I stumbled across two classic movies over at Hulu.com yesterday. Both are streamed in high-quality video for free at the site, and are available to watch anytime.

In the last few months it’s been hard to avoid hearing the name of Harvey Milk, the San Francisco activist and community organizer who became the nation’s first-ever openly gay elected official in 1978 — and was assassinated just eleven months later. The Gus Van Sant/Sean Penn biopic Milk has been getting well-deserved rave reviews since it opened in November. But Milk isn’t the first movie made about Harvey, and it may not be the best. The 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk is an astounding achievement, and a great lesson in the history and practice of organizing. Check it out at Hulu if you haven’t seen it already.

The Marx Brothers’ 1932 Horse Feathers is history of a different kind. In it Groucho plays a university president, and the movie’s plot — such as it is — centers around corruption and gambling in college sports. College students were cultural icons in the 1920s and 1930s, and Horse Feathers gives a fascinating glimpse at how the university was perceived in popular culture at the time.