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The Steel Helmet

Samuel Fuller
1951 • 84 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Edition: Collector’s Sets

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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God’s Country

Louis Malle
1985 • 89 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Edition: Collector’s Sets

In 1979, Louis Malle traveled into the heart of Minnesota to capture the everyday lives of the men and women in a prosperous farming community. Six years later, during Ronald Reagan’s second term, he returned to find drastic economic decline.

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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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The Killers

Robert Siodmak
1946 • 103 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Edition: Collector’s Sets

The first screen incarnation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers” came in 1946, when director Robert Siodmak unleashed The Killers, helping to define the film noir style and launching the careers of Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner.

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The Killers

Don Siegel
1964 • 93 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Edition: Collector’s Sets

Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers” has fascinated readers and filmmakers for generations. In 1964, Don Siegel—initially slated to direct the 1946 version—took it on, creating the first-ever made-for-TV feature.

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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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Body and Soul

Oscar Micheaux
1925 • 79 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #371 Edition: Collector’s Sets

Body and Soul, directed by the legendary African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, is a direct critique of the power of the cloth, casting Paul Robeson in dual roles as a jackleg preacher and a well-meaning inventor.

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Borderline

Kenneth Macpherson
1930 • 65 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Edition: Collector’s Sets
Borderline, the sole feature of British film theorist Kenneth Macpherson, boldly blends Eisensteinian montage and domestic melodrama, and features Paul Robeson and his wife, Eslanda, as lovers caught up in a tangled web of interracial affairs.

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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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Jericho

Thornton Freeland
1937 • 75 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Edition: Collector’s Sets

Jericho features Paul Robeson, in what turned out to be his most satisfying film role, as a World War I officer who escapes his fate as a black man by fleeing to Africa and creating a new world for himself.

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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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Native Land

Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand
1942 • 89 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Edition: Collector’s Sets

With Paul Robeson’s narration and songs, Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz’s beautifully shot and edited political semidocumentary exposes violations of Americans’ civil liberties and is a call to action for exploited workers around the country.

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The Baron of Arizona

Samuel Fuller
1950 • 97 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Edition: Collector’s Sets

Vincent Price portrays legendary swindler James Addison Reavis, who in 1880 concocted an elaborate hoax to name himself the “Baron” of Arizona, and therefore inherit all the land in the state. Samuel Fuller adapts this tall tale to film with fleet, elegant storytelling and a sly sense of humor.

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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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The Love Parade

Ernst Lubitsch
1929 • 109 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Edition: Collector’s Sets

The Love Parade made stars out of toast-of-Paris Maurice Chevalier and girl-from-Philly Jeanette MacDonald, cast as a womanizing military attaché and the man-hungry queen of “Sylvania.” With its naughty innuendo and satiric romance, it opened the door for a decade of battles of the sexes.

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Monte Carlo

Ernst Lubitsch
1930 • 90 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Edition: Collector’s Sets

Jeanette MacDonald’s independent-minded countess leaves her foppish prince fiancé at the altar, and whisks herself away to the Riviera. Lubitsch’s follow-up to The Love Parade shows even more musical invention, and presents MacDonald at her sexily haughty best

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The Smiling Lieutenant

Ernst Lubitsch
1931 • 89 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Edition: Collector’s Sets

Maurice Chevalier’s randy Viennese lieutenant is enamored of Claudette Colbert’s freethinking, all-girl-orchestra-leading cutie. Yet complications ensue when the sexually repressed princess of the fictional kingdom of Flausenthurm, played by newcomer Miriam Hopkins, sets her sights on him.

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One Hour with You

Ernst Lubitsch
1932 • 78 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Edition: Collector’s Sets

Lubitsch reunites Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, this time as a seemingly blissful couple whose marriage hits the skids when her flirtatious school chum comes on to her husband a bit too strong.

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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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A Constant Forge

Charles Kiselyak
2000 • 200 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #256 Edition: Collector’s Sets

Charles Kiselyak’s A Constant Forge—The Life and Art of John Cassavetes is a detailed journey through the career of one of film’s greatest pioneers and iconoclasts, assembled from candid interviews with Cassavetes’ collaborators and friends, rare photographs, and archival footage.

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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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Three Documentaries

Saul J. Turell
1962 • 189 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Edition: Collector’s Sets

Three delightful tributes to Hollywood: The Great Chase, a rollicking compendium of the greatest hits of silent-cinema chase sequences, The Love Goddesses, a look at cinema’s most alluring female sex symbols, and the Oscar-winning remembrance Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist.

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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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The Docks of New York

Josef von Sternberg
1928 • 75 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #531 Edition: Collector’s Sets

Fog-shrouded cinematography by Harold Rosson (The Wizard of Oz), expressionist set design by Hans Dreier (Sunset Boulevard), and sensual performances by Bancroft and Compson make this one of Josef von Sternberg’s finest works, and one of the most exquisitely crafted films of its era.

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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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The Last Command

Josef von Sternberg
1928 • 88 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #530 Edition: Collector’s Sets

Emil Jannings won the first best actor Academy Award for his performance as a sympathetic tyrant: an exiled Russian general turned Hollywood extra who lands a role playing a version of his former czarist self, bringing about his emotional downfall.

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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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Caesar and Cleopatra

Gabriel Pascal
1945 • 128 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Edition: Collector’s Sets

Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains pop off the screen in vivid Technicolor in Gabriel Pascal’s version of Shaw’s 1901 play about love and politics in ancient Rome and Egypt.

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The Silence of the Lambs

Jonathan Demme
1991 • 118 minutes • 1.85:1 • United States
Spine: #13 Edition: DVD

Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter matches wits with Jodie Foster’s heroic FBI agent Clarice Starling in Jonathan Demme’s taut psychological thriller.

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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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RoboCop

Paul Verhoeven
1987 • 103 minutes • 1.66:1 • United States
Spine: #23 Edition: DVD

A grown-up superhero fantasy come to vivid, bloody life, Paul Verhoeven’s special effects-laden cult phenomenon features a resurrected hero (Peter Weller) in a new, supercharged cyborg body, struggling to reclaim his memory and avenge his own death.

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Dead Ringers

David Cronenberg
1988 • 115 minutes • 1.66:1 • United States
Spine: #21 Edition: DVD

Jeremy Irons gives a tour-de-force performance as identical twin gynecologists—suave Elliot and sensitive Beverly, bipolar sides of one personality—who descend into a whirlpool of sexual confusion, drugs, and madness in David Cronenberg’s chilling tale.

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Sid & Nancy

Alex Cox
1986 • 111 minutes • 1.75:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #20 Edition: DVD

Director Alex Cox balances a bleak evocation of star-crossed love with surreal humor and genuine tenderness in this portrait of the brief, intense attachment of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.

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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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The Long Good Friday

John Mackenzie
1979 • 114 minutes • 1.77:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #26 Edition: DVD

Bob Hoskins, in his breakthrough film role, stars as a London racketeer fast losing control of his gangland empire; Helen Mirren shines as his classy moll.

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Flesh for Frankenstein

Paul Morrissey
1973 • 95 minutes • 2.35:1 • United States
Spine: #27 Edition: DVD

Maverick filmmaker Paul Morrissey’s Flesh for Frankenstein reevaluates the horror film, infusing it with satiric wit and sexuality. Morrissey’s tale of the mad Baron Frankenstein and his perverse creative urges was heavily edited upon initial release; this is the restored director’s cut.

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Blood for Dracula

Paul Morrissey
1974 • 103 minutes • 1.85:1 • United States
Spine: #28 Edition: DVD

In Paul Morrissey’s brash mixture of humor, horror, and sex, Blood for Dracula, the infamous count searches Italy for virgin blood.

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Great Expectations

David Lean
1946 • 118 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #31 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets

One of the great translations of literature into film, David Lean’s Great Expectations brings Charles Dickens’s masterpiece to robust on-screen life.

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Oliver Twist

David Lean
1948 • 116 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #32 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, iTunes

An orphan wends his way from cruel apprenticeship to den of thieves in search of a true home in David Lean’s rendition of Dickens’s classic tale.

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Nanook of the North

Robert Flaherty
1922 • 79 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #33 Edition: DVD

Robert Flaherty’s classic film tells the story of Inuit hunter Nanook and his family as they struggle to survive in the harsh conditions of Canada’s Hudson Bay region.

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Time Bandits

Terry Gilliam
1981 • 116 minutes • 1.85:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #37 Edition: DVD

In Terry Gilliam’s fantastic voyage through time and space, a young boy escapes his gadget-obsessed parents to join a band of time-traveling dwarves.

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