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Tokyo Chorus

Yasujiro Ozu
1931 • 90 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Low wage–earning dad Okajima is depending on his bonus, and so are his wife and children, yet payday doesn’t exactly go as planned. Exquisite and economical, Yasujiro Ozu’s film alternates between brilliantly mounted comic sequences and heartrending working-class realities.

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Flunky, Work Hard

Mikio Naruse
1931 • 28 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Mikio Naruse’s earliest available film, Flunky, Work Hard is the rare work by the director not to center around female characters. It is a charming, breezy short concerning an impoverished insurance salesman and his scrappy son.

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I Was Born, But . . .

Yasujiro Ozu
1932 • 100 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

One of Ozu’s most popular films, I Was Born, But . . . is a blithe portrait of the financial and psychological toils of one family, as told from the rascally point of view of a couple of stubborn little boys.

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No Blood Relation

Mikio Naruse
1932 • 79 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

In No Blood Relation, a gripping early example of Mikio Naruse’s cinematic boldness, featuring a screenplay by Ozu’s famed collaborator Kogo Noda, an actress returns to Tokyo after a successful stint in Hollywood to reclaim the daughter she abandoned years before.

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Passing Fancy

Yasujiro Ozu
1933 • 101 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

The first of many films featuring the endearing single-dad Kihachi (played wonderfully by Takeshi Sakamoto), Passing Fancy is a humorous and heartfelt study of a close, if fraught, father-son relationship.

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Japanese Girls at the Harbor

Hiroshi Shimizu
1933 • 76 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Shimizu’s exquisite silent drama tells of the humiliating social downfall experienced by Sunako after jealousy drives her to commit a terrible crime. With its lushly photographed landscapes and innovative visual storytelling, this film shows a director at the peak of his powers and experimentation.

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The Private Life of Henry VIII

Alexander Korda
1933 • 96 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Charles Laughton gulps beer and chomps on mutton, in his first of many iconic screen roles, as King Henry VIII, the ultimate anti-husband. Alexander Korda’s first major international success is a raucous, entertaining, even poignant peek into the boudoirs of the infamous king and his six wives.

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Apart from You

Mikio Naruse
1933 • 60 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

In this gently devastating drama, a critical breakthrough for Naruse, he contrasts the life of an aging geisha, whose angry teenage son is ashamed of her profession, with that of her youthful counterpart, a lovely young girl resentful of her family for forcing her into a life of ignominy.

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Every-Night Dreams

Mikio Naruse
1933 • 65 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

In the formally ravishing Every-Night Dreams, set in the dockside neighborhoods of Tokyo, a single mother works tirelessly as a Ginza bar hostess to ensure a better life for her young son—until her long-lost husband returns.

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Les misérables

Raymond Bernard
1934 • 279 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Hailed by film critics around the world as the greatest screen adapation of Victor Hugo’s mammoth nineteenth-century novel, Raymond Bernard’s dazzling, nearly five-hour Les misérables is a breathtaking tour de force, unfolding with the depth and detail of its source.

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The Rise of Catherine the Great

Paul Czinner
1934 • 95 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

A quick-witted and compelling dramatization of the troubled marriage of Catherine II (played by German actress Elisabeth Bergner, in her English-language debut) to Peter III (a randy Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) and her subsequent ascension to the throne as Empress of Russia.

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The Private Life of Don Juan

Alexander Korda
1934 • 87 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Douglas Fairbanks Sr. makes his big-screen swan song with Korda’s deliciously satiric deflation of the Don Juan myth. After having faked his own death and escaped Seville, the aging lothario returns, only to find that he has been forgotten; perhaps Merle Oberon’s beauty can coax him back.

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Street Without End

Mikio Naruse
1934 • 88 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Mikio Naruse’s final silent film is a gloriously rich portrait of a waitress, Sugiko, whose life, despite a host of male admirers and even some intrigued movie talent scouts, ends up taking a suffocatingly domestic turn after a wealthy businessman accidentally hits her with his car.

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Sisters of the Gion

Kenji Mizoguchi
1936 • 69 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

The independent, unsentimental Omocha and her sister, the more tradition-minded Umekichi, are both geishas in the working-class district of Gion. Mizoguchi’s film is an uncompromising look at the forces that keep many women at the bottom rung of the social ladder.

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Osaka Elegy

Kenji Mizoguchi
1936 • 71 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Osaka Elegy established Mizoguchi as one of Japan’s major filmmakers. The director’s often-used leading actress Isuzu Yamada stars as Ayako, a switchboard operator trapped in a compromising, ruinous relationship with her boss to help support her wastrel father.

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Mr. Thank You

Hiroshi Shimizu
1936 • 78 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Shimizu’s endearing road movie follows the long and winding route of a sweet-natured bus driver—nicknamed Mr. Thank You for his constant exclamation to pedestrians who kindly step out of his path—traveling from rural Izu to Tokyo.

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Rembrandt

Alexander Korda
1936 • 85 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Charles Laughton once again teams up with Korda for this moving, elegantly shot biopic about the Dutch painter. Beginning when Rembrandt’s reputation was at its height, the film then tracks his quiet descent into loneliness and isolated self-expression.

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The Story of a Cheat

Sacha Guitry
1936 • 81 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

This fleet, witty picaresque about a gambler and petty thief is a whimsical delight. Guitry himself stars as the tricheur looking back fondly on a life of crime, which he narrates with an effervescence matched by that of the film’s skillful editing and cinematography.

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The Pearls of the Crown

Sacha Guitry
1937 • 105 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Sacha Guitry plays four roles in this whirlwind of pageantry investigating the history of seven pearls, four of which end up on the crown of England and three of which go missing. The Pearls of the Crown rockets through four centuries of European history with imaginative, winking irreverence.

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Désiré

Sacha Guitry
1937 • 97 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Sacha Guitry exchanges his usual top hat for a uniform in Désiré, playing a cavalier valet embroiled in an awkward flirtation with his new employer, played by the actor-director’s real-life wife, Jacqueline Delubac.

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Elephant Boy

Robert Flaherty and Zoltán Korda
1937 • 82 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Elephant Boy served as the breakthrough showcase for the thirteen-year-old Sabu, whose beaming performance as a young mahout leading the British on an expedition made him a major international star.

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The Masseurs and a Woman

Hiroshi Shimizu
1938 • 76 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

A pair of blind masseurs, an enigmatic city woman, a lonely man and his ill-behaved nephew—The Masseurs and a Woman is made up of crisscrossing miniature studies of love and family at a remote resort in the mountains.

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Quadrille

Sacha Guitry
1938 • 95 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

A sparkling four-way affair overflowing with dialogue that showcases writer-director Sacha Guitry’s wit, Quadrille stars Guitry as a magazine editor whose longtime girlfriend—to whom he plans to finally propose—is uncontrollably drawn to a handsome American movie star.

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The Drum

Zoltán Korda
1938 • 98 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Zoltán Korda’s charged adaptation of a novel by The Four Feathers author A. E. W. Mason features Sabu in his second film role, as the teenage Prince Azim, forced into hiding when his father, the ruler of a peaceful kingdom in northwest India, is assassinated by his own ruthless brother.

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Ornamental Hairpin

Hiroshi Shimizu
1941 • 71 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Two bruised souls enact a tender, hesitant romance in Shimizu’s alternately poignant and playful wartime love story. A soldier is waylaid at a rural spa when he accidentally cuts his foot on the titular object. Soon enough he tracks down its lovely owner and finds himself smitten.

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Major Barbara

Gabriel Pascal
1941 • 121 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Wendy Hiller plays one of George Bernard Shaw’s most memorable and controversial characters, Barbara Undershaft, a Salvation Army officer who speaks out against the hypocrisy she believes exists in her Christian charity organization.

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Remorques

Jean Grémillon
1941 • 84 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Jacques Prévert cowrote this atmospheric tale of the romantic trials of a tugboat captain, played by the iconic French star Jean Gabin.

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Jungle Book

Zoltán Korda
1942 • 106 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes

This Korda brothers film is the definitive version of Rudyard Kipling’s classic collection of fables, starring Sabu as Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves, who can communicate with all the beasts of the jungle.

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Lumière d’été

Jean Grémillon
1943 • 110 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

A shimmering glass hotel at the top of a remote Provençal mountain provides the setting for a tragicomic tapestry about an obsessive love pentangle, whose principals range from an artist to a hotel manager to a dam worker.

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Sanshiro Sugata

Akira Kurosawa
1943 • 79 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Kurosawa’s effortless debut is a thrilling martial arts action tale, but it’s also a moving story of moral education that’s quintessential Kurosawa.

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Torment

Alf Sjöberg
1944 • 101 minutes • 1.33:1 • Sweden
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Ingmar Bergman’s first produced screenplay was for the great Swedish filmmaker Alf Sjöberg’s Torment, a dark coming-of-age drama about a boarding-school senior, Widgren, terrorized by his sadistic Latin teacher.

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The Most Beautiful

Akira Kurosawa
1944 • 85 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

This portrait of female volunteer workers at an optics plant during World War II, shot on location at the Nippon Kogaku factory, was created with a patriotic agenda. Yet it anticipates the aesthetics of Japanese cinema’s postwar social realism.

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Le ciel est à vous

Jean Grémillon
1944 • 107 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

In this uplifting romantic drama, the wife of a mechanic and former fighter pilot falls in love with the idea of flying herself. This soon becomes an obsession, and she undertakes a lofty feat: the longest solo flight ever made by a woman

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Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two

Akira Kurosawa
1945 • 83 minutes • 1.37:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Kurosawa’s first film was such a success that the studio leaned on the director to make a sequel. The result is a hugely entertaining adventure, reuniting most of the major players from the original.

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The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail

Akira Kurosawa
1945 • 59 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

The fourth film from Akira Kurosawa is based on a legendary twelfth-century incident in which the lord Yoshitsune and a group of samurai retainers dressed as monks in order to pass through a dangerous enemy checkpoint.

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Crisis

Ingmar Bergman
1946 • 93 minutes • 1.33:1 • Sweden
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

In Ingmar Bergman’s feature directing debut, urban beauty-shop proprietress Miss Jenny arrives in an idyllic rural town one morning to whisk away her eighteen-year-old daughter, Nelly, whom she abandoned as a child, from the loving woman who has raised her.

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No Regrets for Our Youth

Akira Kurosawa
1946 • 110 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

In Akira Kurosawa’s first film after the end of World War II, future beloved Ozu regular Setsuko Hara gives an astonishing performance as Yukie, who transforms herself from genteel bourgeois daughter to independent social activist during a tumultuous decade in Japanese history.

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One Wonderful Sunday

Akira Kurosawa
1947 • 109 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

This affectionate paean to young love is also a frank examination by Akira Kurosawa of the harsh realities of postwar Japan. During a Sunday trip into war-ravaged Tokyo, Yuzo and Masako look for work and lodging, as well as affordable entertainments to pass the time.

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Port of Call

Ingmar Bergman
1948 • 97 minutes • 1.33:1 • Sweden
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Berit, a suicidal young woman living in a working-class port town, unexpectedly falls for Gösta, a sailor on leave. Haunted by a troubled past and held in a vice grip by her domineering mother, Berit begins to hope that her relationship with Gösta might save her from self-destruction.

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Women of the Night

Kenji Mizoguchi
1948 • 74 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Filmed on location in Osaka, Women of the Night concerns two sisters—Fusako, a war widow, and Natsuko, having an affair with a narcotics smuggler—who along with their younger friend Kumiko descend into prostitution and moral chaos amid the postwar devastation surrounding them.

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To Joy

Ingmar Bergman
1949 • 99 minutes • 1.33:1 • Sweden
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

An orchestra violinist’s dreams of becoming a celebrated soloist and fears of his own mediocrity get in the way of his marriage to the patient, caring Marta in Ingmar Bergman’s heartbreaking To Joy.

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Chains

Raffaello Matarazzo
1949 • 94 minutes • 1.33:1 • Italy
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

After years of making mostly comedies and literary adaptations, Raffaello Matarazzo turned to melodrama with this intense tale of a tight-knit working-class family shattered by temptation.

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Scandal

Akira Kurosawa
1950 • 105 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

A handsome, suave Toshiro Mifune lights up the screen as painter Ichiro, whose circumstantial meeting with a famous singer is twisted by the tabloid press into a torrid affair. Ichiro files a lawsuit against the seedy gossip magazine, but his lawyer, Hiruta (Takashi Shimura), is playing both sides.

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Tormento

Raffaello Matarazzo
1950 • 98 minutes • 1.33:1 • Italy
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Anna flees her home, where she has been victimized for years by her spineless father’s mean-spirited second wife, to be with her lover, an honest businessman yet to make his fortune. When he is accused of a murder he didn’t commit, the couple’s domestic tranquillity is upended.

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The Steel Helmet

Samuel Fuller
1951 • 84 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes

Despite its relatively low budget, this portrait of Korean War soldiers dealing with moral and racial identity crises remains one of Samuel Fuller’s most gripping, realistic depictions of the blood and guts of war, as well as a reflection of Fuller’s irreducible social conscience.

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The Idiot

Akira Kurosawa
1951 • 166 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

The Idiot, an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece about a wayward, pure soul’s reintegration into society—updated by Kurosawa to capture Japan’s postwar aimlessness—was a victim of studio interference and public indifference. Today, this “folly” looks ever more fascinating.

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Androcles and the Lion

Chester Erskine
1952 • 98 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

George Bernard Shaw’s breezy, delightful dramatization of this classic fable—about a Christian slave who pulls a thorn from a lion’s paw and is spared from death in the Colosseum as a result of his kind act—was written as a meditation on modern Christian values.

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Nobody’s Children

Raffaello Matarazzo
1952 • 96 minutes • 1.33:1 • Italy
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Nobody’s Children is the first half of an overflowing diptych of melodramas chronicling the labyrinthine misfortunes of a couple torn cruelly apart by fate (and meddling villains).

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