Free entrance X chargeable entrance. Free parking X paid parking. Free service X chargeable service. Free consultation X paid consultation. Free health care X expensive health care. Free toilet X pay toilet. Free fare (in the sense of a free ticket to travel, the opposite can be a paid ticket). Here there is a mentioning of paying a ticket fare.
The fact that it was well-established long before OP's 1930s movies is attested by this sentence in the Transactions of the Annual Meeting from the South Carolina Bar Association, 1886 And to-day, “free white and twenty-one,” that slang phrase, is no longer broad enough to include the voters in this country.
I checked Garner's Modern American Usage; although BG doesn't address free of vs. free from, he writes that the distinction between freedom of and freedom from is that the former indicates the "possession of a right" (freedom of speech) and the latter "protection from a wrong" (freedom from oppression). So free from is used to indicate protection from something problematic, and free of (which ...
"Free of" vs. "Free from" - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange
What is the opposite of free as in "free of charge" (when we speak about prices)? We can add not for negation, but I am looking for a single word.
Free ride dates back to 1880, while free loader is a more recent construction “freeloader (n.) also free-loader, by 1939, from free (adj.) + agent noun from load (v.)As a verb, freeload is attested by 1967 and probably is a back-formation from this”
1 ' Free ' absolutely means 'free from any sorts constraints or controls. The context determines its different denotations, if any, as in 'free press', 'fee speech', 'free stuff' etc.