Newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane is taken from his mother as a boy and made the ward of a rich industrialist. As a result, every well-meaning, tyrannical or self-destructive move he makes for the rest of his life appears in some way to be a reaction to that deeply wounding event.
When legendary hunter Bob Rainsford is shipwrecked on the perilous reefs surrounding a mysterious island, he finds himself the guest of the reclusive and eccentric Count Zaroff. While he is very gracious at first, Zaroff eventually forces Rainsford and two other shipwreck survivors, brother and...
Two young Chicago hoodlums, Tom Powers and Matt Doyle, rise up from their poverty-stricken slum life to become petty thieves, bootleggers and cold-blooded killers. But with street notoriety and newfound wealth, the duo feels the heat from the cops and rival gangsters both. Despite his ruthless...
After the death of a United States Senator, idealistic Jefferson Smith is appointed as his replacement in Washington. Soon, the naive and earnest new senator has to battle political corruption.
Lucky is tricked into missing his own wedding to Margaret and has to make $25,000 so her father will allow him to marry her. He and business partner Pop go to New York where they run into dancing instructor Penny. She and Lucky form a successful dance partnership, but romance is blighted by his old...
Despite his talent as a musician, a city boy decides to become a boxer. He's successful as a fighter — much to the dismay of his parents. When gangsters try to buy a piece of him, he begins to have second thoughts.
After a roustabout sailor avoids being shanghaied in 1850s San Francisco, his audacity helps him rise to a position of power in the vice industry of the infamous Barbary Coast.
Nikki Martin, a beautiful French opera star, stows away on an ocean liner in hopes of escaping her jealous fiancee. Once aboard, she joins an American swing band and falls in love with its leader, who, after hearing her sing, eventually comes to reciprocate her feelings.
Alexander Graham Bell falls in love with deaf girl Mabel Hubbard while teaching the deaf and trying to invent means for telegraphing the human voice. She urges him to put off thoughts of marriage until his experiments are complete. He invents the telephone, marries and becomes rich and famous,...
Abe Lincoln in Illinois is a 1940 biographical film which tells the story of the life of Abraham Lincoln from his departure from Kentucky until his election as President of the United States.
Young lovers Jack and Sally are from families that compete to send horses to the 1938 Kentucky Derby, but during the Civil War, her family sided with the South while his sided with the North--and her Uncle Peter will have nothing to do with Jack's family.
Pilot disobeys unsafe orders and loses his job. He then starts a flying school which receives a boost when the government launches a program which it hopes will produce 20,000 pilots a year.
A woman is tried for the murder of her lover. Director Bayard Veiller's 1929 courtroom drama stars Norma Shearer, Lewis Stone, Lilyan Tashman and H. B. Warner.
A news reporter-commentator at a combined radio-television broadcasting station gives up his stand against the election of a corrupt mayoral candidate after a gangster threatens his family. Features tidal wave stock footage from RKO's "Deluge" (1933), q.v.