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CBS Reports: Biography of a Bookie Joint

An undercover investigative documentary on illegal bookmaking in Boston, using concealed-camera footage to expose institutional corruption and regulatory failure, and triggering major political and law-enforcement reforms following broadcast. (Note: Originally produced and broadcast as part of CBS Reports, but widely cited, archived, and treated as an independent investigative documentary due to production method, cultural impact, and historical significance.)

CBS Reports: Biography of a Bookie Joint

NR 1961
Dear Mr. Gable

Burgess Meredith narrates this insightful MGM-produced documentary about the life and career of Hollywood legend Clark Gable, from his childhood in Ohio, to his star status in Hollywood, and to his romantic life off-screen, including his marriage to Carole Lombard. The film incorporates classic film footage of Gable with interviews of people from his past, including an old classmate from his school days, a former sweetheart, and his press agent. Another treat is the rare home movie footage of Gable and Lombard on a camping trip.

Dear Mr. Gable

10.0 1968
Meet Marlon Brando

Filmed during a studio-organized press junket, "Meet Marlon Brando" observes Marlon Brando as he fields a succession of television interviews meant to promote Morituri. Rather than comply, Brando deflects questions with irony, flirtation, and philosophical detours, subtly undermining the promotional ritual itself. Shot in direct-cinema style by Albert Maysles and David Maysles, the film becomes a candid study of celebrity, media performance, and resistance to commodification.

Meet Marlon Brando

6.9 1966
Cortile Cascino

This long-suppressed and controversial documentary was produced in 1961 for network television but never broadcast. Co-mingling cinema verité and narrative techniques, the film offers a sensitive but critical look at the slum called Cortile Cascino in the center of Palermo, Sicily where poverty and early death are constants and where the church and the Mafia compete for the inhabitants' fealty. The established church, largely ignoring the plight of its parishioners, nonetheless voices its outrage when a faith healer draws large crowds. The Mafia runs an illegal slaughterhouse and controls the concession to funerals but also distributes free food to the district's hungry residents. In the face of relentless adversity, the women provide the only stabilizing force. The neighborhood's despair is tragically foregrounded in a sequence depicting the burial of baby who died of malnutrition. The soundtrack is composed of comments by the people, recorded and translated by the filmmakers.

Cortile Cascino

6.5 1962
The T.A.M.I. Show

Hailed by one music reviewer as "the grooviest, wildest, slickest hit ever to pound the screen," "The T.A.M.I. Show" is an unrelenting rock spectacular starring some of the greatest pop performers of the 60s. These top recording idols – representing the musical moods of London, Liverpool, Hollywood and Detroit – packed the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium with 2,600 screaming fans and virtually brought down the house. This is the cinematic record of that electrifying event.

The T.A.M.I. Show

7.9 1964
Theatre In Israel

An English-speaking film produced on behalf of the Israeli Center of the International Theater Institute, providing international audience with an overview of modern Israeli theater, including scenes of renowned Israeli theater productions from the theater season of 1967. The film opens with excerpts from “The Dybbuk” at Habima Theater, and includes scenes from the successful musicals of the Cameri Theater “Utz Li Gutz Li” (Rumpelstiltskin) and “King Solomon and Shalmai The Shoemaker”. Other excerpts include scenes from the plays “The American Princess” by Nissim Aloni at the Seasons Theater, “He Walked Through the Fields” by Moshe Shamir at the Haifa Theater, Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler”, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf”, and more.

Theatre In Israel

8.0 1967
Istanbul

All of Pialat's Turkish films are uniquely interested in the country — especially Istanbul — as it was, not just as it is at the precise moment that Pialat is filming it. History informs these films in a big way, with the voiceover narration (which incorporates excerpts from various authors) introducing tension between the images of the modern-day city and the descriptions of incidents from its long and rich history. Istanbul is probably the most conventional documentary of Pialat's Turkish series, providing a general profile of the titular city, its different neighborhoods, and the different cultures and ways of living that coexist within its sprawling borders. As the other films in the series also suggest, Pialat sees Turkey, and Istanbul in particular, as a junction point between Europe and the East, between the old and the new, between history and modernity.

Istanbul

7.0 1964
Operación H

In 1963, the businessman Juan Huarte Beaumont, art patron, collector and founder of X Films, a film production company based in Madrid, invited the Basque artists Nestor Basterretxea and Jorge Oteiza to make a promotional short about his companies. Certain conditions were attached to the commission: the artists were each to present finished scripts without any contact with each other about them. Huarte chose Basterretxea's script, and Basterretxea directed the film, which was given the title 'Operación H' in postproduction.

Operación H

9.0 1963
Bassae

"I was interested by the fact that some old guy, after the Parthenon’s glamour, devoted himself in a much smaller temple, where there was no white marble, no nothing. All Greek temples are dedicated to Apollo etc, and this particular one was not dedicated to anyone and is in a place where there never was a city nearby, in a kind of wasteland, in a ditch. But, just by going up a bit –you are in the centre of Peloponissos- on a clear day, you can see the sea on both your left and right. I went back there, at least six, seven or eight times, as if I wanted to think or find myself. So, at the temple in Bassae, I made a short 10 minute film and I was lucky enough to encounter two days of clouds and mist between the columns."

Bassae

8.1 1964
Marinetti

Albie Thoms' Marinetti was the culmination of the synthetic environments that the UBU group had pioneered in Australia; festive public 'happenings' that combined the energy and volume of creative rock and jazz with the mesmeric effect of multi-dimensional lightshows. Another kind of culmination: Marinetti records most of the principal collaborators in the UBU film group, like Aggy Read and the Perrys. Uniquely valuable as a document of Australia's late 1960s counter-culture, the soundtrack provides the best indication of the unrestrained liberty that bands like Tully and the John Sangster Underground band some of whose members perform on this recording were famously achieving in their improvisations of the period.

Marinetti

6.8 1969