Arcadia Public Library

An egocentric American girl dreams of becoming a star while working in a third-rate Berlin cabaret.

One of Hollywood's earliest -- and most peculiar -- musicals, The Great Gabbo stars von Stroheim as an egotistical ventriloquist who casts a Svengali-like spell upon an ingenue (Betty Compson), against a backdrop of singularly strange numbers (including "Icky" and the spider-and-fly-themed "Caught in a Web"). Director James Cruze (The Covered Wagon) allowed von Stroheim to endow the character with his signature flourishes, resulting in a wicked cocktail...

Eleven films designed to influence, including a vintage promotional film of a French-dubbed Laurel & Hardy, theatrical advertisements featuring Michel Simon and Jacques Tati, a 1938 George Pal puppet animation, three WW-II era musical shorts, two political campaign films, and the National Film registry selection Master Hands, a paean to the 1936 Chevrolet automobile.

An intoxicating blend of wartime romance and brightly colored musical, the film depicts an original world "where Bresson meets the Beatles" (Variety).

In preparation for a Broadway musical, a group of aspiring stage performers is put through their paces by a veteran stage director using some singular techniques.

A stern lady communist comes to Paris to retrieve three wayward comrades and a Russian composer, but instead warms up to capitalist attractions.

Legendary director Douglas Sirk's (Written on the wind, Imitation of life) La Habanera is a lushly poetic and boldly modern musical drama decades ahead of its time. Working at Germany's famed UFA Studios (Metropolis), under the very noses of the Nazi authorities that would later force him into Hollywood exile and eminence, Sirk transformed a glossy musical vehicle for UFA's "new Garbo" Zarah Leander into a dark and intimate anti-colonial melodrama....

Silver-tongued con artist Harold Hill hoodwinks the stubborn townsfolk of River City, Iowa into buying instruments and uniforms for a boy's band, but his game ultimately and romantically backfires.

A leprechaun tries to retrieve a crock of gold from an old wanderer who has taken it to America.