Fanny Brice

The legendary W.C. Fields is featured in rare behind-the-scenes footage and home movies at work and at play, along with hilarious scenes from some of his greatest films.

A documentary film about three generations of female Jewish comedians and the complexity and challenges of their relationship to comedy, Judaism, and gender. The film profiles Molly Picon, Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, Joan Rivers, Gilda Radner, and Wendy Wasserstein, as well as contemporary comedians Judy Gold and Jackie Hoffman.

Vaudeville is a 1997 PBS documentary under its American Masters program. Using film clips and photos, the art and history of vaudeville (1890-1930s) is illustrated.

This documentary examines the dozens of Yiddish-language talking films made in the United States and Europe between the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.

Period music, film clips and newsreel footage combined into a visual exploration of the American entertainment industry during the Great Depression.

Documentary about radio comedies primarily focused on Burns & Allen, Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy, The Jack Benny Program, Fibber McGee & Molly, The Bob Hope Show, and The Fred Allen Show.

The late, great impresario Florenz Ziegfeld looks down from heaven and ordains a new revue in his grand old style.

At the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, sideshow barker Florenz Ziegfeld turns the tables on his more-successful neighbor Billings, and also steals his girlfriend. This pattern repeats throughout their lives, as Ziegfeld makes and loses many fortunes putting on ever-bigger, more spectacular shows

When a nobleman loses his way in the fog and enters a house where there's a party going on, he's mistaken for a hired butler.

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 to suggest a garden that might be seen in a French palace. This includes the placement of trees and other foliage, as well as large statues along the route. Grandstands are set up so fans can see their favorite stars as they arrive for the premiere. Finally, the proverbial "galaxy of stars" arrives in their limousines. Fanny Brice and Pete Smith make remarks at the microphone set up on the carpet outside the theatre.

Caddish lawyer Lee Gentry is going out with Katy Costello, but carrying on an affair with dancer Carmen Brown. When he wants to end the dalliance with Carmen, she is so distraught that she becomes suicidal. Seizing the gun from Carmen, he accidentally shoots her, and thinking she's dead, concocts a series of increasingly outlandish alibis to cover his tracks under the guidance of a ghostly apparition that is his alter ego.

Boisterous teen Judy Bellaire is expelled from her all-female boarding school for convincing her fellow school chorus members to sing a classical piece with a modern swing beat. She returns to her dysfunctional home, dejected, but, with the encouragement of her family's cook, Judy decides to follow her dream and audition for a Broadway musical.

Ethnic comedy of a nightclub entertainer trying to train a boxer.

Fannie Brand, an industrious girl who supports her brother and sister by working in a theatrical costume house, falls in love with Joe Halsey, a young fellow who earns a precarious living demonstrating an elastic exerciser in a drugstore window. Fannie and Joe set a date to be married, but the wedding is called off when Fannie finds Joe making love to her unprincipled sister, Edna. Fannie auditions for Landau, a theatrical producer, and goes on the Broadway stage. Fannie is a great success, and she and Joe soon find their way back into each other's arms.

"When the Paramount movie people decided to make "Night Club"...they took a lot of stage names, let some of them do their specialties, wound a thin, unpleasant story around the whole, and called it a day." - Kansas City Times, 02/18/1929