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.

Salt of the Earth was written by Michael Wilson, directed by Herbert J. Biberman, and produced by Paul Jarrico, all of whom had been blacklisted during the Red scare of the 1950s. Its plot centers on a long and difficult strike, based on the 1951 miners’ strike against the Empire Zinc Company in New Mexico.

The movie was financed by the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers and denounced at the time by the United States House of Representatives for its communist sympathies. In 1992 the Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the US National Film Registry. Thanks to its 3½ (of 4) stars from Leonard Maltin and a solid IMDb user rating, it was also selected to be 46th in the Internet Archive Top 100.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is a film noir starring Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Lizabeth Scott and featuring Kirk Douglas in his film debut. Stanwyck is bound to husband Douglas by his knowledge of a crime she committed as a teenager. When an old flame comes back to town, the result is a web of noir melodrama.

While Stanwyck is the unquestioned star of the movie, check out Scott, whose next movie would be one of my favorite noirs, Dead Reckoning with Humphrey Bogart. All that star power is what put this movie at #47 in the Internet Archive Top 100.

This thoughtful, sentimental drama about a British air base and a neighboring town the effects of World War II on the people who live there. It was made in Britain just after the war and was well-received there, although US audiences mostly ignored its stateside release.

John Mills, who played the central character of Peter Penrose, would return in a top-10 Internet Archive Top 100 film in his next role. You can also see a couple of his earlier performances in Car of Dreams and Cottage to Let.