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.

John Wayne didn’t make a lot of comedies, but McLintock! was a critical and commercial success for him, his son Michael Wayne, who produced it, and his son Patrick Wayne, who co-starred.

Loosely based on The Taming of the Shrew, the movie centers on a cattle baron and his estranged wife, played by Maureen O’Hara. To describe the events and outcome, Leonard Maltin said it best, “Not recommended for feminists.” If you can get past that, it’s nice to include something this broad and colorful in the Internet Archive Top 100.

In this lightweight romantic comedy about Hollywood phonies, a publicity agent works to make his fiance a famous movie star, only to find the change in their relationship isn’t that welcome after all. It also features an odd dance number where the men wear masks of then-current film stars.

A few hundred IMDb votes love Young and Beautiful, and Leonard Maltin didn’t list it in his guide. It shows the quirkiness of the system that this okay movie is ranked so high in the Internet Archive Top 100.

Here’s a late example of the Will Hays phenomenon. This time the comic actor is an incompetent fire captain who accidentally invents a new type of firefighting foam. Then his fire truck is stolen, and the usual Hays-style British comedy ensues.

According to Wikipedia, Where’s That Fire? had been thought to be a lost film for many years before it was rediscovered by the BBC in 1975. I’m glad someone took the time to add it to the Internet Archive’s Feature Films collection so it could be part of the IA Top 100.