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Mickey Mouse, piloting a steamboat, delights his passenger, Minnie, by making musical instruments out of the menagerie on deck.
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The cartoon is considered the debut of Mickey Mouse and his girlfriend Minnie. Steamboat Willie is especially notable for being the first Disney cartoon with synchronized sound, as well as the first cartoon to feature a fully post-produced soundtrack which distinguished it from earlier sound cartoonsRead More »
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Inspired by Lindbergh’s flight from New York to Paris, Mickey builds a plane to take Minnie for a trip involving some necking, though Minnie objects to the necking.Read More »
In his last film – and only Talkie – Lon Chaney recreates one of his famed Silent roles: the scheming ventriloquist Prof. Echo. Disguised as Grandma O’Grady, Echo heads a robbery ring that includes a feeble-minded strongman and a cigar-chomping little person, the latter masquerading as Grandma’s grandbaby. Known as the Man of a Thousand Faces, Chaney here displays a different kind of virtuosity as well, creating five different voices to portray Echo, Grandma, a parrot, a girl and Echo’s dummy. A big hit directed by Jack Conway, The Unholy Three promised to launch Chaney as a major Sound Era star. He was slated to play the title role in Tod Browning’s Dracula, but it was not to be. Chaney died only weeks after The Unholy Three premiered.Read More »
Two thieves, the Blackbird and West End Bertie, fall in love with the same girl, a French nightclub performer named Fifi. Each man tries to outdo the other to win her heart.Read More »
At the Opera of Paris, a mysterious phantom threatens a famous lyric singer, Carlotta and thus forces her to give up her role (Marguerite in Faust) for unknown Christine Daae. Christine meets this phantom (a masked man) in the catacombs, where he lives. What’s his goal? What’s his secret?Read More »
Born on the fourth of July, 1900, the future holds unlimited potential for newborn John Sims. But dreams soon fade with the death of his father when John is but a lad. Like many before him, John sets out to make his mark in New York City, but ends up a faceless worker (#137) in a large office of a large business. Still he is happy with his fate and soon meets a young woman named Mary on a blind double date. Things take their course and they soon marry and live in a small apartment. Soon John is bickering with Mary and finds that he has no love for the in-laws. When the marriage looks like a bust, he finds that Mary is with child and he stays. After 5 years, he has a son and a daughter and the same dead end job. When tragedy strikes, John must find the conviction to continue or lose what little he has left.Read More »
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In the middle of an economic crisis, the workers are living in poverty and struggling to find a little happiness and get a warm meal. Mother Krause lives with her two grown-up children, as well as a shady “bed lodger” and his lover – a prostitute with a child – on just a few square metres. In next to no time, tensions build up, and soon crime is involved too. Mother Krausen’s painstakingly preserved order collapses. This story has lost hardly any of its relevance. In those days, columns of marching workers calling out “Join the ranks!” indicated a possible way out. But the older generation went to the dogs.Read More »
A film on the life of Bangorō Shibukawa, the founder of the Shibukawa-ryū school of jūjutsu. To paraphrase Tadao Satō’s blurb on the back cover of the video, this is an important film for three reasons.
1. It is an almost perfectly well preserved copy of one of only few full-length movies still available of the first superstar in Japanese cinema history, the very famous Onoe Matsunosuke.Read More »
