Classics - Movies

Bitter Moon

Classics

Legendary filmmaker Roman Polanski (Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, Repulsion) explores the sexy side of obsession and the wild side of romance in this outrageous look at the dark side of love. Starring Peter Coyote (Heart of Midnight), Emmanuelle Seigner (Frantic), Hugh Grant (Notting Hill) and Kristin Scott Thomas (The English Patient). A mild-mannered man (Grant) attempts to rekindle the sexual fire in his marriage while on a cruise, but he develops an irresistible infatuation with an eccentric paraplegic’s wife (Seigner). Offbeat and original, this voyage of wild obsession puts a whole new twist on the concept of marital bliss. Featuring dazzling performances and nasty comic moments, Bitter Moon is a hilarious walk on the wild side. Stunningly shot by Tonino Delli Colli (Once Upon a Time in America) with a beautiful score by Vangelis (Blade Runner). Co-starring Victor Banerjee (A Passage to India).

We Can't Go Home Again

Classics

Restored and reconstructed from its 1973 Cannes version, legendary director Nicholas Ray’s experimental masterpiece WE CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN embodies the director’s practice of filmmaking as a “communal way of life.” Made with his college students in upstate New York, the film features Ray as mentor, friend, and reference point to his students and their stories of love, sex, rebellion, and lost innocence. With its expressionistic colorization, the film exemplifies Ray’s groundbreaking approach to multiple-image storytelling, providing a unique, almost anthropological perspective in recording the “history, progress, manners, morals, and mores of everyday life” at a critical moment in 1970s America.

The Disorderly Orderly

Classics

Poor Jerome Littlefield (Jerry Lewis). He wants to be a doctor but that's not exactly the perfect career choice when you're hopelessly squeamish. So he settles for the job of orderly at the Whitestone Sanitarium, a career move that's guaranteed to keep the patients and viewers in stitches! The fun begins with Sammy Davis, Jr.'s rendition of the film's title song and continues as the bumbling Jerome, a one-man disaster area, triggers chaos every time he tries to lend a helping hand. From causing the patients more trauma to a highspeed ambulance chase, Lewis and his healthy dose of comic mishaps are the perfect prescription for all that ails you.

Harry and Walter Go to New York

Classics

In a spirited comedy, directed by Mark Rydell, two not very bright vaudeville song and dance men in the 1890's wind-up in jail where they meet a debonair master safecracker. They get the plans to an impenetrable vault and race to beat the master cracksman at his own game.

Try and Get Me

Classics

A harrowing manhunt for two men wanted for kidnapping and murder ends when they are arrested. Then, however, a small town is whipped into vengeful mob fury by a journalist, and the two are lynched. Excellent characterizations and direction make this film a classic. Based upon the novel "The Condemned."

Shirley Temple: The House of the Seven Gables

Classics

Nathaniel Hawthorne's supernatural and romantic tale of a New England family and their life in the House of the Seven Gables, a two-hundred-year-old dwelling haunted by the ghosts of past generations. In a cinematic rendition of one of the best-known 19th century American novels, Shirley is joined by legendary stars Martin Landau, Agnes Moorehead, Robert Culp, and others.

On Again-Off Again

Classics

This wacky vaudeville-style romp casts the irreverent comedy team as feuding co-owners of a drug company, William "Willy" Hobbs (Wheeler) and Claude Augustus Horton (Woolsey), who agree to wrestle each other for the sole ownership of the business. The winner will take the company and the loser must become the other's valet for a year. But when Hobbs loses, he sends his wife to Florida and schemes to trick Horton. What follows are hilarious hijinks as only Wheeler and Woolsey can pull off!

What! No Beer?

Classics

Two of comedy's greatest masters – Buster Keaton and Jimmy Durante – appear together in this effervescent and irreverent slapstick about a couple of regular guys trying to cash in on the end of Prohibition. Durante is a barber who talks Keaton, his dim-bulb taxidermist buddy, into spending his life's savings on a brewery. Determined to be first, they start making beer before Prohibition is actually over. That makes their "competition" bootlegging thugs – something they didn't count on! Then, Buster falls for one of the gangster's molls, the cops get into the act, and Keaton and Durante have to figure out how to get out of the beer business before they're done in! From a story by Robert E. Hopkins (Anita Loo's screenwriting partner on San Francisco), this timely farce, directed by veteran Edward Sedgwick, was called "one solid riot of laughs…Rowdy and hoodlum fun" (The New York American).

The Assassination Bureau

Classics

Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg head an impeccable cast in The Assassination Bureau, a spirited caper inspired by a book co-written by Jack London. Reed plays Ivan, the self-confident chief of an association of hitmen for hire, who will refuse no well-paid offer - especially the lucrative challenge of an aspiring reporter (Rigg). Reasoning that a running cat-and-mouse duel with his henchmen will rid the organization of incompetents, Ivan agrees to become the object of a nonstop hunt. The game is afoot... and Europe is the playground!

You're Only Young Once

Classics

On vacation with his family on California's Catalina Island, Andy Hardy (Mickey Rooney) falls head over swim fins for a sophisticated young beauty (Eleanor Lynn). Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone) warns his son that she is too fast for him. But to Andy, that just means he should run after his golden girl a little faster! This sequel to A Family Affair, the enormously successful first Hardy family film, introduces the cast most often associated with the series (only Rooney, Cecilia Parker and Sara Haden appeared in the prior picture). Moviegoers took the whole Hardy clan to its heart – especially Rooney's irrepressible Andy – and thronged popcorn palaces to share more warmhearted father-and-son wisdom leavened by laughs.

My Friend Irma Goes West

Classics

The story begins when Irma (Marie Wilson) and her friends head westward on the incorrect assumption that Steve Laird (Dean Martin) has landed a movie contract. During the train trip to California, Steve's goonish pal Seymour (Jerry Lewis) is entrusted with a pet monkey, owned by movie star Yvonne Yvonne (Corinne Calvet). There's a contretemps with gangsters and a kidnapping before a happy ending can be realized.

Death of a Salesman

Classics

Salesman Willy Loman is in a crisis. He's about to lose his job, he can't pay his bills, and his sons Biff and Happy don't respect him and can't seem to live up to their potential. He wonders what went wrong and how he can make things up to his family.

Jamboree

Classics

Freddie Fisher and His Schnickelfritz Band, and Ernest Tubb and His Texas Troubadors are two bands. Both bands are vying for the same radio spot and outwit themselves by impersonating each other.

Christmas with Danny Kaye featuring Peggy Lee

Classics

This collection brings together 2 memorable Christmas episodes of the Emmy winning, top-rated CBS variety show , The Danny Kaye Show. Featuring Nat King Cole’s iconic performance “The Christmas Song” (aka “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”), duets with Danny and Peggy Lee and “Jingle Bell Rock” by a young Wayne Newton.

The Two Jakes

Classics

Jack Nicholson returns as private eye Jake Gittes in this atmospheric Chinatown follow-up that's hit upon "the elusive sequel formula for somehow enhancing a great original" (Mike Clark, USA Today). Much has changed since we last saw Jake. The war has come and gone; 1948 Los Angeles teems with optimism and fast bucks. But there's one thing Jake knows hasn't changed: "Nine times out of ten, if you follow the money you will get to the truth." And that's the trail he follows when a routine case of marital hanky panky explodes into a murder that's tied to a grab for oil--and to Jake's own past.

A Flash of Light: The Photographs of E.J. Kelty

Classics

Each summer, Edward J Kelty, a Manhattan banquet photographer active from the 1920's through the 1940's, would load his enormous camera into a small truck and follow the circus, first up and down the East Coast and eventually throughout the United States. His extraordinary photographs captured the spirit and atmosphere of the big top, and with a "poof" of flash powder preserved mesmerizing images of the horse wranglers, acrobats, ticket-takers, candy butchers, teeterboard tumblers and sideshow exotics that populated the colorful world of the traveling circuses. Kelty was the Cecil B. DeMille of circus photographers, at times assembling as many as one thousand circus performers for spectacular group shots. Particularly popular were his annual "Congress of Freaks" photographs, which gathered together the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus sideshow attractions - from Ajax the sword swallower to Eko and Iko, the "ambassadors from Mars", for a "class picture." He sold these group photos, as well as prints depicting individual performers, circus lots, and big top interiors - to circus owners, performers and fans.

The Belles of St. Trinian's

Classics

The schoolgirls of St. Trinian's are more interested in racing forms than books as they try to get-rich-quick. They are abetted by the headmistress' brother. In this classic comedy which spawned several sequels, both the headmistress and her brother are played by Alastair Sim. Based on the cartoons of Ronald Searle. Available in HD in North America.

San Quentin (1937)

Classics

Humphrey Bogart...out of the PEN...into the jaws of DEATH! In the wake of riots at San Quentin Prison, Army trainer Stephen Jameson (Pat O'Brien) is appointed to take over the job of running the notorious prison. While celebrating with a couple of pals the night before he starts his newjob, Stephen meets captivating nightclub singer May Kennedy (Ann Sheridan). As they get acquainted, her kid brother, petty crook Joe (Bogart--Casablanca), bursts into the room followed by the police who arrest him for robbing a bank. Because the robbery is not his first offense, Joe is sentenced to San Quentin, where he quickly falls in with the wrong crowd. When May visits Joe in prison, she discovers that Stephen is responsible for the harsh treatment of her brother and ends their relationship.

A Man Vanishes

Classics

One of the most important and complex works by two-time Palme d'Or winning director Shohei Imamura, A MAN VANISHES begins as an investigation into one of the thousands of missing persons cases that occur in Japan each year. The film follows the case of Tadashi, a handsome businessman who has suddenly vanished. Imamura and his crew interview the man's fiancée, Yoshie, who is desperately searching for him, and the filmmaker becomes increasingly involved in her life. But the "investigation" casts a shadow of doubt over the couple's relationship, Tadashi's business ventures, his relationship with Yoshie's sister, and even the investigating film director, Imamura himself, who may not be what he seems. Radical film in scope, technique, and aesthetic, A MAN VANISHES distills many of Imamura's central themes and obsessions, the film culminating a stunning sequence that explodes any stable sense of fiction and reality.

Judge Hardy and Son

Classics

When an elderly couple is faced with eviction, Judge Hardy unleashes Carvel's secret weapon: his son, the irrepressible Andy Hardy! Suspecting that the couple (character great Maria Ouspenskaya alongside Egon Brecher) is concealing the existence of an estranged daughter Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone) tasks Andy (Mickey Rooney) with finding that daughter. Acting on a hunch, Andy decides to investigate any local girls who have the middle initial "V". Narrowing the field to three, Andy finds himself juggling romances while trying to stay true to real gal pal Polly Benedict (Ann Rutherford). But things take a sudden serious turn for the worse when Andy's beloved mother (Fay Holden) falls seriously ill. Studio chief Louis Mayer had a personal interest in the Andy Hardy series, crafting the town of Carvel into his own ideal of Americana. Andy's deeply moving heartfelt prayer for the health of his mother has been attributed to Mr. Mayer, himself!

Classics Movies