Cinematic Era: Before 1950 Vintage

Government undercover agents William Dennis and Joan Barclay are working to solve the disappearances of girls working as "taxi-dancers" from dance halls operated by Jack Miranda and his henchman Nifty.

Small ranchers battle against a land baron trying to take their spreads.

A kitchen is filled with houseflies. A spider wakes up and plays his web like a harp, attracting a pair of them; the female is trapped, and the male summons the cavalry, which arrives riding horseflies, riding dragonflies to drop pepper bombs, firing champagne bottles, and ultimately setting the web on fire and catching the spider on flypaper when he falls.

Maris, having married Lynch, a worthless man who deserts her, taking their daughter Felice with him, marries mill owner Dwight Alden after receiving notification that her husband and child are dead. Discovering that Alden employs child labor, Maris, assisted by the village minister, tries to persuade him that this is wrong, but he will tolerate no interference in his business.

In 1929, the Chinese are preparing an attack on the CER, recruiting soldiers to their gang. Among them there is a resident of a lodging house Van. Having recovered after a sudden attack on a Soviet border village, the Red Army squad goes on the offensive. Wang is among the prisoners. Wang and another prisoner go on the run. But on the road between the fugitives there is a conflict and young Chinese Wang begins to realize who his true enemy is...

A clueless man finds a bomb on the street and keeps throwing it to the crowd around him. The sketch then moves with the clueless nerd getting involved in all sorts of troubles until he accidentally gets into a hideout from a terrorist group that will complicate things for him more than he ever hoped.

A young man torn between love and friendship.

1940s British realist film about the life and struggles of a family in a Welsh mining town.

After saving a tramp from suicide, a millionaire takes his clothing and disappears. Word is out that he will give a million dollars to anyone who is kind to a tramp.

When a an overly romantic barge captain marries two women, each reminding him of his mother, he finds himself resorting to prison to escape them.

Although Mabel’s parents disapprove of Roscoe and Mabel’s relationship, the two still secretly court. When a rivaling suitor named Reddy appears, the men fight for Mabel’s hand. Although successful, Roscoe witnesses Reddy fall into a well and instantly calls for help. As the police fish Reddy out of the well, the young lovers see their chance at freedom and run off to elope.

Forced by her mean-spirited father, Lord Chief Justice James O'Brien, to marry a man she doesn't love, Connaught O'Brien gives up hope of ever with her true love, Dermot McDermot. After her father dies and a hunted rebel leader returns to town, however, Connaught finds a renewed hope that the tides of oppression will shift and she might again find happiness. This silent romantic drama, set in Ireland, is the first film in which a then-unknown John Wayne is clearly visible.

The best man at an upcoming wedding goes to a jeweler to pick up the wedding ring and is also given a bracelet, on approval, worth $25,000. On his way home, a pigeon swoops down and snags the bracelet. The man must track down the pigeon and get the bracelet back so he won't have to pay for it--but that's easier said than done.

In this western, Red Ryder tries to be a good example for a young man who idolizes his father, an outlaw. The boy wants to follow in his father's footsteps when the hero intervenes.

A tramp heads home drunk on a Saturday night, finding it hard to make it to his room. When he finally does, he cannot make it to his bed.

Anita and Marion take a temporary job as waitresses in Max's diner, next to a train station. When the train stops off, pandemonium erupts when the passengers fill the diner and all want meals immediately. This film only survived in parts.

Jim Warren is starting a range war by getting his boss Duke Bradley to fence off part of the range used by other ranchers. This pits father against son when Tom Bradley sides with a newly arrived nester family. Then after stealing Duke Bradley's money, Warren frames Duke's son Tom for the theft.

Italian filmmaker Carmine Gallone was still in his "operetta" mode when he helmed 1938's Il Sogno di Butterfly (Dream of the Butterfly) Maria Cebotari plays opera diva Rosa Belloni, currently starring in a production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly. The plot thickens when Rosa's backstage life begins to mirror the travails of the character she is portraying. The climax comes when Harry Peters (Fosco Giachetti), the American father of Rosa's illegitimate child, returns after four years with his new wife in tow, leading inexorably to a doleful ending both on- and offstage. Critics complained about the substandard photography in Il Sogno di Butterfly, but this might have been due to poor laboratory work.

Radio star Gene Autry returns to his home town of Gold Ridge at the request of his old friend Pop Harrison, who wants Gene to straighten out his wayward son, Tex Harrison, whose gambling and drinking threaten to bankrupt the rodeo organization which he heads. News photographer Clementine "Clem" Benson and reporter Hack Hackett are ordered to follow Gene. The group finds quarters at the "Bar Nothing" dude ranch, winter quarters for Tex's rodeo group, and Tex soon tangles with Hackett in a quarrel.

The stooges, professional dog washers, find a baby on a doorstep and, thinking it to be abandoned, take it home. When they read in the paper the baby is believed to have been kidnapped, they disguise Curly as a the baby's mother and try to sneak past the local cop. They are caught, but when the baby's parents show up and realize what happened, the result is a happy ending.

Professional forger Bill Butters realizes one day that the police are closing in on him, and convinces his daughter Peggy to flee.

In the 16th episode of Hal Roach's Spat Family series, the Spats order a fire engine from a mail catalogue-- and soon they'll need it!

A gambling ring run out of the Mogul Taxi company is intent on fixing college football games. Football star Harold "Red" Grange is a target for the gamblers, whose thugs try to eliminate Grange from playing. Grange's buddy Buddy is himself vulnerable to blackmail, since he has broken team rules by marrying. The crooks use all their wiles to keep Grange and Buddy from leading their team to victory.

Wintertime in Lyon. About a dozen people, men and women, are having a snowball fight in the middle of a tree-lined street. The cyclist coming along the road becomes the target of opportunity. He falls off his bicycle. He's not hurt, but he rides back the way he came, as the fight continues.

A small-town girl who's made it big in New York as a fashion model returns home, only to find that her somewhat dotty uncle has mortgaged his boarding house to the hilt. In her efforts to help him keep his boarding house, she becomes involved with a handsome young minister and his superior, an older bishop.

Joris Ivens’s advocacy documentary for the Republican cause intercuts a besieged Madrid with a nearby village digging an irrigation canal, linking the war to bread, land, and survival. Produced by the writers’ collective Contemporary Historians, edited by Helen van Dongen, scored by Marc Blitzstein, and narrated in its U.S. version by Ernest Hemingway (after an initial Orson Welles track), it blends frontline reportage with persuasion against Franco’s forces and their German–Italian backers.

Roomers in a boarding house break the rules and are caught cooking if their room. A frantic run-in with the landlady ensues.

Having misused funds held in his trust by investing them with his friend, Henry Lowe, Robert Reardon appeals to his future son-in-law, James Calvin, a candidate for the position of district attorney, for help. When Calvin threatens to indict Lowe for fraud if he is elected, Reardon's anger becomes so great that the engagement between Calvin and Reardon's daughter Helen is broken, resulting in Reardon's suicide. After Lowe comes into possession of a check forged by Helen's brother Jack, he uses the document to force a marriage with Helen. Treated brutally by her husband, Helen seeks Calvin's aid, but Lowe frames Calvin, now the district attorney, in a compromising situation with his ex-fiancée. Calvin is about to resign when Helen traps her husband with some marked money, causing his suicide through disgrace. Thus freed, Helen and Calvin find happiness together.

An excellent example of an 'industrial', showing lace-making processes in a huge Nottingham factory with intertitles explaining the various stages of lace production.

In this partially lost silent film, a man working as a motion picture extra in Hollywood westerns impresses a visiting sheikh with his boxing skills and is engaged to go to Arabia, where he becomes involved in warring and falls in love with a beautiful princess.

Gold has been found and Sharp is out to get the land. He has the land owners killed and then has Watson forge new deeds. Cheyenne and Fuzzy arrive in time to save Trent. Then they go after the gang and its leader.

Cowboy Tim Hamlin arrives in a town plagued by a gang of cattle rustlers.

This 1930 film, a collection of songs and sketches showcasing Paramount Studios' contract stars, credits 11 directors

After inheriting a New York City art gallery, bookie Milton Berle and his partner Cesar Romero decide to go into the art forgery business. Director Ray McCarey's 1942 comedy also stars Carole Landis, J. Carrol Naish, Steven Geray, Richard Derr, Rose Hobart, Elisha Cook Jr., Chick Chandler, Francis Pierlot and Jerome Cowan.

An Englishman (Richard Arlen) fights in the Sudan after receiving white feathers of cowardice from his fiancee (Fay Wray) and friends.

Plumber Donald is using a large magnet in his work. When he drops it, it causes trouble for Pluto, especially after Pluto swallows it. Things begin clinging to him, especially his metal dog dish.

About Omar Khayyam of Persia, the poet and mathematician, who wrote the Iranian first solar calendar circa A.D. 1073. His fiancé was forced to marry the shah, but she eventually escaped and, with help of grand Vazir, joined Omar Khayyam. Hollywood made a film based on the same story with Connell Wilde, the life and adventures of Omar Khayyam.

About the shooting of a workers' demonstration on January 9, 1905. The film has not been completely preserved.

Harry finds out he is the missing heir to an estate, and is summoned to an old, spooky mansion to collect his inheritance.

Marguerite, the beauty of an Austrian village, loves the poverty-stricken Baron Erich von Statzen, although her mother is opposed to the affair, having been made suspicious by the hunchback Ludwig, who is smitten by Marguerite's charms and insanely jealous of Statzen. Statzen's uncle would have him marry Helena Boursch, the local brewer's daughter, to save his dwindling estate. Ordered to the front when war is declared, Statzen is forced to leave without saying goodby to Marguerite.

A black cat is suspected of being possessed by the spirit of a elderly murdered woman.

During World War II, the Canadian Navy gathered a troupe of diverse performers (dancers, comedians, singers, musicians) from its ranks and sent them off to entertain their shipmates, and the show/revue ultimately played London's Hioopodrome. The acceptance was based more on wartime-London's appreciation of the gallantry of Britain's sons and daughters from over the seas than it was on the artistic value of the show or the talent of the performers. The film is a fictional/fact mixture of the adventures of the troupe members, and the ending, only part filmed in Technicolor, is primarily the Revue as seen at the Hippodrome.

On the eve of her elopement with Henry Traquair, Margaret Fielding is accidentally discovered in Traquair's apartments by his friends, Captain Richard Haynes and Walter Maxwell.....

Dick Rainboldt (Carey) signs up to work at a gold mine without realizing that he's being hired as a strikebreaker. He takes the job primarily because of a pretty girl who lives in the town. The superintendent and manager of the mine convince Rainboldt to blow up the mine and make it appear like the strikers did it. But Rainboldt turns the tables on the plotters and reveals their scheme. The mine owner rewards him with a big assignment and the girl promises to marry him.

An opium smuggler is marked for murder in this story of the Chinese Mafia.

An engineer is hired to plan and oversee the construction of a undersea tunnel between Europe and the US. However, certain interests don't want to see the tunnel built and use every means at their disposal, including sabotage and murder, to stop its construction. French-language version of the 1933 German DER TUNNEL, q.v.

When John Harlow loses his sweetheart Jenny Larkin as a result of poverty, he vows never to be broke again and leaves town. He moves to the city, and several years later, after pinching his pennies, he becomes financially successful. One night, while at a dance hall, he runs into Jenny who is now employed as a dance hall hostess. Jenny decides to fleece John and sets him up with Laura, one of her colleagues. Laura is innocent of the scheme, and she and John fall in love. Jenny becomes jealous and attempts to reclaim John by telling him that Laura is having an affair with Richard Crane. John believes her until he discovers that Crane has just married Laura's mother. He proposes to Laura, and she accepts on the condition that he relinquish his spendthrift ways.

Robert Frazer and Anna Q. Nilsson star in this drama, based on Temple Dusk by Calvin Johnson. David Marlowe (Frazer), the son of a clergyman (Frank Currier), is seduced by the earthly delights of drinking and gambling. While intoxicated he proposes to Ember Edwards (Nilsson), and she accepts because he has told her he is rich and she is sick of her poverty-stricken life. At a gambling house run by Clement Palter (Charles Lane), David takes a 25 dollar check from Bunny Fish (Robert Schable), changes the amount to 2,500 dollars, and proceeds to lose the whole sum at faro.

Cal Stanley goes undercover as a beef buyer in order to catch the gang responsible for stealing the area's cattle.

Barney just wants to hibernate for the winter, but his nephew, just in from the North Pole, has other plans.

Gnomes greet the coming of spring by manufacturing various bright colours.

Chane Weymer, an Arizona rancher, goes after a gang that is trapping wild horses by the use of barbed-wire enclosures.

Ma Webster (Blanche Yurka) and her boys rob a bank on Christmas Eve; G-men stop them with Tommy guns.

Beverly Ross, the switchboard operator at a local radio station, jumps at the chance to be the DJ for an early morning show before the soldiers at a nearby army camp assemble for reveille. Beverly, with her modern music, camp bulletins and chatter, is a hit with the soldiers. Beverly's younger brother and his two buddies are soldiers at the camp. The buddies vie for Beverly's attentions.

Cullen Landis stars as rookie fireman Danny Grogan. Though well-liked by his colleagues, Danny is openly despised by one of the smoke-eaters, who has a yen for our hero's sweetheart.

Anita and Marion realize that an abandoned baby they sneaked into an orphanage was kidnapped from a millionaire. For the reward, they proceed to break into the institution at night, dressed as men to beat curfew, to get the kid out again. This film survives only in very fragmentary form.

Wild Bill Hickock and Cannonball help two young people in love and bring the murderer of Cannonball's father to justice.

Mickey walks into the tavern where Minnie is dancing, and begins to dance and play piano himself. Pegleg Pete comes in and treats Minnie badly. Mickey tries to defend her, but Pete steals her away. Mickey, riding Horace Horsecollar, gives chase. He manages to throw Pete off a cliff.