
This omnibus release consists of three playlets filmed and aired during television's Golden Age, and starring some of the legends of film and television. The collection originally ran as a two-hour segment on December 14, 1959, on the anthology series The Play of the Week, broadcast locally in New York City via the independent radio station WNTA. Each "tale" in the anthology was adapted from a single tale by the inimitable Sholom Aleichem, regarded by many as the "Yiddish Mark Twain". Included are: "A Tale of Chelm" starring Zero Mostel and Nancy Walker in the story of a bookseller attempting to buy a goat; "Bontche Schweig" about a poor man (Jack Gilford) whose recent arrival in Heaven makes the angels cry; and "The High School" about a Jewish merchant (Morris Carnovsky) persuaded by his wife (Gertrude Berg) to let their son attend a particular high school despite the enforcement of quotas for Jewish students.

This omnibus release consists of three playlets filmed and aired during television's Golden Age, and starring some of the legends of film and television. The collection originally ran as a two-hour segment on December 14, 1959, on the anthology series The Play of the Week, broadcast locally in New York City via the independent radio station WNTA. Each "tale" in the anthology was adapted from a single tale by the inimitable Sholom Aleichem, regarded by many as the "Yiddish Mark Twain". Included are: "A Tale of Chelm" starring Zero Mostel and Nancy Walker in the story of a bookseller attempting to buy a goat; "Bontche Schweig" about a poor man (Jack Gilford) whose recent arrival in Heaven makes the angels cry; and "The High School" about a Jewish merchant (Morris Carnovsky) persuaded by his wife (Gertrude Berg) to let their son attend a particular high school despite the enforcement of quotas for Jewish students.
1959-12-14
9
Based on the Writer Whose Stories Inspired The Fiddler on the Roof
6.1Time passes and tension mounts in a Florida police station as an estranged interracial couple awaits news of their missing teenage son.
6.7The true story of 20-year-old Colleen Stan, a hitchhiking woman abducted by a young couple and held captive for seven years, during which time she's tortured and forced to live as a slave to her captors.
6.1Fanny Price is sent to live with her wealthy relatives, the Bertrams, where she is treated poorly by most except her cousin Edmund. Her life is complicated by the arrival of the worldly Mary and Henry Crawford
6.6Based on the true story of a successful couple, Maggie and Aaron who are preparing for the arrival of their first child.
6.2Legendary acting duo and married couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor prepare for a 1983 theatrical production of the play "Private Lives."
6.3Thomas Montgomery, a married father of two young daughters, gets seduced by the world of online gambling and chat rooms where a virtual romance and sexual obsession ultimately leads to the murder of an innocent man.
8.0Twelve Angry Men is a 1954 teleplay by Reginald Rose for the Studio One anthology television series. Initially staged as a CBS live production on 20 September 1954, the drama was later rewritten for the stage in 1955 under the same title and again for a feature film, 12 Angry Men (1957). The episode garnered three Emmy Awards for writer Rose, director Franklin Schaffner and Robert Cummings as Best Actor.
7.2A dramatization of the life of Earl 'The Goat' Manigault (Don Cheadle), with a lot of factual based occurrences. A reformed junkie returns from prison to clean up his act and devote the rest of his life to the young kids of Harlem. 1996 was the 25th anniversary of the first tournament named after him.
7.4A journalist finds himself questioning his own life when his best friend, a dying man, offers him some very powerful wisdom and advice for coping in relationships, careers and society.
7.1Dramatisation of the true story of the life of Neil "Nello" Baldwin. Born with a mild learning disability but without the burden of social embarrassment & how his inexhaustible ability to see the good in any situation overcame any stigma society tried to label him with.
6.7A Midwestern husband and father announces his plan to have a sex change operation.
6.5An acclaimed stage performer, Dorothy still struggled with the challenge of her color, in a time that wouldn't let some stars in by the front door. Yet against the odds she beat out many more famous rivals for the role of "Carmen Jones", becoming the first black woman ever nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award. Marriages and affairs would break her heart, but her heart was strong. Seductive and easily seduced, she was born to be a star - with all the glory and all the pain of being loved, abused, cheated, glorified, undermined and undefeated. Here was a woman who wouldn't wait in the wings. Halle Berry stars as Dorothy Dandrige.
6.3An unlikely friendship evolves over one wild night in LA between a struggling journalist and actor Hervé Villechaize, the world's most famous gun-toting dwarf, resulting in life-changing consequences for both.
6.2Heaven Leigh Casteel, gifted and intelligent, is the eldest of five dirt-poor children struggling to survive in a mountain shack. As she endures neglect and abuse, Heaven discovers a dark secret that changes everything she thought she knew about her family. Then tragedy tears her world apart and she must forge her own way in the cruel, unknown world.
6.3Two great lawyers argue the case for and against a science teacher accused of the crime of teaching evolution.
6.8Defiant young activists take the women's suffrage movement by storm, putting their lives at risk to help American women win the right to vote.
6.3In the fall of 1994, a teacher at Chicago's run-down Steinmetz High conspires with the school's academic decathlon team to cheat on an academic competition.
6.3The Sound of Music Live! is a television special that was originally broadcast by NBC on December 5, 2013. Produced by Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, the special was an adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway musical The Sound of Music, starring country singer Carrie Underwood as Maria von Trapp, performed and televised live from Grumman Studios in Bethpage, New York. Meron felt that if the telecast were successful, the concept could become "another kind of entertainment that can exist on TV." By her request, Underwood's casting as Maria was personally endorsed by Julie Andrews, who starred in the 1965 film.
6.9When a Jewish songstress is plucked from the stage and sent to Auschwitz, she and other musicians find themselves assigned to a terrible task—using their talents to soothe fellow prisoners who are sentenced to die in the gas chambers.
7.4A widower refuses to let his three daughters marry in order to avoid paying settlements, so they'll just have to outsmart him.
6.4The evil Iago pretends to be friend of Othello in order to manipulate him to serve his own end in the film version of this Shakespeare classic.
7.1Widowed Welsh mother Anna Leonowens becomes a governess and English tutor to the wives and many children of the stubborn King Mongkut of Siam. Anna and the King have a clash of personalities as she works to teach the royal family about the English language, customs and etiquette, and rushes to prepare a party for a group of European diplomats who must change their opinions about the King.
7.0Mame Dennis, a progressive and independent woman of the 1920s, is left to care for her nephew Patrick after his wealthy father dies. Conflict ensues when the executor of the father's estate objects to the aunt's lifestyle and tries to force her to send Patrick to prep school.
7.0The first feature film to represent the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective. Shot on location at Landsberg, the largest DP camp in U.S.-occupied Germany, and mixing neorealist and expressionist styles, the film follows a Polish Jew and his family from pre-war Warsaw through Auschwitz and the DP camps.
7.1The growing ambition of Julius Caesar is a source of major concern to his close friend Brutus. Cassius persuades him to participate in his plot to assassinate Caesar but both have sorely underestimated Mark Antony.
6.2A dashing Mississippi river gambler wins the affections of the daughter of the owner of the Show Boat.
The common denominator of the five stories, preceded by a brief prologue by Artem Benki, is the setting of a giant open-pit mine in the Podkrušnohoří region in northwestern Bohemia and its surroundings, including the dominant feature of the landscape, the ruined Jezeří Castle.
7.0Musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, a classic tale of an orphan who runs away from the workhouse and joins up with a group of boys headed by the Artful Dodger and trained to be pickpockets by master thief Fagin.
6.2A black champion boxer and his white female companion struggle to survive while the white boxing establishment looks for ways to knock him down.
7.2An upper-crust family dinner is interrupted by a police inspector who brings news that a girl known to everyone present has died in suspicious circumstances. It seems that any or all of them could have had a hand in her death. But who is the mysterious Inspector and what can he want of them?
The story of a Czech national revivalist, writer and author of a famous cookbook... The story takes us to Litomyšl in 1836. The local bourgeois society, which does not fail to interject a German word into their conversation as proof of good upbringing and better origin, slanders Mrs. Rettigová. "Rettička" not only fights for standard Czech, is a patriot, but also attracts young girls and students to her and lends them Czech books. She simply disrupts the good old order. Another sensation in the town is caused by the announcement of a planned wedding. Maiden Lenka will marry old doctor Plavec. When Mrs. Rettigová finds out about it, she invites both fiancés to her, each separately. The hunter Valenta, Lenka's former admirer, who had been abroad with his master for a long time, asked her to help him get Lenka back...
The conflict, in which a mature, thirty-year-old woman must choose between her energetic, down-to-earth, and selfish husband, a priest, and her eighteen-year-old admirer, centers on the question of what constitutes the strength and value of men and women.
6.5The two people in their late thirties, Constanze and Jens, have a very stressful daily life. Their situation intensifies when their ten-year-old son Luis begins having problems at school. The parents now find themselves in conflict between fulfilling societal conventions and trying to protect their son. The existing values of both are put to a severe test. They underestimate how much Luis is being bullied at school and that he urgently needs help.
5.9Two first-year students at Oxford University join a secret society and learn that their reputations can be made or destroyed over the course of one evening.
8.5Sexual passion breeds violence in the Thomas Middleton and William Rowley written tale of a beautiful woman who falls in love with a sea-captain. Filmed with lush production values and at a leisurely, very British pace, Helen Mirren is riveting as Beatrice-Joanna, a young lass already torn by love and commitment.Beatrice-Joanna (Helen Mirren) is betrothed to Lord Alonzo de Piraquo (Malcolm Reynolds) but is in love with Alsemero (Brian Cox). She hires her father's manservant, De Flores (Stanley Baker), to kill Alonzo but after he has done so, she realises De Flores wants her as a reward.The Changeling was an instalment of the BBC's Play of the Month series and is a production for television of a 1622 Jacobean tragedy of the same name, written by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley.
6.4Southern matriarch Madea has a lot on her plate. Her nieces, Vanessa and Lisa, have relationship troubles - Vanessa moves into Madea's house with her 2 young children and Lisa is engaged to a controlling man that her mother set her up with. In addition, Madea has just been court-ordered to become the guardian of Nikki, a rebellious runaway teenager. Madea must keep the peace and her family together while simultaneously planning her clan's reunion.
7.1A troubled and bullied high school student fights against judgement from his community after threatening to bomb the football team.
7.1Gabby, the waitress in an isolated Arizona diner, dreams of a bigger and better life. One day penniless intellectual Alan drifts into the joint and the two strike up a rapport. Soon enough, notorious killer Duke Mantee takes the diner's inhabitants hostage. Surrounded by miles of desert, the patrons and staff are forced to sit tight with Mantee and his gang overnight.