"Love Is a Ball" (1963), a comedy with Glenn Ford and Hope Lange.

 "Five Steps to Danger" (1957), a spy drama with Ruth Roman and Sterling Hayden.

 The sentimental wartime melodrama "Tomorrow Is Forever" (1946), starring Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles and a very young Natalie Wood.

 "Hickey & Boggs" (1972), "I Spy's" Bill Cosby and Robert Culp as big-screen private eyes.

 The 12-minute silent film that set the standard for Western cliches, "The Great Train Robbery" (1903). A lot of the movies at Fancast are on DVD and rentable, of course — but why pay? Among the golden oldies I spotted are the original "The Taking of Pelham 123," "Paths of Glory," "Support Your Local Sheriff," The Bishop's Wife," "Horse Feathers," "My Little Chickadee" and many more.

OK, I've skewed old here because those are the movies I look for — but '80s, '90s and '00s flicks are also available on Fancast: "Fatal Attraction," "Dressed to Kill," "Revenge of the Nerds," "Broken Flowers," etc.

I've highlighted Fancast here for these rare titles I spotted but many of the same movies can be found on the biggest, most popular and best-known vendor of free movies, Hulu at www.hulu.com (which also sublets movies and TV-show episodes to other sites, such as the Internet Movie Data Base, www.imdb.com). On Hulu you can find "In the Line of Fire," "Anastasia," "Cliffhanger," "Jewel of the Nile," "The Pit and the Pendulum," etc.

And now Hulu's biggest competitor may prove to be YouTube, which just last week launched its own page for free feature-length films at www.youtube.com/movies, with such films as "Carrie," "Thunderheart," "The Mod Squad," "Starman" — and, unexpectedly, a trio of German films by Werner Herzog with his frequent star Klaus Kinski: "Woyzeck," "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and the documentary "My Best Fiend."

These sites also have countless full-length TV episodes of shows ranging from 1950s classics to whatever was on last night.

There are, of course, other full-length free-movie sites, including some that stick to public-domain features.

And if you're among the attention-deficit generation, most also have those movie and TV clips, movie trailers and so-called TV "minisodes."

E-MAIL: hicks@desnews.com