jameswharris

The Things That We Love

by James Wallace Harris, 6/27/26

Susan and I just finished watching The Spoils of Poynton, a 1970 BBC production shown on Masterpiece Theater in 1971. It’s based on a 1897 novel by Henry James. Mrs. Adele Gereth has collected art objects, furniture, knick-knacks, lamps, glassware, and pottery for her entire life. Now that her son Owen is of age and will inherit the house and everything in it, she is distraught to learn that his fiancée, Mona Brigstock, lacks the taste and refinement to appreciate her treasure. So Adele connives to get Owen to marry someone else.

This is how things used to be. Families clung to generations of cherished things. Before my mother died, she wanted to know who wanted what of her things. She assumed that Becky, my sister, and I, as well as some of my cousins, would fight over her favorite things. After she died, I took the photo albums, my sister took some homemade quilts, and we gave away everything else.

I’m currently listening to Whistler, the new novel by Ann Patchett. At one point, Jonathan, the husband of the main character, Daphne Fuller, leaves her for several days to return home after his mother’s death to sort through her possessions with his siblings. Daphne begs Jonathan to hire an estate cleanout instead of putting himself through weeks of agony.

When Susan’s parents died, we bought their house because Susan and her brothers were too sentimental to let it go. So we lived with Robert and Mary’s stuff for a very long time. It was actually better than our stuff. And when my friend Janis moved to Mexico, we took in a bunch of her stuff. I think of these people by the things they owned.

All of this makes me think about the things I love to buy and own. Isn’t it weird how we love physical objects so intently? Susan and I are terrible at home decor. Our favorite kind of furniture is the La-Z-Boy. We have six single chairs and one double. We also love large screen TVs. My den has a 65″ TV, and her living room has a 75″ TV. We have hundreds of DVDs. And I have hundreds of CDs. I also have hundreds of books.

I don’t lust after cars, guns, or sports memorabilia like normal guys. I’m a bookworm, and books are what I get all sappy about. Susan says when I die, she’ll call Goodwill and Salvation Army and ask them to haul off everything I loved. Sometimes I think I should help her out by giving most of my books away before I die.

I especially love old science fiction magazines. I’d rather have them than diamonds. I would trade them for 19th-century artwork, but I’m realistic enough to know I’m no art collector. Besides, impressionist artworks really don’t go with La-Z-Boys.

The other day, I watched a YouTube video of the actor Paul Giamatti being interviewed about his book collecting. I felt a great affinity with these two guys. These are my people. I cherish crappy old paperbacks, too.

I always marvel when I visit friends and see how they’ve made their houses into museums of the things they admire. It makes me feel bad that I don’t love beautiful home furnishings. Our decor is functional for watching TV, listening to music, and reading.

After I’ve died, and someone is throwing out my science fiction magazine, I doubt they will see the beauty I saw. They won’t know that every issue of F&SF, Galaxy, or Astounding triggers memories. Most people remember the people they knew and the stories about them. I remember writers and the stories they wrote.

I wish I had a manor house and a lifetime of collected treasures like Adele Gereth, including my library of books and magazines. I love my house, even though it’s junky and cluttered. I do regret not having more refined tastes. But I never cared about dishes or doodads. My grandmother collected figurines of dogs. She had hundreds. That was cool. I wish I had gotten one to remember her by – a collie dog.

In Whistler, Jonathan’s first wife collected paintings of rabbits. I wish I had thought of something like that when I was young. Some kind of modest art that people throwing my stuff away could have identified me with. I’ve always admired 19th-century drawings by naturalists and scientists.

I visit the Friends of the Library bookstore once a week. People donate the kind of things I treasure. In fact, a lot of my treasure came from that bookstore. I think I’ll arrange to give my stuff to them when I die. I’ve already given them thousands of books, records, and CDs over the decades. It makes me sad when I see things I once loved left on the shelves for weeks. Hopefully, they will all find a new home with someone to love them. I guess I’m no different than Adele Gereth.

JWH

Are My Thoughts Like Your Thoughts?

by James Wallace Harris, 6/15/26

In Chapter 3, “Thought” from A World Appears, Michael Pollan works with psychologist Russell T. Hurlburt, who has been collecting thought diaries from his subjects for over fifty years. The technique Hurlburt uses is called Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES). Subjects wear a device that randomly beeps in their ears. When they hear the beep, they write down what was going on in their head just before the beep. Hurlburt says:

I have sampled with some people whose inner experience is characterized almost exclusively by inner speech; with others whose inner experience is characterized almost exclusively by images, or by sensory awareness, or by unsymbolized thinking, or by feelings; with others whose inner experience is characterized by a combination of all those; with some whose inner experience is characterized by many simultaneous events; with others whose inner experience is characterized almost exclusively by one event at a time; and so on. So, yes, I think people are importantly different when it comes to inner experience.

So when you ask a person, “What are you thinking?” the answer might not be anything like how you think. For the most part, people assume everyone thinks like they do, but Hurlburt’s research shows that isn’t true.

I’ve kept a running chatter in my head my whole life, except for when I’m unconscious. However, as soon as I wake up, the voice returns. It’s weird to think that some people don’t have this inner voice. That makes me think of the science fiction novel Blindsight by Peter Watts. Watts imagines an intelligent alien race that lacks conscious self-awareness.

My inner voice is almost always analytical, always commenting on what I’m experiencing. If I have a pain in my abdomen, the voice is proposing theories as to what is causing the pain. But it’s not always like this.

When I was younger, I had constant fantasies about everything. I was a little Walter Mitty. I’ve always had imaginary conversations in my head, usually about what I was going to talk about with people in the future. Of course, I had lots of sexual fantasies, but I had many more kinds of fantasies. If I saw a movie and didn’t like the plot, I’d reimagine it with a new plot. If I didn’t like the actors, I’d recast the film in my head. I’ve mentally written hundreds of science fiction stories. For every blog post I write, I’ve already written it several times in my thoughts.

I found it fascinating that Hurlburt said some people don’t do this either.

But then, when I discovered I had aphantasia, my mind boggled trying to imagine how other people see inside their minds. I do sometimes have flashes of visual imagery. My dreams are very vivid. And sometimes if I’m tired in just the right way, I have waking dreams. When I was young and smoked dope, the visual floodgates would open.

I do “visualize” things in my head, but without pictures. I have good spatial awareness and can intuit how machines work. I have another sense for how things look. It’s very hard to describe. I wonder if it’s like how blind people develop spatial awareness?

Hurlburt’s research also showed that people see and think less in their heads as they age. That makes me wonder if I had better mental imagery when I was younger. I do feel my inner chatter is slowing.

One reason I believe that is because when I first tried to meditate in the 1970s, I had a hell of a time quieting that inner voice. Now I can relax, and it will shut up for about as long as I can hold my breath. And it feels like that. The longer I shut up mentally, the pressure builds, sort of like needing to take a breath when you’re holding it. Thoughts eventually explode out.

I’ve often wondered why most people aren’t addicted to music like I am. When I play music, it stimulates my brain in many ways. My “thinking” goes into overdrive, and my mind is flooded with ideas. Also, music creates all kinds of emotions or enhances existing emotions. Music makes me mentally high, but it’s unlike the old marijuana high that made my body high, too. I need to hear one to two hours of music a day, so it does feel like an addiction.

I’m not sure what Hurlburt means by “symbolized” and “unsymbolized thinking.” I might do that, or I might not. Nor do I know what he means by only being able to think of one event at a time. I know I’m experiencing many sensory events at once, but I think I only focus on one at a time. Are some people multichanneled? Is that like having multiple picture-in-picture on your inner TV screen?

I have to assume I’m a bookworm because of the way I think. Reading fiction is like having your own artificial reality goggles. However, I don’t visualize scenes like other readers do.

I assume I write blogs because it feels like I’m organizing my thoughts. I assume that I would think like a writer, say, like Michael Pollan. But the more I read about Hurlburt, the more I wonder.

The fact that there is so much variation from person to person in our modes of thinking is itself an important finding of Descriptive Experience Sampling. Most of us assume that our inner lives must be substantially similar—not necessarily in content but in the form our thoughts take. Hurlburt has suggested that we fail to recognize the diversity of thinking styles because we lump them all together under that single word—thinking—and assume we mean the same thing by it, though in actuality we don’t.

“When a visualizer says they are thinking about something,” Hurlburt said, “they mean they are seeing a visual image of something, and if they are predominantly inner speakers, they mean ‘I was talking to myself.’ And the reason for this, I speculate, is that when you were two and learned that when your mother, or whoever it was, says, ‘I was thinking,’ that meant something that was happening inside Mom that you couldn’t see. So when I want to tell you whatever is going on inside me, that’s ‘I’m thinking.’ But ‘thinking’ means something different from person to person.” If Hurlburt is right, the word thinking has allowed us to overlook these differences and make the unwarranted assumption that other people are having inner experiences more or less like our own.

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (pp. 146-147). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Pollan was surprised when Hurlburt expressed what his DES diaries suggested:

Hurlburt proceeded to tell me that he didn’t think I had much inner experience at all. I was on the far end of a spectrum that ran from a rich inner life of words, images, and sensations to one…well, one lacking all that. Apparently, the fact that I had so much trouble distinguishing context from the moments under analysis (and kept bringing up things he considered irrelevant) suggested to him that I was, in effect, backfilling moments empty of actual inner experience.

I was flabbergasted, and reacted a little defensively.

Hurlburt said that he had arrived at his conclusion by a process of elimination: Most of my beeps lacked words, lacked images, lacked sensory awareness. Okay, but what about unsymbolized thinking? My non- or preverbal thought processes seemed to fall neatly into this mode. Hurlburt acknowledged that we had turned up a few instances of this, but “unsymbolized thoughts are complete thoughts,” he explained, not the misty “gists” of thought I had described. Subtract those and he was left with one uncomfortable possibility: that I didn’t have nearly as much of an inner life as I’d always assumed.

My interiority, he seemed to be suggesting, was sparsely furnished.

Has it always been this way? I wondered. Hurlburt pointed out that the ability to generate inner experiences depends on cognitive resources that decline with age. For example, he’s found that as people get older, their inner seeing tends to deteriorate, fading from full-color imagery to black and white. He cited James, who writes that “the older men are and the more effective as thinkers, the more, as a rule, they have lost their visualizing power…. The present writer observes it in his own person most distinctly.” Hurlburt thinks that all forms of inner experience may be subject to the same fading over time.

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (pp. 148-149). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Can we know ourselves? Many philosophers and scientists say we can’t understand consciousness because we’re studying it from the inside out. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to step outside of ourselves and study who we are?

It’s quite commonly known that people see colors differently. For example, when I play Rummikub with friends, they claim the green tiles are blue. This is really no different than how different monitors show the same .jpg file with different-looking colors.

This morning, my inner voice was chatting about how we see the world, and asked if machines perceive reality differently. Does a camera see a vista as objective reality? Or are the chemicals in film, and the sensors in digital cameras, also limited by physical constraints?

It is rather weird that we have no idea what reality looks like. And it seems we have no idea what we really look like on the inside.

JWH

The Forsytes on TV

by James Wallace Harris, 6/13/26

Would anyone still be reading John Galsworthy if British television didn’t keep producing new versions of The Forsyte Saga? Galsworthy did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932, the year before he died, but that recognition seldom guarantees an enduring audience.

I must admit I wouldn’t be reading Galsworthy books today if I hadn’t been a fan of all three miniseries based on The Forsyte Saga. Technically, The Forsyte Saga is the title Galsworthy gave to the first trilogy of novels based on the Forsyte family. All nine novels are called The Forsyte Chronicles.

I know it sounds obsessive that I’m reading the books after watching 42 episodes of the three miniseries. However, the novels color in the main characters with greater detail. They also flesh out all the minor characters we see standing around the main characters on the screen.

The literary world has forgotten Galsworthy as a Victorian materialist who didn’t make the evolutionary step to modernism. Virginia Woolf was particularly hard on Galsworthy for failing to portray the inner lives of his characters. We don’t get deep, long stream-of-consciousness narratives, but I do feel Galsworthy describes the inner world of his characters, sometimes explicitly but often implied through dialogue and action.

Soames Foryste, who readers will hate as much as Irene Forsyte hates him, does get our sympathy. Soames is so well developed over six novels that he feels like one of the historical figures Lytton Strachey wrote about in Eminent Victorians.

Personally, I don’t know why Anthony Trollope and John Galsworthy aren’t as popular with readers as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. They fill in a gap in English history for readers who study history through novels. Galsworthy is well-suited for those who love Downton Abbey, which explains why British television has produced it three times.

Amazon has the Forsyte Collection for 99 cents, which claims to contain everything in 3,355 pages. There are several audiobook editions, but I’m listening to the Naxos editions. Naxos packages the entire story of nine novels using their trilogy names: The Forsyte Saga, A Modern Comedy, and End of the Chapter.

Only the first six novels actually focus on the Forsytes; the last three deal with a distant cousin.

The Forsytes Saga (1967) miniseries has 26 parts, and covers the first six novels and interludes (short stories):

The Man of Property
In Chancery
To Let
The White Monkey
The Silver Spoon
Swan Song

The Forsyte Saga (2002) miniseries has 10 parts, and only covers the first three novels and interludes (short stories):

The Man of Property
In Chancery
To Let

The latest television version, The Forsytes (2025), had only six episodes in its first season and covered only part of The Man of Property. It had been renewed for seasons 2 and 3. For some reason, it changes the story from the books and the two other television series. I don’t recommend starting with this series, even though it has the most elaborate production.

I recommend watching the 1967 series, which is in black-and-white. The only place I could find it was on YouTube. Among the stars were two of my favorites, Kenneth More and Susan Hampshire.

As far as I can remember, only Soames, Irene, and Winifred appear in all six of the first novels that focus on the Forsyte family from the 1880s until 1926. It involves at least ten love stories and eight marriages. It begins in Victorian times, spans the Edwardian, through World War I, and into the Jazz Age.

The 26 episodes of The Forsyte Saga reminded me a great deal of the 26 episodes of The Pallisers, which is based on six novels by Anthony Trollope. It made me wonder if Galsworthy was a fan of Trollope. But it also reminded me of the 12-volume novel series, Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, and the four-part TV series of the same name. These English writers like to span generations, combining character drama and British history.

Although there are plenty of reasons to hate Soames Forsyte, I found him a fascinating character. I was very sympathetic to Irene Forsyte, but I also wanted to condemn her. I both liked and disliked Jon and Fleur. In the 1967 version, Fleur was played by Susan Hampshire. It’s hard to judge the faults of a character played by such a beautiful actress.

I’ve already seen the 2002 version twice, and I’m looking forward to watching it again. According to WatchNow, it’s available on Netflix and PBS. Damian Lewis portrays Soames wonderfully. The character is so unlikable, yet over time, you develop great sympathy for the poor man.

Unfortunately, I haven’t taken to the new 2025 version, although I will give it another viewing. The actors all look too young and beautiful. The costumes, sets, and production are luscious. Visually, it reminds me of HBO’s The Gilded Age. The latest big historical dramas all seem to be revising the past, so everyone is young and beautiful. I really appreciated all the genuinely old-looking characters in the 1967 version.

The miniseries focuses on romantic relationships. The novels also explore many other kinds of relationships. Soames and his father. Soames and his uncles and aunts. Soames with his brothers and sisters. Soames is the patron of Philip the artist. But they are also romantic rivals for Irene. In the second trilogy, A Modern Comedy, the novels focus on Soames’ relationship with his daughter Fleur. In the second trilogy, we see Soames in several business and political relationships. And we see Soames’ relationship to art – he’s a collector of paintings.

And this is just the connections of Soames. There is an intense relationship between Old Jolyon, Young Jolyon, and his son Jolly. We encounter even more relationships with their wives and lovers. Young Jolyon is Soames’s first cousin, and the two families have several overlapping relationships.

The story focuses on marriage from Victorian times through the Jazz Age. To the first and second generations of Forystes, marriage was about improving the Forsyte holdings. Soames twice marries poor, beautiful women who come to despise him. Intense love fails other couples. In the first six novels, I can only recall one marriage where love succeeds.

I’ve read enough about Galsworthy to know that the complicated Forsytes were somewhat inspired by his own family. And Galsworthy stole his wife, Ada, from his cousin, and they lived unmarried for several years, hiding the scandal from his father. After his father died, his cousin divorced Ada, and Galsworthy married her. This is paralleled with Jolyon and Soames.

In other words, there is great depth in these novels that makes The Forsytes worth reproducing for television. And it should encourage fans to read the novels.

JWH

How Aware or Conscious Was I At 5 Years Old?

by James Wallace Harris, 6/8/26

In the first chapter of Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears, he makes a good case that consciousness evolved alongside biology, probably beginning in cells. For most of history, humans separated themselves from the animal world by claiming we had a soul, a divine spark, that animals lacked. Scientific studies of the mind are showing that’s not true.

Pollan found scientists who showed that plants could form and retain memories, anticipate, decide, and act on their goals. Their tiny bit of consciousness is nothing like ours, but it shows that consciousness is on a spectrum. There are profound implications if consciousness coevolved with biology, from the virus to the human brain. Research into consciousness and artificial intelligence is revealing a flood of new insights.

If life itself represents a spectrum of conscious development, I’m also assuming that any individual animal also shows a spectrum of conscious development over its lifetime.

I’m saying who I was at five is far different from who I am at seventy-four. The difference won’t be as big as between me and my cat, Ozzy, but I believe it’s huge. I’m not sure, but in some ways, five-year-old Ozzy might have been more aware than 5-year-old Jimmy. If we were both abandoned in the woods, Ozzy would have far better survival awareness.

I also believe my awareness/consciousness evolved significantly from 5 years 0 months to 5 years 12 months. I started the 1st grade when I was 5 years and 8 months old. School accelerated the evolution of my conscious mind.

I only have fleeting memories of life before turning five. I can remember only a few interactions with people. I have a few memories from Kindergarten. I had no knowledge of numbers, words, or letters. I had extremely limited spatial and temporal awareness.

I did what I was told, but I would have preferred to play on my own. I loved my toy truck, a little metal front-loader. I loved to climb trees. I loved TV, but we’re talking Captain Kangaroo and Kukla, Fran and Ollie. I had no idea what books and magazines were. I had no idea where I lived.

I’m not sure I had any particular self-awareness. Looking back, I think I was mostly unconscious of reality. If a stranger had walked up to me and pointed a gun at my head, I don’t think I would have been frightened or even known what a gun was. If my parents had left me alone in the house, I’m not sure I could have gotten my own food. I knew my father, mother, sister, and grandmother, but I was indifferent or clueless about everyone else. I don’t remember my Kindergarten teacher or any of my classmates.

My friend Linda has told many stories about her childhood, and she was far more aware than I was at the same ages. Girls mature sooner, but I think Linda was even exceptional for being a girl.

My point is, everyone evolves differently. The question is, how broad is the range of consciousness in humans? We know the range of intelligence is great, but what about awareness of reality? How many people are closer to a collie dog than to Einstein?

Nor is consciousness one thing. Elon Musk might be at the height of money-making consciousness, but fairly low at empathy for people.

Looking back at Jimmy at 5, I feel he was essentially unconscious compared to Jim at 74. I also sense that there are countless areas where I’m essentially unconscious at 74 compared to others at any age.

We say humans have five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Well, what lets me feel my heartbeat? What sense organ lets me feel cold? What sense organ lets me discern the passing of time? What sense organ does my wife have that lets her remember melodies that I lack?

How many levels of awareness are humans capable of achieving? How many aspects of reality can we discern? Science fiction, mysticism, spiritualists, and users of psychedelic drugs claim there are many levels of higher consciousness we could attain if we tried. Most sound like fantasies, but what if some are possible?

Over the centuries, there have been stories about supermen. Often, they have psychic abilities and other superpowers. Just consider Greek myths and Marvel Comics.

What are some truly possible higher states of consciousness? Compared to Jimmy at 5, I have a higher consciousness. What levels could I have achieved if I had known they existed and I had tried to attain them?

Artificial intelligence is a big topic right now. Computer scientists want to create AIs that are smarter than people. But what other things might AI become aware of that we can’t perceive?

We only perceive in a limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum. AIs could be built to perceive far more of the whole spectrum. What if they discover things we never could with our senses and even scientific instruments? Will we believe them?

If I could travel back in time to talk to Jimmy at 5, could I make him understand anything about being Jim at 74? I doubt it. He could not even conceive the concepts of time travel, aging, or growth.

In recent months, I’ve been contemplating the evolution of my own consciousness. I think that evolution accelerated between 5 and 12. But then it exploded around 13. Most conceptual expansions peaked in my twenties. And most of my conceptual abilities have been declining since then. However, I feel my ability to generalize is still growing. That might be wisdom, or it might be a delusion.

The more I study my own mind and read books by scientists who study minds in general, the more I’m convinced that our consciousness coevolved with physics, chemistry, and biology. Thus, when my physical body dissolves with entropy, so will my mind.

There are even some scientists who still hold out that part of our awareness is metaphysical, and it will survive physical existence. Those scientists say artificial intelligence will never have that metaphysical spark they call the soul. I wonder something different.

What if the total gestalt of body, mind, awareness, sentience, and consciousness can be called our soul? But what if that soul is mortal? That collectively, all life on Earth has a kind of soul. too, but also mortal. Obviously, all life is evolving. But how much can we evolve as individuals?

Life and evolution are anti-entropic. Death is entropy. Is there a metaphysical existence that is not entropic?

JWH

Finding Old Movies on YouTube When You Don’t Have TCM

by James Wallace Harris, 6/2/26

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is the gold standard for old movie lovers. Unfortunately, in the era of cord-cutting, fewer people have access to this wonderful resource. TCM is available via several live-streaming services, including YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, DirecTV Stream, and Sling TV. However, they are becoming as expensive as cable TV.

Luckily, my wife is willing to pay for YouTube TV, so I don’t have to worry. However, I have friends who love old movies and don’t have TCM. I invite them over to watch movies with me, but it’s not the same.

The mood to sit in a dark room lit only by the flicker of a black-and-white movie can strike at any time. When I say old, I mean films produced before Beatlemania.

To show how old I am, I’d call The Graduate (1967) a new movie. I define old movies as those I first saw on television growing up. And new movies are those that came out after I started going to the movies on my own in 1962, when I was ten. I’d tend to call films like The Matrix (1999) recent films.

There are plenty of streaming services that show new and recent movies. It’s hard to find old movies if you don’t have TCM.

YouTube is a great resource for old movies. If you don’t subscribe to YouTube Premium Lite ($8.99) or YouTube Premium ($15.99), you’ll have to watch ads or rent the films individually. See YouTube Premium. Lite just removes most commercials, and full Premium adds YouTube Music. Watch this video for a full explanation. I’m subscribed to Lite because I have a Spotify subscription.

Go to YouTube’s Movies and TV page to view their catalog newer movies.

However, many old films are uploaded by regular users. These you have to find yourself, but they are a great source of old movies that aren’t shown on TCM. TCM’s library is great on MGM and Warner Brothers films, but is less good for many studios. For example, YouTube has lots of films from 20th Century Fox and Screen Gems that you don’t see on TCM.

Whenever you’re searching JustWatch and it lists no streaming sources for the film or TV show you’re looking for, check on YouTube.

In recent years, I’ve craved widescreen black-and-white films from the 1950s, and I’ve struck gold on YouTube in finding them.

I should warn y’all that watching old movies on YouTube can be tricky. In the early years of YouTube, old movies were uploaded in low resolution. But over time, they are reloaded in higher resolutions. If you find a movie that’s not in 1080p or 720p, be sure to use the search function to locate other copies.

Also, some uploaders trim off the opening credits. I hate that. I assume they are trying to avoid copyright strikes. Others like to overlay their channel IDs onto the film. I really hate that! My TV can upscale a 360p or 480p copy to make it watchable, but I generally check for 720p or 1080p copies first.

I’m also annoyed by colorized prints. Generally, I won’t watch them. However, I am intrigued by David Adiss’s effort to convert The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) from 4:3 to 16:9 aspect ratio with AI, and colorize it with AI.

Another problem is that films are uploaded without titles or alternate titles. I guess this is a shade area of the law. Check IMDb.org.

On the other hand, I’ve found stunning prints of old movies on YouTube. My soul finds great beauty in black-and-white cinematography.

It’s possible to watch old movies on your phone or tablet on YouTube, but I strongly recommend adding the YouTube app to your smart TV interface, or your Roku, Fire TV Stick, or Apple TV box.

I also recommend having a Google account. This should be automatic if you’re using a smart TV with Google TV or Android TV.

If you’re logged into YouTube, you can save old films to Watch Later. Also, Google remembers what you like and suggests additional old movies to your feed. I now have a nice library of old movies waiting to be seen.

Below are movies I’ve watched on YouTube with IMDB ratings. If you like a film, click on “Watch on YouTube.” It will take you to YouTube, and you can add it to your Watch Later list.

No Down Payment (1957) – 7.1

The Tattered Dress (1957) – 6.5

Oliver Twist (1948) – 7.8

The Admirable Crichton (1957) – 7.1

Separate Tables (1958) – 7.3

Two of a Kind (1951) – 6.6

Rawhide (1951) – 7.1

The Big Combo (1955) – 7.3

Garden of Evil (1954) 6.6 4K

House of Strangers (1949) – 7.3

Vicki (1953) – 6.5

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005) – 7.6

These are just the ones I’ve seen recently. You’ll note the many film noir flicks. Once I started watching them, YouTube kept offering me more. As the algorithm learns your tastes in films, the better the system gets. Be patient.

JWH