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. . . And the Pursuit of Happiness

Louis Malle
1986 • 81 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

In 1986, Louis Malle set out to investigate the ever-widening range of immigrant experience in America. Interviewing a variety of newcomers in middle- and working-class communities from coast to coast, Malle paints a generous, humane portrait of their individual struggles.

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First Man into Space

Robert Day
1959 • 77 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #365 Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes

In this interstellar cautionary tale, brash U.S. Navy test pilot Dan Prescott, hungry for fame, rockets himself beyond Earth’s atmosphere, only to become encrusted with cosmic dust and return a blood-drinking monster.

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The Atomic Submarine

Spencer G. Bennet
1959 • 72 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #366 Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes

When a nuclear-powered submarine, the Tiger Shark, sets out to investigate a series of mysterious disappearances near the Arctic Circle, its fearless crew finds itself besieged by electrical storms, an Unidentified Floating Saucer, and lots of hairy tentacles.

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The Haunted Strangler

Robert Day
1958 • 79 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #367 Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Nineteenth-century English author James Rankin (Boris Karloff) believes that the wrong man was hanged twenty years earlier for a series of murders, but his investigations lead him to a horrible and, for him, gruesomely inescapable secret.

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Corridors of Blood

Robert Day
1959 • 87 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #368 Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes

In 1840s London, Dr. Thomas Bolton (Boris Karloff) dares to dream the unthinkable: to operate on patients without causing pain. Unfortunately, the road to general anesthesia is blocked by a ruthless killer (Christopher Lee), as well as Bolton’s devastating addiction to his own chemical experiments.

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The Emperor Jones

Dudley Murphy
1933 • 105 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #370 Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Of all Paul Robeson’s starring film performances, by far his most iconic was his breakthrough in the big-screen adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, in which he plays Brutus Jones, a Pullman porter who powers his way to the rule of a Caribbean island.

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Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist

Saul J. Turell
1979 • 30 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Saul J. Turell’s Academy Award-winning documentary short Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist, narrated by Sidney Poitier, traces his career through his activism and his socially charged performances of his signature song, “Ol’ Man River.”

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Sanders of the River

Zoltán Korda
1935 • 91 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #372 Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Paul Robeson moved his family to London in 1928, headlining six British films in twelve years. Robeson’s first British production, Zoltán Korda’s Sanders of the River, however, ended up an embarrassment, its story of an African tribal leader transformed into a celebration of the British Empire.

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The Proud Valley

Pen Tennyson
1940 • 76 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #373 Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

As David Goliath, in the popular British drama The Proud Valley, Paul Robeson is the quintessential everyman, an American sailor who joins rank-and-file Welsh miners organizing against the powers that be.

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The Golden Coach

Jean Renoir
1953 • 103 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Spine: #242 Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Set to the music of Antonio Vivaldi, Jean Renoir’s ravishing, sumptuous tribute to the theater involves a viceroy who receives an exquisite golden coach and gives it to the tempestuous star of a touring commedia dell’arte company (the vivacious Anna Magnani).

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Mr. Freedom

William Klein
1969 • 92 minutes • 1.66:1 • France
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Mr. Freedom, a bellowing good-ol’-boy superhero decked out in copious football padding, jets to France to cut off a Commie invasion from Switzerland. Freedom joins forces with Marie Madeleine to combat lefty freethinkers, as well as insidious evildoers Moujik Man and inflatable Red China Man.

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Opening Night

John Cassavetes
1976 • 144 minutes • 1.66:1 • United States
Spine: #255 Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes

In John Cassavetes’ Opening Night, Broadway actress Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) rehearses for her latest play, about a woman unable to admit that she is aging. When she witnesses the accidental death of an adoring young fan, she begins to confront the turmoil she faces in her own life.

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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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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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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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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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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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Summertime

David Lean
1955 • 100 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #22 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes

In David Lean’s visually enchanting Summertime, Katharine Hepburn plays a lonely American spinster whose dream of romance finally becomes a bittersweet reality when she meets a handsome—but married—Italian man while vacationing in Venice.

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Picnic at Hanging Rock

Peter Weir
1975 • 107 minutes • 1.66:1 • Australia
Spine: #29 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus

In Peter Weir’s lyrical, meditative 1975 masterpiece, a Valentine’s Day picnic at an ancient volcanic outcropping turns to disaster for the residents of Mrs. Appleyard’s school when a few young girls inexplicably vanish on Hanging Rock.

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Fishing with John

John Lurie
1992 • 147 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #42 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus

John Lurie knows absolutely nothing about fishing, but that doesn’t stop him from undertaking the adventure of a lifetime in Fishing with John. Featuring Jim Jarmusch, Willem Dafoe, and Tom Waits.

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The Most Dangerous Game

Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel
1932 • 63 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #46 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

One of the best and most literate movies from the great days of horror, The Most Dangerous Game stars Leslie Banks as a big-game hunter with a taste for the world’s most exotic prey—his houseguests.

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The Night Porter

Liliana Cavani
1974 • 118 minutes • 1.85:1 • Italy
Spine: #59 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus

In Liliana Cavani’s scintillating drama, a concentration camp survivor (Charlotte Rampling) discovers her ex-torturer/lover (Dirk Bogarde) working as a night porter at a hotel in postwar Vienna.

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Carnival of Souls

Herk Harvey
1962 • 83 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #63 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus

In Herk Harvey’s macabre masterpiece, Mary Henry survives a drag race in a rural Kansas town, then takes a job as a church organist in Salt Lake City. En route, she becomes haunted by a bizarre apparition that compels her to an abandoned lakeside pavilion.

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Sisters

Brian De Palma
1973 • 93 minutes • 1.85:1 • United States
Spine: #89 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus, iTunes

A stylish paean to female destructiveness, De Palma’s first foray into horror voyeurism is a stunning amalgam of split-screen effects, bloody birthday cakes, and a chilling score by frequent Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann.

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