In this interview, filmed by the Criterion Collection in 2019, film scholar Mia Mask discusses blackface and the 'Bojangles of Harlem' number in George Stevens's 'Swing Time' (1936).
Self
An evocative and imaginative exploration of the racial tensions in Othello and how the themes in Shakespeare's play still resonate today.
A young Jewish man is torn between tradition and individuality when his old-fashioned family objects to his career as a jazz singer. This is the first full length feature film to use synchronized sound, and is the original film musical.
A successful songwriter, dazzled by high society, falls for a society girl who is just playing around.
A group of self-absorbed actors set out to make the most expensive war film ever. After ballooning costs force the studio to cancel the movie, the frustrated director refuses to stop shooting, leading his cast into the jungles of Southeast Asia, where they encounter real bad guys.
An ambitious coffee salesman has a series of improbable and ironic adventures seemingly designed to challenge his naive idealism.
Boisterous teen Judy Bellaire is expelled from her all-female boarding school for convincing her fellow school chorus members to sing a classical piece with a modern swing beat. She returns to her dysfunctional home, dejected, but, with the encouragement of her family's cook, Judy decides to follow her dream and audition for a Broadway musical.
General Othello's marriage is destroyed when vengeful Ensign Iago convinces him that his new wife has been unfaithful.
A mysterious door in the basement of the Hercules house leads to the Sixth Dimension by way of a gigantic set of intestine. When Frenchy slips through the door, King Fausto falls in love with her. The jealous Queen Doris takes Frenchy prisoner, and it is up to the Hercules family and friend Squeezit Henderson to rescue her.
A man leaves his quiet life in the country to become a comic entertainer in the Big City. His journey is a Surreal celebration of the descent into a Hell of narcissistic self-destruction. In a string of events ranging from antisocial transgression to racist provocation to fantastic flights of absurdity, our protagonist loses grasp of his humanity and bit by bit slips into complete animal degradation. A comedy.
Frustrated when network brass reject his sitcom idea, producer Pierre Delacroix pitches the worst idea he can think of in an attempt to get fired: a 21st century minstrel show. The network not only airs it, but it becomes a smash hit.
Lovely Linda Mason has crooner Jim Hardy head over heels, but suave stepper Ted Hanover wants her for his new dance partner after fickle Lila Dixon gives him the brush. Jim's supper club, Holiday Inn, is the setting for the chase by Hanover and his manager.
Show business twin sisters Rosemary and Susie, one serious and the other a scatterbrain, join the WAVES and both fall in love with crooner Johnny Cabot.
After marrying a dour and disinterested lord for status, a young woman falls in love with a stage actor while her best friend from boarding school enters an affair with her husband.
The Moorish general Othello is manipulated into thinking that his new wife Desdemona has been carrying on an affair with his lieutenant Michael Cassio when in reality it is all part of the scheme of a bitter ensign named Iago.
Struggling stockbroker Jimmie Shannon learns that, if he gets married by 7 p.m. on his 27th birthday -- which is today -- he'll inherit $7 million from an eccentric relative.
A spider attempts to lure a ladybug into his web. When she manages to escape and hide in a tulip, a storm comes that batters the spider, while the ladybug remains safe.
Blackie helps the police rescue hostage from an escaped maniac on a killing spree.
Blackie is implicated in a murder when he accidently sells a phony Charles Dickens first edition at an auction.
Returning to the same medical school where they were test subjects years before, two twisted serial killers use brutal sex acts to kill off a group of med students.