Raoul Walsh

Documentary focusing on the film careers F.W. Murnau, Frank Borzage and William Fox and their impact on the history of cinema.

Jack L. Warner, Harry Warner, Albert Warner and Sam Warner were siblings who were born in Poland and emigrated to Canada near the turn of the century. In 1903, the brothers entered the budding motion picture business. In time, the Warner Brothers moved into film production and would open their own studio in 1923.

How the cinema industry does not respect the author's work as it was conceived, how manipulates the motion pictures in order to make them easier to watch by an undemanding audience or even how mutilates them to adapt the original formats and runtimes to the restrictive frame of the television screen and the abusive requirements of advertising. (Followed by “Filmmakers in Action.”)

In 1972 and '73, film critic Richard Schickel made an 8-part series for American public television: 'The Men Who Made the Movies'. Each episode featured a prominent Hollywood director discussing his career in an on-camera monologue (actually an interview, with Schickel's questions edited out), interspersed with generous clips from his most famous films, accompanied by somewhat overwrought narration (written by Schickel and spoken by Cliff Robertson). It's regrettable that Schickel did not include Fritz Lang, William Wyler and John Ford in this series: all three were alive at the time, although Ford was quite ill.

A waitress at the Warner Brothers commissary is anxious to break into pictures. She thinks her big break may have arrived when actors Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan agree to help her.

A young, beautiful prostitute named Sadie Thompson arrives on the South Pacific island of Pago Pago looking for honest work and falls for Timothy O'Hara, an American sailor who is unfazed by her unsavory past. However, Mr. Davidson, a missionary who arrived on the island at the same time, aims to "save" Sadie from her sinful life and petitions to have her separated from her beau and deported back to San Francisco.

Part of a 7-part series exploring all aspects of Hollywood.

Two families, abolitionist Northerners the Stonemans and Southern landowners the Camerons, intertwine. When Confederate colonel Ben Cameron is captured in battle, nurse Elsie Stoneman petitions for his pardon. In Reconstruction-era South Carolina, Cameron founds the Ku Klux Klan, battling Elsie's congressman father and his African-American protégé, Silas Lynch.

Kitty, the pretty young wife of a Texas businessman, feels neglected and unwanted as her husband pays more attention to his business interests than he does to her and spends more and more time away from home. A handsome young neighbor notices her emotional state and decides to try to take advantage of it. In her confused and lonely condition, Kitty finds herself attracted to the man and begins to think about running away with him.

John Stafford is unjustly arrested on the eve of his marriage for the murder of an old gentleman whose body was found in his guardian's library. The young man is taken to the penitentiary, but eludes his guards and escapes. His sweetheart engages a noted detective who finds a small Hindu image in the hand of the dead man.