Movies: Claudette Colbert

This short shows how Hollywood gets ready for the world premiere of an "important" movie. The film celebrated here is Marie Antoinette (1938), which had its premiere at the Carthay Circle Theatre. We see the street leading to the theatre transformed ...

Witty narration follows the history of Versailles Palace; founded by Louis XIII, enlarged by autocratic Louis XIV, whose personal affairs and amours, and those of his two successors, are followed in more detail to the start of the Revolution, after w...

Two buddies who rise from fly-by-night wildcatters to oil tycoons over a twenty year period both love the same woman. McMasters and Sand come to oil towns to get rich. Betsy comes West intending to marry Sand but marries McMasters instead. Getting ri...

Too bad for presidential hopes of banker T.K. Blair; his party feels he has too little flair for savoir faire. But at a medicine show, the party bosses find Blair's double: huckster Doc Varney. Of course, they scheme to make Varney T.K.'s public spok...

Looks at the stereotype-breaking films of the period from 1929, when movies entered the sound era, until 1934 when the Hays Code virtually neutered film content. No longer portrayed as virgins or vamps, the liberated female of the pre-code films had ...

Sister Mary presides over a convent where a convicted murderess, who is being escorted to Death Row, is stranded by bad weather. She is slowly becoming convinced that Valerie is innocent so Sister Mary sets about to clear the girl and bring the real ...

Elizabeth Rimplegar inhabits a household populated by virtual lunatics. Her mother, Nellie, mishandled the family fortune, and, alas, the stock market crash has depleted their worth. Elizabeth's goofy brothers cannot easily adjust to the life of the ...

A woman divorces her husband of 20 years because he gambles too much....

Borneo, 1941, during World War II. When the Japanese occupy the island, American writer Agnes Newton Keith is separated from her husband and imprisoned with her son in a prison camp run by the enigmatic Colonel Suga....

At the Brentwood Asylum for the mentally ill, psychiatrist partners Jane Everest and Alex MacGregor are broken up by the new superintendent, Dr. Charles Monet, who has a low regard for women physicians. Jane and Charles clash on patient treatment, an...

When she can't support her illegitimate child, an abandoned young woman puts her up for adoption and pursues a career as a torch singer. Years later, she searches for the child she gave up....

A grocery clerk, longing to become a cowboy actor, goes to Hollywood in search of fame and fortune. Unfortunately, his acting ability is non-existent....

Some of MGM'S musical stars review the studios history of musicals. From The Hollywood Revue of 1929 to Brigadoon, from the first musical talkies to Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain....

Tough Caribbean freighter Captain Sam Whelan engages Sally Clark, a tramp masquerading as a missionary's daughter, to care for an abandoned baby on board his ship. En route to New York, ships mate Gatson sexually attacks her. The Captain knocks Gatso...

Parrish McLean lives with his mother Ellen on Sala Post's tobacco plantation in the Connecticut River Valley. His mother winds up marrying Sala's rival Judd Raike, ruthless planter who wants to drive Sala out of business. Judd insists that Parrish le...

Society girl becomes a social secretary when her father dies penniless. From a story by Charles Brackett....

A princess is torn between her royal obligations and her love for a handsome Frenchman....

Upper-class female reporter is (despite herself) attracted to hulking laborer digging a tunnel under the Hudson river....

A singing Frenchman meets an American heiress and gets a job at her father's chewing-gum factory....

A spoiled young rich girl is sent to prison for accidentally running down a pedestrian. There she learns about a life and people she had never even imagined existed before....