The Patsy

A semi-documentary experimental 1930 German silent film created by amateurs with a small budget. With authentic scenes of the metropolis city of Berlin, it's the first film from the later famous screenwriters/directors Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann.

a silent movie by Robert Wiene

A social drama set in the milieu of the arts.

Henry and Marion have a lover's quarrel and part in anger. They do not reconcile, and ten years pass without contact. Marion becomes a society girl and spends her time at parties with her friends. Henry has become very ill and wishes to see Marion one more time. He writes asking her to visit. When she recieves the note, she laughs and tosses it on the floor, but, later, on a whim, decides to take all her drunken friends with her to visit him. When they arrive, Marion finds Henry dead, clutching her portrait in his hand. She sends her friends away and falls to her knees in remorse. Mary Pickford's debut!

A young woman who lives with her uncle begins to dream about a monster that lurks in the shadows of the night.

Oscar Krug is looked upon with suspicion by his neighbors because of his German name. When the US is drawn into the war with Germany, he enlists and travels the seas with his wife, Alice Morse. During a submarine attack Alice is snatched from Krug's side by a German officer. Krug now lives to have his revenge, and when the opportunity presents itself, he will have it.

Charles Abbott is implicated in the death of his friend Escobar, brother to the woman he loves.

Anna Moore, a poor orphaned country girl, and her little brother, Tommy, live with hypocritical Squire Simpson, who conspires with his son to acquire the inheritance due the girl.

The film consists of a series of tightly interlinked vignettes, the most sustained of which details the story of a man and a woman who are passionately in love. Their attempts to consummate their passion are constantly thwarted, by their families, by the Church and bourgeois society in general.

Young Cabiria is kidnapped by pirates and sold as a slave in Carthage. Just as she's to be sacrificed to Moloch, Cabiria is rescued by Fulvius Axilla, a good-hearted Roman spy, and his powerful slave, Maciste. The trio are broken up as Cabiria is entrusted to a woman of noble birth. With Cabiria's fate unknown, Maciste punished for his heroism, and Fulvius sent away to fight for Rome, is there any hope of our heroes reuniting?

This is a poetic film set in the times of Lenin's NEP. A ballet dancer steals a brooch and gives it as a present to another dancer. This is a crime of passion. A mysterious black ball is after the heroine. She runs away from it and manages to give the brooch in an exquisite pirouette movement, as shiny as diamond facets. What gives a stone its dazzling luster are its polished facets. But the real gem is love, and it's much harder to get than any diamond in the world.

Using every known means of transportation, several savants from the Geographic Society undertake a journey through the Alps to the Sun which finishes under the sea.

Hanns Heinz Ewers' grim science-fiction novel Alraune has already been filmed twice when this version was assembled in 1928. In another of his "mad doctor" roles, Paul Wegener plays Professor Brinken, sociopathic scientist who combines the genes of an executed murderer with those of a prostitute. The result is a beautiful young woman named Alraune (Brigitte Helm), who is incapable of feeling any real emotions -- least of all guilt or regret. Upon attaining adulthood, Alraune sets about to seduce and destroy every male who crosses her path. Ultimately, Professor Brinken is hoist on his own petard when he falls hopelessly in love with Alraune himself. Alraune was remade in 1930, with Brigitte Helm repeating her role, and again in 1951, with Hildegarde Knef as the "heroine" and Erich von Stroheim as her misguided mentor.

A young man travels to Mars in a rocket ship, where he leads a popular uprising against the ruling group with the support of Queen Aelita, who has fallen in love with him after watching him through a telescope.

A scientist discovers that there's gold on the moon. He builds a rocket to fly there, but there's too much rivalry among the crew to have a successful expedition.

The story of a poor young woman, separated by prejudice from her husband and baby, is interwoven with tales of intolerance from throughout history.

The story of an idle rich boy who joins the US Army's Rainbow Division and is sent to France to fight in World War I, becomes friends with two working class men, experiences the horrors of trench warfare, and finds love with a French girl.

John, an ambitious but undisciplined New York City office worker, meets and marries Mary. They start a family, struggle to cope with marital stress, financial setbacks, and tragedy, all while lost amid the anonymous, pitiless throngs of the big city.

In Midnight Madness millionaire diamond miner Michael Bream (Clive Brook) discovers that the woman he’s marrying — funfair shooting-gallery hostess Norma Forbes — is a gold digger. So Bream decides to teach her a lesson, and forces her to live with him in the remote African outback where, eventually, she realizes her true affections.

Trilby lounges on a table with her shoes off, smoking, laughing, enjoying a piece of cake, and kissing her friend in a scene from the popular eponymous novel and stage play. Now lost, it is considered the first book-to-film adaptation.