No, Auslanders, the National Mall is not, as many surmise, a gigantic shopping mall. But for the occasional National Football League-slash-Pepsi promotion, we do prefer to keep the National Mall free of branding. However, once a year, the Mall at 15th and Constitution Avenue goes multiplex, presenting a series of film classics called Screen on the Green. And whether you’re a film buff, an enthusiast of DC’s green space, or simply a summer intern looking to cop a feel under the setting sun, this annual festival has something for everyone.

The Green Screening begins July 18th with the 1973 classic The Way We Were. Starring Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand, this is the way they were: not as craggy and less prone to polarizing political statements, respectively. It’s a love story set amid the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of European fascism that pits romantic passion against poltical idealism as the activist Streisand and the ambivalent Redford struggle to find a common ground to rest their mutual attraction. Directed by Sydney Pollack, The Way We Were is one of those movies that we keep in the win column to offset dreck like Random Hearts and The Interpreter.

The line is: “Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges.” That’s one piece of film history that can be corrected by taking in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Directed by the master John Huston and starring the great Humphrey Bogart, Sierra Madre tracks Bogart and co-star Tim Holt as they venture into the Mexican hills looking for the gold vein that’ll turn their luckless lives around. Set to screen on July 25th.

Cary Grant’s a handsome gambler with a streak of menace. Joan Fontaine is a shy heiress he meets on a train. And Alfred Hitchcock is that dude you see in that one scene, mailing a letter. Grant and Fontaine meet cute and fall hard for each other, but is theirs a love for the ages, or merely the backdrop for murder? By now, you probably have an inkling of Suspicion. A film-noir classic and one of Hitchcock’s best, it deserves more recognition than that other movie he made where Jimmy Stewart plays the only man in Christendom that can’t deduce that that’s Kim Novak wearing a wig. Screening August 1.

Edward Albee’s got the most vicious copyright lawyers in the land at his beck and call. And for what? A bookshelf full of pretentious, solipsistic drivel, mostly. But his influence on the culture won’t be denied on August 8, thanks to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who did their utmost to threaten the sanctity of marriage in real life, portray the most venal couple in the history of heterosexuality as they use a late night cocktail party as the staging ground for all-out psychological war. George Segal and Sandy Dennis are the young couple caught in the crossfire.

Screen on the Green concludes on August 15th with the absolutely essential film noir classic The Big Sleep. It’s Bogart and Bacall. It’s Raymond Chandler. It’s Howard Hawks. Who adapted Chandler’s novel for the screen? William Effing Faulkner, that's who. And, years later, it would inspire another one of the greatest movies of all time. Bogart plays private eye Phillip Marlowe, who’s asked by the dying General Sternwood to look after his youngest daughter who’s fallen in with the wrong crowd. What follows is a series of twists and mysteries, culminating in blackmail and murder, all featuring some of the greatest dialogue ever penned for the movies. We’d be inclined to say that if there’s one old movie worth braving the mosquitoes, humidity and shifty Capitol Hill hoodrats to see this year, make it The Big Sleep.