Colleen Moore

Erstwhile childhood friends, Judah Ben-Hur and Messala meet again as adults, this time with Roman officer Messala as conqueror and Judah as a wealthy, though conquered, Israelite. A slip of a brick during a Roman parade causes Judah to be sent off as a galley slave, his property confiscated and his mother and sister imprisoned. Years later, as a result of his determination to stay alive and his willingness to aid his Roman master, Judah returns to his homeland an exalted and wealthy Roman athlete. Unable to find his mother and sister, and believing them dead, he can think of nothing else than revenge against Messala.

Before the G, PG and R ratings system there was the Production Code, and before that there was, well, nothing. This eye-opening documentary examines the rampant sexuality of early Hollywood through movie clips and reminiscences by stars of the era. Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Marlene Dietrich and others relate tales of the artistic freedom that led to the draconian Production Code, which governed content from 1934 to 1968. Diane Lane narrates.

Poor Ella Cinders is much abused by her evil step-mother and step-sisters. When she wins a local beauty contest she jumps at the chance to get out of her dead-end life and go to Hollywood, where she is promised a job in the movies. When she arrives in Hollywood, she discovers that the contest was a scam and the job non-existent. But through pluck, luck, and talent, she makes it in the movies anyway, and finds true love.

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Ellie Byrne and Don Lane, chums, living in the poor section of a factory town, go away to make their fortunes. Ellie wishes to become a lady so that she can marry Preston Dutton, a society chap, and Don becoming infatuated with Stephanie Parrish, daughter of a wealthy man. Ellie becomes a leading actress and Don the author of her first play. Ellie refuses Dutton’s suit when she learns he is after her money, and Stephanie returns Don’s engagement ring. Ellie and Don go back to the factory town disillusioned. They realize that they love each other and in reality had not bettered themselves for someone else but for each other. A lost film.

On the eve of her wedding Lady Kay Rutfield runs off aboard her sloop. A storm carries her out to sea and she is rescued by a passing rumrunner bound for the Long Island Sound. Once they arrive in the States, Kay makes her escape and hides in the deserted mansion of Jimmy Winter. Jimmy is due to marry the following day. He comes home to the mansion unexpectedly, and finds Kay, who persuades him to let her pose for a night as his wife.

Fernie Schmidt (Colleen Moore) lives with her parents in the rear of their delicatessen. The smells of the business - cheeses, sausages, garlic and pickled herrings - repulses Fernie, who dreams of leaving this environment and moving into a life that's more rarified. Her father, Pop Schmidt (Jean Hersholt) has plans for his daughter to marry Peter Halitovsky (Arthur Stone), a sausage salesman, but Fernie is repulsed by the idea. At a dance, Fernie meets Jack Dugan (Malcolm McGregor), who tells her that he is in stocks, a paper-counter, and she falls for him. Because of her rejection of her father's chosen candidate for matrimony, Pop puts Fernie out of the house.

Shenanigans at a small town movie theater.

Among the pieces featured in Fragments are the final reel of John Ford's The Village Blacksmith (1922) and a glimpse at Emil Jannings in The Way of All Flesh (1927), the only Oscar®-winning performance in a lost film. Fragments also features clips from such lost films as Cleopatra (1917), starring Theda Bara; The Miracle Man (1919), with Lon Chaney; He Comes Up Smiling (1918), starring Douglas Fairbanks; an early lost sound film, Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), filmed in early Technicolor, and the only color footage of silent star Clara Bow, Red Hair (1928). The program is rounded out with interviews of film preservationists involved in identifying and restoring these films. Also featured is a new interview with Diana Serra Cary, best known as "Baby Peggy", one of the major American child stars of the silent era, who discusses one of the featured fragments, Darling of New York (1923).

Moore plays the "dual" role of a French singer in America who was originally an American chorus girl in France to acquire a new persona.

Dinty is a newsboy whose fight to care for his ailing mother leads him into conflicts with the other boys on the street and then with drug smugglers in Chinatown.

When Marie Louise, the daughter of the town factor, returns home from school, Julio Sandoval, a reckless young half-breed ruled by his animal instincts, develops a passion for the girl, even though she is engaged to Captain McKeever of the mounted police. Meeting Marie when she is alone in the woods one day, the half-breed carries her to his cabin on the mountain top where he collapses from an attack of mountain fever brought on by overexertion.

A 1927 silent-era series of Hollywood studio tours, these short subjects go behind the scenes at major studios and showcase famous stars, directors, and landmarks of the movie capital.

Naughty But Nice was based on The Bigamists, a story by Lewis Alen Brown. Gawky country girl Berenice Summers (Colleen Moore) is catapulted head-first into High Society when her Uncle Seth (Burr McIntosh) strikes oil. Shipped off to a fancy boarding school, Berenice suffers at the hands of her snooty classmates, but the last straw comes when she's publicly humiliated by local wise-guy Paul Carroll (Donald Reed).

Irene, a feisty Irish girl in Philadelphia, clashes with her family and walks out, heading to New York City to seek fame and fortune. She gets a job as a dressmaker's model and becomes involved with Donald, the scion of a wealthy family. Donald's mother doesn't approve of Irene and sets out to discredit her in Donald's eyes.

A young American has her ship torpedoed by a German U-boat but makes it back to her ancestral home in France, where she witnesses German brutality firsthand.

A man's life is retold just after his funeral. Beginning as a track walker, Tom Garner rose through all sorts of railroad jobs to head the company. In the meantime he lost touch with his family. When he saw what was happening it was already too late.

Shane O'Mealia leaves Ireland, promising to send for his sweetheart, Moyna. In the mean time the son of the old lady she lives with, takes them back to America without telling Shane, who then must explain a girl he's been seeing in New York.

Jealous of her son Oliver's interest in Penelope Mason, Mrs. Newell takes him to a resort where he is easy prey for designing Enid Morton. After some near-disastrous situations with Enid's suspicious husband, Penelope comes to Oliver's rescue at Mrs. Newell's request.

Mary, a bride-to-be, has a troublesome wedding day.

In the seventeenth century, in Massachusetts, a young woman is forced to wear a scarlet "A" on her dress for bearing a child out of wedlock.

Annie, left orphaned after the death of her mother, goes to an orphanage where she tells her fellow orphans stories of ghosts and goblins. The matron of the orphanage finds Annie's closest relative, the abusive Uncle Thomp. Big Dave, a neighbor comes to her aid, becoming her protector. Eventually Annie goes to live with Squire Goode and his large family. There, she entertains the children of the household with her stories, but sees her abusive aunt and uncle as her chief tormentors. She tells stories of how the goblins will take away the children if they are not good. War breaks out and Dave, who Annie adores, enlists. In a feverish vision triggered by her distress—revealed later as a nightmare—she imagines receiving news of Dave's battlefield death, delivered mockingly by her uncle, leading to her heartbroken collapse and apparent deathbed vigil.

In France during World War I, a charming farm girl keeps a squadron of English pilots in good spirits as best as she can. She falls for a handsome newcomer who is already engaged.

A department store clerk decides to marry a withdrawing colleague with tuberculosis, over another dashing, ambitious suitor, leads to a life of hardship and struggle. Though The Nth Commandment survives incomplete, enough exists of director Frank Borzage’s last film while under contract with William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures for scholar Hervé Dumont to declare “it the first truly Borzagian work.”