Recommend a good YouTube free film. Ta!
YouTube films
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
Musings on the byways of popular culture
by 84 Comments
Recommend a good YouTube free film. Ta!
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Currently (assuming you are talking about features hence who knows how long they are up for) I would recommend the bonkers Liquid Sky, made in 1982 for about 50p. Its plot is tiny space aliens who invade the CBGBs/Mudd Club scene of NYC and infect a brilliantly blank-faced actress/model/whatever so that whoever she has sex with dies instantly. So much great detail about the club/loft scene of the time. Not available in the UK on streaming or a dvd release, so don’t feel I am taking anyone’s legit rights. ‘Liquid Sky Full Movie’ should get you there. Music soundtrack is ace.
also there are several channels hosting The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with Maggie Smith never better.
A Matter of Life and Death was on YouTube last time I looked. Not the best of prints, but the best film ever made so you may be able to overlook that.
Yep. P & P are there, quite a few classic noirs (e.g. Kansas City Confidential, DOA) and British black and whites (e.g. The League Of Gentlemen, The Naked Truth). Picture quality is variable, but many of these are hard to find otherwise (streaming services seem to believe no-one wants to watch anything made before 1980).
But my suggestion is this excellent print of Cash On Demand (1962). Peter Cushing is the fastidious and disliked bank manager put in a tight spot (the film starts at 1.30)
What you want is some gritty 1970s kitchen-sink drama: here’s several hundred “Play for Today’s”
https://archive.org/details/play-for-today
Ooh that’s a hell of a resource! Just a random scroll showed me straightaway that no 131 is the brilliant Comedians by Trevor Griffith with the incomparable Jonathan Pryce.
Crumbs, that’s 75Gb of disk space I’ll never get back! Thanks for the heads-up.
Speaking of Play for Today, Penda’s Fen was on mainstream TV for the first time in ages recently and is on iPlayer now. I had wanted to see it for decades and I’m glad to say it didn’t disappoint.
I went to see Penda’s Fen this June in Washington and it’s only today that I brought the flyer in for the showing into the house as it’s been in the car boot since then.
Most odd.
Thanks for the tip, Vincent.
What an incredible canon of television drama!
Many thanks, folks. I knew that would work. I’m snaffling the ones I like, and will be interested in some of the ones forgotten. I got “Edna, the Inebriate Woman” via a dodgy DVD site decades ago. It’s one of those things you have to have. “Comedians” and “Blue Remembered Hills”, also. I found it a few weeks ago, and it has been a source of deep joy.
Archive.org has a lot of great TV and films in the other directories, too. Just have a sniff about.
So I click on the first one, “The Long Distance Piano Player” and who should be there in the first frame but Ray Davies!
Oh wow, thank you for this it’s an absolute goldmine
Dead Man’s Shoes
I recently watched Grand Prix from 1966
Is that one with, I think Yves Montand and Natalie Wood? I seem to remember a scene from that film where young Ms Wood is sitting by the side of the road (or maybe the racetrack) wearing a rather fetching off-the-shoulder number. Kept my 10 year old mind – er – active of a night…
Not Natalie Wood, Francoise Hardy maybe?
IMDB is your friend it was Eva Marie Saint.
I think you’ll find it was Irene Handl.
The inebriate trophy girlfriend?
No, hang on. Thora Hird.
‘ee. ‘appen.
Hattie Jacques, then.
Peggy Mount? Or Mount Peggy, perhaps, although I’m not sure that bears thinking about.
I just watched it, Eve Marie Saint is in it, she is blonde so more likely brunette Francoise Hardy) who is also in it) was thought to be Natalie Wood (who isn’t)
Actually it may well have been Jessica Walter
“In On The Waterfront..”
In her American circumstance.
😄🎸
It was The Great Race from 1965, not Grand Prix. This must have been the scene…
Ahhh, superb movie…
It would have made my Top Ten but for the overlong (in retrospect) scenes at the North Pole and in the Prince’s castle.
Natalie Wood, and so would I FNAAARRRR.
Someone on here previously suggested “Romance with a Double Bass” with John Cleese and Connie Booth. It’s listed as 39m long, so not a full feature. Still to watch myself, but on the list.
I’ve been working through the seemingly endless noir movies on YouTube for years. Last night’s was “Dear Murderer”, British snob noir from ’47, lots of “far beck” accents and Dennis Price in a silk dressing gown. Priceless. And they’re all around the 90 minute mark.
For those who are that way inclined, let me recommend 4K Video Downloader Plus. Incredibly fast, and cheap.
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne with Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins is definitely worth a watch.
You can download Y-T videos as mp4 here: https://vidssave.com/youtube-movies-1mf
Free, no ads, nothing sketchy about it that I can see.
Be aware that the site uses Cloudflare, which has been frequently plagued with access problems, sometimes on a global scale.
So that means that sometimes it won’t be available? I can live with that.
Just clicked the link: ‘sorry you have been blocked’! Not very friendly.
I use yt-dlp command line in a Mac terminal window, incredibly fast and versatile
Is that all there is to it?
And the URL, presumably?
After installation that will work, there are also format options, so you can download as audio or video, you add that info to the command and add the URL in quotes
“Installation”? Eh?
Asking for a dim-witted friend: please will you give him a very slow and patient walkthrough of the steps required? Terminal is a bit of a mystery to him and he’d appreciate a keystroke-by-keystroke “how to”. Thanking you on his behalf.
Your dim-witted friend might find this useful; I didn’t. https://www.ditig.com/yt-dlp-cheat-sheet
Can I recommend to him 4K Downloader Plus? Fast, versatile and available for a nugatory price.
I can get it done for nowt at the above-mentioned web site, thank ‘ee.
That link? Yeah, no.
I tried your website, but it wouldn’t let me download anything without first downloading an app called VidMate. Didn’t see much point in that. Did I mention my app?
I just tried it again (Firefox ESR on Mac Mojave with UBlock Origin) and it worked perfectly without any app prompts. The internet, eh?
What app’s that, Mike?
@h-p-saucecraft
Pretty straightforward 😉 :
Open terminal window
First install home brew
% /bin/bash -c “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)”
Then this:
% echo ‘eval “$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)”‘ >> ~/.zprofile
% brew install yt-dlp
Then I had to do this:
% brew install ffmpeg
% brew install fprobe
Usage:
This will download an mp3:
% yt-dlp -x –audio-format mp3 “PLACE URL HERE”
This will download a video:
% yt-dlp -f “bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best” “PLACE URL HERE”
You can use cd in the window to move to the directory ahead of downloading where you want it to be
Good luck
Thank you! But we clearly have very different ideas as to what “pretty straightforward” means.
David Cronenberg films
https://archive.org/details/filmography-david-cronenberg
Alfred Hitchcock films
https://archive.org/details/filmography-alfred-hitchcock
Ken Russell films (non-features)
https://archive.org/details/filmography-ken-russell-no-features/
Robert Altman films
https://archive.org/details/filmography-robert-altman
Andrei Tarkovsky films
https://archive.org/details/filmography-andrei-tarkovsky
Orson Welles films
https://archive.org/details/filmography-orson-welles
Roger Corman films
https://archive.org/details/filmography-roger-corman
Bonzo Dog Band video collection
https://archive.org/details/bonzo-dog-doo-dah-band-video-collection
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Albert Finney)
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tom Courtney)
If… (Malcolm McDowell)
I watched Of Mice and Men on YT recently. Fantastic adaptation. John Malcovich and Gary Sinise both perfect. I see that Spotlight is on the same channel. That’s a film I must watch again.
This is all very well but can you get all of Jason Statham’s films on there? Particularly the one where he fights a whole bunch of bad guys who thoughtfully attack him one at a time.
Have you seen the Crank movies? Utterly, utterly bwilliant.
If you dig one man army flicks give this some love.
A great film. The sequel, with the bonus of the always ace Stephen Lang, is almost equally crazy.
Not just me then. There is a third on the way. I’ll definitely be down for a bit of that when it lands.
Sisu 3: There Are Not Many People Still Alive for Me to Kill, or maybe Sisu 3: This Time It Really, Really Is War, or Sisu 3: You And Whose Army?
I could watch plenty more of this series, even if it’s just to be amazed at how the action/stunt team keep getting more inventive each time.
HAVE YOU SEE-
Sorry. *cough*
Have you seen the Crank movies? Excessive isn’t strong enough a word.
Yep. I’ve watched most of Statham’s œuvre. I recently took in The Beekeeper which had the usual exciting plot development of our Jase’s character having a different name!
Crank 2 is Jayce’s masterpiece. Unless you count Stath Lets Flats..
I’m fairly sure that I have watched all of Jases’s films more than once. I recently rewatched Transporter 3 having forgotten how completely terrible it was. Don’t think I’ve seen the SISU films, are they particularly gory?
They are certainly violent but so deliberately over the top it becomes cartoonish. They are obviously made tongue in cheek even if the cheek is exploding after having been stabbed multi times and riddled with bullets after being shot out of a cannon.
I watched A Working Man starring Jase recently and it is easily the worst film I’ve seen for some time. I loved it.
Thanks, sounds like I will have to give them a go.
Some of the mighty Stath’s films deserve a wide berth, but I like him. Yes, he generally plays the same part in everything, but he does what he does very well, and I often get the feeling that he knows his long and well-paid career is all a bit mad, but he’s going to keep having fun with it for as long as it lasts.
One of his recent films (he does churn them out) is Shelter, and I thought it was terrific. Quite low-key for our hero, and all the better for it.
I’m also on his side because of his role in the Melissa McCarthy film Spy, where he happily sent up his hardman image. For example: “Nothing kills me. I’m immune to 179 different types of poison. I know because I ingested them all at once when I was deep undercover in an underground poison-ingesting crime ring.”
I watched Shelter recently too and The Beekeeper. Both top notch drivel.
The thing about Jase is, he’s effortlessly cool. In the same way as Connery and Caine could be. A rare combination of knowingness and total commitment to delivering crap lines in crap movies.
I don’t think I’ve seen one of his films. What’s a good one?
Kumbalangi Nights is free on You Tube ( and strangely also can be hired). Anyway, it’s a marvelous Malayalam film from 2019. First time I saw it I couldn’t understand a word ( it wasn’t sub-titled), but I still loves it. The version on You Tube has English sub-titles.
The Nicky Hopkins doc.
Hurrah! I’ve been waiting for that to appear.
Just watched it, so I’m still in bed at 11.55. Lovely film. Thank you for the prompt.
(But David Soul, FFS !!?!?)
Ah, the life of the retired. I am currently at Cambridge University, attempting to persuade GCSE students to take Physics A-level. I’m getting paid but it feels like pushing water uphill.
Just watched that last week. Superb! Straight to 4KDownloader.
The second film version of Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep”, directed by Michael Winner with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe. The cast also includes Sarah Miles, Candy Clark, Joan Collins and Oliver Reed, and features James Stewart as General Sternwood.
Set in London instead of Los Angeles and taking place in the ’70s rather than the ’40s, it nevertheless sticks much more closely to the plot of Chandler’s novel than the rather sanitized 1946 Howard Hawks-directed American version, with Bogart as Marlowe.
The critics didn’t go for it at all on release, but I rate it as far from perfect but rather good.
You recommended this before and I watched it and, cough, saved a copy. Excellent.
I particularly like the beginning where Marlowe is driving to Knebworth House to meet General Sternwood as the credits roll. And then driving away again at the end.
I don’t think any one actor got Marlowe right. Not even the much-vaunted (as opposed to little-vaunted) Bogart. He was terrific, of course, but not Marlowe. They’re all either too smooth or too haggard. Smaggard is Marlowe’s defining characteristic.
Danny Glover or Liam Neeson, anybody?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Marlowe
Sneakers.
Is Sneakers a good movie?
AI Overview:
Yes, Sneakers (1992) is widely considered a very good and deeply entertaining movie.
Why It Is Good
All-Star Cast: The movie features legendary actors like Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, River Phoenix, Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley, and James Earl Jones.
Fun Blend of Genres: It mixes a smart caper plot with comedy, light suspense, and espionage.
Great Chemistry: The actors play a ragtag team of security experts and hackers whose friendly banter makes the watch effortless and fun.
Minor Flaws
Outdated Tech: The computer technology and hacking look very 1990s today.
Silly Moments: A few plot points and stunts stretch believability near the end.
Overall, it is a charming, fast-paced popcorn film that holds up well as a classic 90s heist adventure.
Listening to The Reunion (the cast and crew of Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero) on R4 last week reminded me: That Sinking Feeling is on Youtube.
Excellent episode.
I saw Altered Images last week (swoon)
Twin Town.
From Wikipedia:
Twin Town is a 1997 British dark comedy crime film, filmed mainly around Port Talbot and set in Swansea, Wales. It was directed by Kevin Allen and had a working title of Hot Dog; a hot dog van features in a number of scenes in the film. It stars real-life brothers Rhys Ifans (in his first major movie role) and Llŷr Ifans (credited as Llyr Evans) along with Dougray Scott. The director appears on screen, briefly seen as a show host on a TV set in the static caravan home of the twins while co-writer Paul Durden briefly appears as a rude taxi driver.