Top 100.

In a way, I’m taking a break here to point out a category of movie that otherwise isn’t represented in this Internet Archive Top 100 list. To qualify, a film needs at least 100 IMDb voters, no matter how good it is. Here is the exception to that rule; you can see that despite its high rating, there are still fewer votes than that by the time you read this.

The People v. Leo Frank, which aired on PBS just a few years ago, is the story of a Jewish factory superintendent put on trial for the murder of a young female employee. The trial and its aftermath exposed the thread of antisemitism that underpinned Atlanta society at the time. This is a powerful subject with strong performances, and it’s a good example of the wealth of lesser-reviewed movies in the Internet Archive Feature Films collection.

Angel and the Badman is the first film that John Wayne produced as well as starred in. Wayne starts out as an injured gunslinger who is taught the benefits of non-violence by the Quaker woman who nurses him back to health.

The final line of the movie, “Only a man who carries a gun ever needs one,” isn’t the philosophy you’d expect from Wayne and shows that there’s some thought mixed in with its standard Western action. That’s why it’s one of the highest-ranked of its genre in the Internet Archive Top 100.

Another category of common public domain movie is the TV-movie, a platform so presumably ephemeral that copyright protections were sometimes sufficiently slipshod to let it drop into our hands. Escape from Sobibor hit CBS in April 1987 and ITV in the UK a month later. Considering how easy it is to find today, I suspect that it fell into the public domain between then and now.

Rutger Hauer and Alan Arkin star in the story of the 1943 mass escape from the extermination camp at Sobibor, the largest escape from a prison camp of any kind in Europe during World War II, and the star power raises the production above the typical TV movie into the Internet Archive Top 100.

In this pre-Code dramatic musical, Hal Skelly plays a burlesque entertainer who eventually makes it big on Broadway but can’t handle success. The Dance of Life is adapted from the stage hit Burlesque, which also starred Skelly.

The movie was originally shot in two-strip Technicolor, but only black and white TV prints such as this one survive. The Internet Archive Top 100 is packed with movies like this one, which provides a glimpse into a bygone era as it tells a fascinating story.