Quote:
Here’s the trailer from Ernst Lubitsch’s long lost silent film The Patriot, which is the only film nominated for a Best Picture Oscar that is now lost. Emil Jannings, Florence Vidor, and Lewis Stone star.

The trailer is fairly tantalizing, I mean who wouldn’t want to hear Jannings’ “Agonized Roar”, and the fact that it’s a Lubitsch film makes it doubly so. But sadly this is all we have left of the film save for some crowd footage that ended up in Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress. Here’s hoping someday this one turns up.Read More »

A reform school teacher tries to carry his class to the right path by teaching them diving.Read More »

Fernand Gravey and Jacques Duby star as a pair of slick race track touts in need of some quick cash. Targetting rural rube Jean Richard as a patsy, the two sharpsters con him into putting up his hard-earned cash on a few sure things. Within what seems like seconds, Richard becomes wealthy by using his instincts, while the “clever” Gravey and Duby come a-cropper by playing the odds. If it’s possible for a French film to be Runyonesque, then Courte Tete is that film.Read More »

In a tiny Azerbaijani fishing village young Sarah’s father disappears at sea. Misfortunes abound until the superstitious inhabitants demand a funeral. Rebellious Sarah undertakes one last, and deadly, attempt to find her father.Read More »

A security agent investigates sabotage and murder at a secret underground laboratory, home of two experimental robots.Read More »

SYNOPSIS:
This documentary produced in 1973 is a remarkable document on traditional Islamic culture in Afghanistan before the country met with the disasters of ideological struggles and civil war. To a Muslim sensibility, its importance goes much further. It is an objective and respectful testimony to the profound, essential aspects of the spiritual culture of Islam, captured by a Western filmmaker.Read More »

SYNOPSIS:
A meek Belgian soldier (Harry Langdon) fighting in World War I receives penpal letters and a photo from “Mary Brown”, an American girl he has never met. He becomes infatuated with her by long distance. After the war, the young Belgian journeys to America as assistant to a theatrical “strong man”, Zandow the Great (Arthur Thalasso). While in America, he searches for Mary Brown… and he finds her, just as word comes that Zandow is incapacitated and the little nebbish must go on stage in his place.Read More »

An illustration of gradual destruction of an urban monster.Read More »

In 1959, in Romania, six former members of the nomenklatura and the secret police organize a hold up of the National Bank. After their arrest, the state forces them to play themselves in a film which reconstitutes the crime and the investigation. At the end of their trial, filmed live, they are sentenced to death and executed. A month later, the film Reconstitution was released and became a sensation throughout the country.Read More »