This one comes straight from our collection of Free Online Movies. Beat the Devil is a 1953 classic directed by the great John Huston and co-written by Truman Capote, which stars Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, and Gina Lollobrigida. Not a bad lineup. It’s technically a noir film. But it’s really a dramatic comedy (or comic drama?) that spoofs the noir genre and particularly Huston’s earlier film, The Maltese Falcon. A little something to enjoy this weekend, or during the holidays to come. You can find this film permanently hosted over at the Internet Archive. Another version (with some better resolution) can also be found on YouTube. And, again, you can find many great films on our free movie page.

Attached Media: video/mp4 (389 316 ko)

We take you back to 1967, to the three-day Monterey Pop Festival in California, which was kind of a precursor to the Woodstock Festival held in 1969. Monterey marked, among other things, the first major American appearances by Jimi Hendrix and The Who. Above, we give you Hendrix covering Bob Dylan’s anthem Like a Rolling Stone. And here, we have Wild Thing, which ends famously in Hendrix adding fire to his best imitation of Pete Townshend. Great vintage clips which you’ll find in our YouTube favorites.

Newly launched: The Shakespeare Quartos Archive is a new digital collection that features pre-1642 editions of William Shakespeare’s plays. Here, for example, you will find rare early editions of Hamlet, including all 32 existing quarto copies of the play in one place. An online first. Thanks Jeremy for the tip…

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It happened 40 years ago. A 14-year-old Beatles fan named Jerry Levitan managed to sneak into John Lennon’s Toronto hotel room and asked for an interview. And he got one. Now, there’s a short animated film that brings that encounter back to life. I Met the Walrus was nominated for the 2008 Academy Award for Animated Short. You’ll know why when you watch it. Another excellent find by Vickie. Find this video added to our YouTube Favorites.

It’s nice to see cultural anthropology professor Michael Wesch getting featured right now on YouTube’s homepage. (A professor getting featured on YouTube? That has to be a first.) Anyway, Wesch is directing viewers to a film called RIP: A Remix Manifesto, a prize winning film that offers a “probing investigation into how culture builds upon culture [think mashup] in the information age.” I have posted the trailer above. You can also watch the complete movie in multiple parts on YouTube (Part 1 is here), or directly download the entire film and name your price. If you haven’t seen Wesch’s own videos, you can watch his creative pieces here, here, and here.

In the past couple of years, The New Yorker has rolled out a series of animated cartoons, which puts in motion its famous cartoons. They can be watched as video podcasts or as streamed videos. You should definitely head over to The New Yorker web site to view the larger collection.

We gave you Tchaikovsky’s Voice Captured on an Edison Cylinder (1899) and James Joyce Reading from Finnegans Wake. And now, thanks to Robert, we let you listen in on interviews with two other great composers — Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) and Béla Bartók (1881-1945) recorded in 1944.

A quick fyi: Starting today, you can find online legal opinions from the Supreme Court, as well as federal and state courts, thanks to Google Scholar. When you visit Google Scholar, click on the ”Legal opinions and journals” radio button, and then begin your query. If you type ”separate but equal,” Scholar with present you with famous Supreme Court Cases such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education. You get the gist. You can read more about this online legal database over at Google’s blog.

UPDATE/NOTE FROM READER: “This has already been done for the US Supreme Court, and very well, at oyez.org.  Oyez is easy to use, has lots of additional content, including summaries and audio of oral arguments, and is ad-free and Creative Commons licensed for its original content.  Plus, you can search by court term, Justice, and the name of the legal counsel.” An alternative source to look at…

This musical bit is easier watched than described. Click through, start the 20 videos playing in any order/timing that you want, and see what you get. You can read the FAQ for the InB b 2.0 project here.

Thanks V for the tip!

Vladimir Nabokov wanted his last unfinished novel destroyed (learn more about it here). But, 32 years after his death, the book is being published. You can buy The Original of Laura starting Tuesday. Meanwhile, you can also read through a few excerpts thanks to the Times Online.

Two weeks ago, we presented a list of 35 sites where you can watch free movies online. Now, we’ve taken the next step and added 100 high-quality films to our list. Some films are contemporary, but many are classics created by legendary directors, actors & actresses. And they’re frequently made available by the great Internet Archive. (Note: you can usually stream or download their films. It’s your choice.) Below I have listed 15 films, but you can find the complete list here. Finally, if you want to forward a short link to friends, here’s one that you can use: http://bit.ly/freeonlinemovies

• Beat the Devil (1953) Directed by John Huston, with Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre.
• Dementia 13 (1963) A horror film that was one of Francis Ford Coppola’s early mainstream efforts.
• His Girl Friday (1940) Directed by Howard Hawks. A classic comedy with Cary Grant.
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) Directed by Frank Capra, with Jimmy Stewart.
• My Best Friend’s Birthday (1987) Directed by Quentin Tarantino.
• Panic in the Streets (1950) A noir classic directed by Elia Kazan, with Jack Palance.
• Rashomon (1950) By the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.
• Scarlet Street (1945) Directed by Fritz Lang with Edward G. Robinson. A film noir great.
• Sita Sings the Blues (2008) New prize-winning animated film by Nina Paley.
• SuperSize Me (2004) Morgan Spurlock’s documentary on fast food in America. Also watch here.
• Taxi Driver (1976) Directed by Martin Scorsese, with Robert DeNiro. (US viewers only)
• The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with James Stewart and Doris Day.
• The Terror (1963) With Jack Nicholson and partly shot by Francis Ford Coppola.
• Triumph of the Will (1935) The major Nazi propaganda work by Leni Riefenstahl. With subtitles.
• The 39 Steps (1935) One of Alfred Hitchcock’s first hits.
• Un Chien Andalou (1929) Salvador Dali and Louis Bunuel’s short, silent surrealist film.

Get the full list of 100 free online movies here. And remember to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

A quick fyi, The Teaching Company, which provides university courses for lifelong learners like you, is running a big sale until Sunday night. In a nutshell, the sale gives you a 75% discount on all audio downloads of Teaching Company courses. As you know, I am a big advocate of the open course movement. But I’m also a fan of Teaching Company products. They feature excellent professors lecturing on important subjects, and the courses are always well produced. Browse the catalogue, and if you find a course that you like, then select the “audio download” version of the course to take advantage of 75% discount. You can start checking things out here. Note: the courses are all priced differently. Be sure to sort through the catalogue and look for the ones that are particularly well priced.

Take a quick trip back in time, to 1890. Here you can listen to Pyotr Tchaikovsky (The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, etc.) and other eminent musicians having some fun, recording their voices on a then new-fangled technology, the phonograph cylinder, invented by Thomas Edison in 1870. To get a transcript of what the friends had to say, you can read the transcript after the jump. Thanks Maggie for this tip. (via BoingBoing)

A. Rubinstein: What a wonderful thing [the phonograph].
J. Block: Finally.
E. Lawrowskaja: A disgusting…how he dares slyly to name me.
W. Safonov : (Sings a scale incorrectly).
P. Tchaikovsky: This trill could be better.
E. Lawrowskaja: (sings).
P. Tchaikovsky: Block is good, but Edison is even better.
E. Lawrowskaja: (sings) A-o, a-o.
W. Safonow: (In German) Peter Jurgenson in Moskau.
P. Tchaikovsky: Who just spoke?

The pattern always repeats itself. Civilizations rise and fall. Then new ones take their place. But, something else may be about to happen. There might be an impending collapse of our entire global civilization. Not one major civilization, but the entire global civilization, gone. Or, so that’s how Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich sees it. Ehrlich, who has been called “one of the most influential ecologists of our age,” sees one thing staving off disaster. A big shift in culture first and foremost. A cultural evolution. Watch above.

Today, Clicker.com comes out of beta and promises to become the complete guide to Internet Television. Currently, the site “contains more than 450,000 episodes, from over 6,000 shows, from over 1,200 networks, tens of thousands of movies, and 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists.” The content (all apparently legal) is generally supplied by other content providers, and then aggregated by Clicker. Although the content is often quite pop, you can find some university content (Berkeley, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc.) in the mix, much of it supplied by Academic Earth. Other quality content appears in the Art & Artists section here and the Documentary section here.

Thanks Denise for the tip.

via USA Today

For the past couple of months, A Glorious Dawn, a mashup melding Stephen Hawking’s voice with scenes from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, has been making its way around the blogosphere. Now, on the eve of what would have been Sagan’s 75th birthday (he died in 1996), A Glorious Dawn has been officially released as a single by Third Man Records, the label created by White Stripes singer Jack White. We have posted the video above. You can also download the song in mp3 and other formats here, or buy it as a special 7 inch single (pre-order here).

via Huffington Post and Telegraph.co.uk

Two weeks ago, I posted a collection of 20 sites where you can watch free movies online. Thanks to your help, the page now features 30 Places to Watch Free Movies Online, and I hope to keep it growing. Below, I have featured five of the new additions, which includes many important classics. Please feel free to share the full collection with friends, and keep sending your suggestions my way:

Internet Archive – Feature Films: When you’re looking for free movies online, the Internet Archive should be your first stop. It features large collections of comedies, film noir and sci-fi/horror flix. You will also find some foreign films here, along with important classic films, including Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets, John Huston’s Beat the Devil, Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and The Kid with Charlie Chaplin. You can access the Archive’s full movie library here.

Babelgum Films: Babelgum’s goal is to act as an international ‘glue’, bringing a huge range of professional and semi-professional films to a global audience – like a modern-day Tower of Babel. They’re also making an effort to get their content to smartphones. They have an iPhone app now and apps for other phones on the horizon. Get more detail on the mobile apps here.

FMO: FreeMoviesOnline features a large selection of public domain films. Here, you’ll find films featuring John Wayne (Paradise Canyon, Humphrey Bogart (Beat the Devil), Cary Grant (The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss), Fred Astaire (Royal Wedding), Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, and many others.

Fancast: This site features a long list of free movies. Some notable films include Laurence Olivier and Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, Johnny Depp in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade, Gary Cooper in The Pride of the Yankees, Robert DeNiro in Ronin, and Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately, I think this site restricts films to an American audience. But please let me know if I am wrong about that.

Google Video: For some time now, major classics have appeared on Google Video. Take for example: the 1922 German silent film Nosferatu, The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Sergei Eisenstein’s 1918 film Alexander Nevsky, Howard Hughes’ The Outlaw (1943), Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), Night of the Living Dead (1968), 1984 (based on the Orwell novel) and three films by the great Frank Capra — It Happened One Night (with Clark Gable), It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (both with Jimmy Stewart).

Indie Movies Online: Just as it sounds. A good place to watch full-fledged indie films on the web.  Right now, you can find Peter Greenaway’s film, Rembrandt’s J’accuse and The Future We Will Create – Inside the World of TED. The site seems to be available in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, but perhaps also beyond.

For many more free films, please visit 30 Places to Watch Free Movies Online

When I traveled to East Berlin in 1988, my first time as a youngster, I read reports of a split between the hardline East German regime and the opening Soviet government. But nobody really paid much attention to that news. Less than a year later, the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall would be gone, all of it. Above, you can watch footage that shows how East Germans experienced that moment, and here, courtesy of @courosa, you can find a series of vivid historical images that commemorate the events that took place 20 years ago.

Excellent find by Stephen Grant… You can now experience the battle lines of World War I in Second Life, thanks to The First World War Poetry Digital Archive and the Learning Technologies Group at Oxford University. WWI shocked the Western world with its landscape-changing warfare and high tech carnage. Remembrances of “The Great War” live on in some remarkable poetry and literature. And now Second Life too. Find more information on this project here.

Last year, Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford, gave what was supposed to be his last talk on the modern copyright regime that once benefited creativity but now stifles it and brings big bucks to corporations. But, at EDUCAUSE last week, he came back as the keynote speaker and returned to these still-burning issues once again. Lessig has posted his artfully presented talk online, and you can now watch it above.

PS Once you start the video, it will take a little while for you to see anything.