6 Excellent Silent Movies To Watch If You've Only Ever Seen The Talkies

Do you know why I love writing for this website? It’s because even though they get most of their clicks from things like interviews with the cast of John Wick: Chapter 4, and breaking news, they still let me write about stuff that might not be trending on Google at the moment.

Case in point, my recent articles on watching the movie Hook for the first time, and classic black and white films.

Well, I'm going to push the un-searchability envelope even further by talking about silent movies! Because that's what all the kids are talking about on TikTok these days, right? So, here are six excellent silent movies to watch if you've only seen "the talkies."

City Lights

Written, directed, produced by and starring Charlie Chaplin, I was a little hesitant to put 1931's City Lights on this list, as who hasn't seen it? But then, I dug my head out of my butt and remembered that most people don't watch silent movies or still pay for Netflix’s DVD subscription, like I do.

In a nutshell, this is about a tramp (Chaplin) who falls in love with a blind flower girl who mistakes him for a rich guy after certain events lead to him driving her home in a fancy car.

What follows is a series of humorous misadventures for our hero that usually end up in failure. City Lights is an early example of a romantic comedy, and it's a great first silent movie to watch if you've never seen one before.

Metropolis

I know everybody went gaga over Avatar: The Way of Water's visuals (except for me, apparently), but if you want to see a real technical marvel, then you have to watch the 1927 sci-fi drama, Metropolis.

Directed by Fritz Lang, the movie's influence is prevalent in pretty much every modern day sci-fi film and TV show that’s currently on the market.

The story itself is relatively simple, though. It concerns two societies, one highly advanced above, and one full of workers below. Well, when one member of the ruling class learns of the lower class beneath him, he works to raise them up, even though his father is perfectly fine with letting them suffer below. Honestly, you come for the story, but you stay for the visuals, which are still impressive, even to this day.

Battleship Potemkin

In this 1925 Russian film directed and co-written by Sergei Eisenstein, we see a mutiny that all starts due to some maggot-ridden meat that’s being served to a ship's crew. What follows is the men fighting back against their officers, an event that really happened back in 1905, which eventually led to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Besides being a fascinating history lesson, the movie itself is a grand scale picture (Clocking in at only 71 minutes!) that rivals a lot of the bloated “epics” that we tend to see today. There’s a very famous scene of a baby carriage precariously going down some stairs that has been replicated in other films (most notably The Untouchables), as well as some other startling visuals.   

The film has been listed on quite a few “greatest pictures of all time” lists for decades, and yeah, even to this day, it still packs a wallop.

Wings

Sure, Wings is probably best known for being the very first Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards, but it’s so much more than just that. Directed by William A. Wellman, and starring megastars at the time like Clara Bow (who actually successfully managed to also have a career in the talkies), “America’s boyfriend,” Charles “Buddy” Rogers, and Richard Arlen, the film is about World War I pilots fighting for love and glory.

Wings, like Metropolis, is a technical marvel given that it’s a film from 1927. The aerial dog fights are incredible, and I would say that it rivals a lot of the CG-heavy special effects that we see today. A good comparison of a film that does these kinds of dogfights right would be last year’s Top Gun: Maverick when it comes to the overall flight experience.

Though I wouldn’t consider it one of the greatest movies to win Best Picture (or even the best war movie to win Best Picture for that matter), I will say that it’s a worthy first movie to win the award. Though, I don’t think it was the most worthy film of 1927…

Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans

…That would be F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, which actually also won an Academy Award for “Unique and Artistic Picture,” at the very first Academy Awards. Not only that, but Janet Gaynor took home the very first Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance as an underappreciated wife.

The film is kind of icky when watched from a modern perspective, but it’s better if you just watch it for its dreamlike storytelling. The plot concerns a farmer who is bored with his wife and child, gets lured by a temptress who convinces him to drown his wife, only for him to realize that his wife is still the love of his life, and that he almost loses her because of his selfish ways.

Again, it’s pretty difficult to actually root for the movie’s “hero” (played by George O’Brien), given how abusive he can be, but the actual flow of the film is unlike anything else you’ll ever see today, and for that, it should definitely be watched.

Meshes Of The Afternoon

Lastly, I thought I’d hit you with a movie from 1943, which was an era that definitely had sound. Still, this is a film that was stylistically chosen not to use it at all. Directed and starring the wife-and-husband team of Maya Deren and Alexander Hackenschmied, Meshes of the Afternoon is pretty much a dream set to film.

And, I’m not joking, as I don’t even know how to describe it other than to say that it’s a series of events that can be interpreted anyway you want. A woman (Deren) chases (Or is she being chased?) a figure with a mirror for a face, then…events occur. The film is only 14 minutes long, and yet, it was still recently ranked as the 16th greatest film of all time on 2022’s Sight and Sound poll (The aforementioned Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, it should be noted, was ranked at number 11 on said list).

If you want to see the film for yourself, you can watch the entire movie on YouTube. Like I said, it’s only 14 minutes, so it’s not going to eat into your day like a Lord of the Rings marathon or anything like that.

Silent films can be some of the greatest movies of all time, and this list is proof. For more news on all things film-related (I might rank cave drawings next), be sure to swing by here often!