
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
6.1A 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.
6.7A 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.
6.2Frustrated 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.
7.5Struggling 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.
6.8An ambitious coffee salesman has a series of improbable and ironic adventures seemingly designed to challenge his naive idealism.
5.9After 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.
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.
Bradshaw, an Englishman, is arrested for the New York killing of booze racketeer Buck Cooly. Interrogated by police chief Galvin, Bradshaw claims self-defence, but refuses to name the woman he was with at the speakeasy where Cooly was shot, and who could provide the alibi that would exonerate him from a murder charge. Galvin's continued pursuit of the woman's identity eventually leads to an unwelcome surprise.
7.1Lovely 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.
5.3A colonial scene in the U.S. An old lady sits astride a bell while a man in blackface, wig, and livery pulls the bell rope. From an upper door emerges an old man, dressed as a dandy, who tips his hat to the woman as he walks down stairs grinning. Others leave the same door and walk down the same stairs: a shabby man, a cop, and, several times, the same dandy. The man in blackface hangs himself; the dandy continues to smile. A bell tolls, a grave beckons. In the dark, the dandy plays the piano. Is he Death? The Hearts of Age is the first film made by Orson Welles. The film is an eight-minute short, which he co-directed with William Vance in 1934. The film stars Welles' first wife, Virginia Nicholson, as well as Welles himself. He made the film while attending the Todd School for Boys, in Woodstock, Illinois, at the age of 19.
5.5Our Colonial Hangover analyzes the debate surrounding the racist component of the Dutch Black Pete character. Although the debate always heats up around the time of the Saint Nicholas celebrations every December, it reached an unprecedented level of ferocity in 2013.
4.7Boisterous 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.
5.0Show 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.
6.2General Othello's marriage is destroyed when vengeful Ensign Iago convinces him that his new wife has been unfaithful.
0.0This documentary presents clips from black films from 1929 through 1957.
6.2A 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.
4.3Returning 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.
6.1A campus culture war between Blacks and whites at a predominantly white Ivy League college comes to a head when the staff of a satirical magazine stages an offensive Halloween party.
5.2The story of the defense of the mission-turned-fortress by 185 Texans against an overwhelming Mexican army in 1836.