Louise Brooks
Among the pieces featured in Fragments are the final reel of John Ford's The Village Blacksmith (1922) and a glimpse at Emil Jannings in The Way of All Flesh (1927), the only Oscar®-winning performance in a lost film. Fragments also features clips from such lost films as Cleopatra (1917), starring Theda Bara; The Miracle Man (1919), with Lon Chaney; He Comes Up Smiling (1918), starring Douglas Fairbanks; an early lost sound film, Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), filmed in early Technicolor, and the only color footage of silent star Clara Bow, Red Hair (1928). The program is rounded out with interviews of film preservationists involved in identifying and restoring these films. Also featured is a new interview with Diana Serra Cary, best known as "Baby Peggy", one of the major American child stars of the silent era, who discusses one of the featured fragments, Darling of New York (1923).
Before the G, PG and R ratings system there was the Production Code, and before that there was, well, nothing. This eye-opening documentary examines the rampant sexuality of early Hollywood through movie clips and reminiscences by stars of the era. Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Marlene Dietrich and others relate tales of the artistic freedom that led to the draconian Production Code, which governed content from 1934 to 1968. Diane Lane narrates.
Documentary recounting the life story of Louise Brooks in 5 sections: "Lulu in Toe Shoes"; "Lulu in Hollywood"; "Lulu in Berlin"; "Lulu in Hell"; and "Resurrection". Narrated by Shirley MacLaine.
Initially commissioned to accompany a Danish production of Alban Berg’s LULU, Lewis Klahr’s cut-out animation refigures the opera's themes in a torrent of images. With an ever-inventive approach to color and symbol, Klahr distills the title character's moral predicament, along with a great many of German Expressionism’s characteristic motifs, in the span of a pop song.
An unprecedented anthology of never-before-told true stories by and about some of Hollywood's most interesting stars, legends, and wannabes, and takes readers inside Hollywood's inner sanctum to show how casting decisions are made, who makes them, and who has the final word.
An ode to film preservation, it presents a night-time visit to a seemingly depopulated repository (presumably the Royal Film Archive of Belgium), juxtaposing a series of images of observation, reconstruction, and projection using film fragments - from the hand-painted, altered image frames of Georges Méliès' Kingdom of the Fairies to the iconic image of Louise Brooks - to turn the archive into a temporal wonderland of novel discoveries, hidden treasure, re-awakened curiosity, and critical re-assessment.
The film tells the cultural story of Berlin during the Weimar Republic through interviews with a number of persons who were involved in literature, film, art, and music during the period. It includes interviews with Christopher Isherwood, Louise Brooks, Lotte Eisner, Elisabeth Bergner, Francis Lederer, Carl Zuckmayer, Gregor Piatigorsky, Claudio Arrau, Rudolf Kolisch, Mischa Spoliansky, Herbert Bayer, Mrs. Walter Gropius, and Arthur Koestler.
This insightful documentary features some of the major and most beautiful actresses to grace the silver screen. It shows how the movie industry changed it's depiction of sex and actresses portrayal of sex from the silent movie era to the present. Classic scenes are shown from the silent movie, True Heart Susie, starring Lillian Gish, to Love Me Tonight (1932), blending sex and sophistication, starring Jeanette MacDonald (pre-Nelson Eddy) and to Elizabeth Taylor in, A Place in the Sun (1951), plus much , much more.
After gold shipments from a mining town have been hijacked, the three Mesquiteers buy a plane to fly the gold out. The owner of the shipping line brings in Eastern gangsters to thwart them.
Buck runs into trouble when he buys a deserted cattle ranch that he turns into a dude ranch.
A driver on a non-stop race from New York to San Francisco gets detoured to Hollywood, where he winds up working as a publicity man for a movie studio and assigned to revive the career of a beautiful but fading star.
A notorious womanizer sets his sights on a pretty American tourist, only to be told by his doctor that he must give up all romance for his health.
To prove his thesis that any product--even one that doesn't exist--can be merchandized if it is advertised properly, a young man gets together with his father's savvy secretary to market a non-existent laundry soap. Complications ensue when his "product" turns out to be more successful than even he imagined--and now he has to deliver.
Lucienne, typist and gorgeous bathing beauty, decides to enter the 'Miss Europe' pageant sponsored by the French newspaper she works for. She finds her jealous lover Andre violently disapproves of such events and tries to withdraw, but it's too late; she's even then being named Miss France. The night Andre planned to propose to her, she's being whisked off to the Miss Europe finals in Spain, where admirers swarm around her. Win or lose, what will the harvest be?
A beautiful showgirl, name "the Canary" is a scheming nightclub singer. Blackmailing is her game and with that she ends up dead. But who killed "the Canary". All the suspects knew and were used by her and everyone had a motive to see her dead. The only witness to the crime has also been 'rubbed out'. Only one man, the keen, fascinating, debonair detective Philo Vance, would be able to figure out who is the killer. Written by Tony Fontana
Lulu is a young woman so beautiful and alluring that few can resist her siren charms. The men drawn into her web include respectable newspaper publisher Dr. Ludwig Schön, his musical producer son Alwa, circus performer Rodrigo Quast and Lulu's seedy old friend, Schigolch. When Lulu's charms inevitably lead to tragedy, the downward spiral encompasses them all.
Thymiane Henning, an innocent young girl, is raped by the clerk of her father's pharmacy. She becomes pregnant, is rejected by her family, and must fend for herself in a harsh, cruel world.
Two sailors with a rivalry over chasing women become friends. But when one decides to finally settle down, will this mysterious young women come between them?
After killing her treacherous step-father, a girl tries to escape the country with a young vagabond. She dresses as a boy, they hop freight trains, quarrel with a group of hobos, and steal a car in their attempt to escape the police, and reach Canada.
Hard-boiled underworld melodrama, with gang wars and gunfights, in which criminal lawyer turns prosecutor to avenge a friend's death.
Wally and Ray are cousins intent upon getting the fortune of their Scots grandad, an aviation nut. They become mixed-up with the U. S. flying corps and are wafted over the enemy lines in a runaway balloon. Through misunderstanding they are honored as heroes of the enemy forces, and sent back to the U.S. lines to spy. Here they are captured and almost shot, but everything ends happily. Only 20 minutes of this 6 reel comedy are extant.
Mame Walsh promised their mother on her deathbed to look after little sister Janie. But Janie helps herself to everything of her sister's, be it her clothes or her men - even the money entrusted to her by fellow employees at the store they work at. Regardless, Mame can't break her promise. So when it comes to getting Janie out of trouble, big sister comes to the rescue.
A lost film - Mary Gray, whose father manufactures cold cream, is engaged to sappy Horace Niles, the son of Hugo Niles, the elder Gray's most competitive rival in the cosmetics business. Chip Armstrong, a hot-shot public relations man, quits the employ of Hugo Niles and goes to work for Gray, persuading Mary to enter the Miss America contest at Atlantic City, with the intention of using her to endorse her father's cold cream should she win. Mary breaks her engagement with Horace. When it appears that she will win the contest, Hugo lures her home on the pretext that her father is ill, and she misses the contest. Chip and Mary return to Atlantic City, discovering that the new Miss America has told the world that she owes all her success to Gray's cold cream. On this note, Chip and Mary decide to get married.
Small-town barber Max Haber ( Adolphe Menjou ), is the pride of his father, Johann, who owns an antiquated barbershop. Max adores Kitty Laverne ( Louise Brooks ), the manicurist, who loves him but is ambitious to be a dancer, so she heads for New York, hoping that he will follow in pursuit of better things. Mrs. Jackson-Greer, a New York society matron, has occasion to note Max styling the hair of a town girl and induces him to come to New York and pose as a French count. There he meets April, Mrs. King's niece, and loses his heart to her, as well as to Kitty, now a showgirl. At the theater where Kitty is appearing Max is the best-dressed man in April's party, but later at a nightclub Kitty exposes him, and he is deserted by his society friends. Disillusioned, Max returns home at the request of his father. Soon Kitty follows, realizing that he is miserable without her.
A blowhard who poses as a railroad executive (but is really just a $30-a-week clerk) catches a young bride and then drives her family's finances to the brink of ruin.
Druggist Elmer Prettywillie is sleeping. A woman rings the night bell only to buy a two-cent stamp. Then garbage collectors waken him. Next it's firemen on a false alarm. And then a real fire.
