The Film in the Film

This 1940 presentation features highlights of earlier (1928 onward) Oscar ceremonies including Shirley Temple and Walt Disney, plus acceptance speeches for films released in 1939 with recipients and presenters including Vivien Leigh, Judy Garland, Hattie McDaniel and more, with host Bob Hope.

Among the pieces featured in Fragments are the final reel of John Ford's The Village Blacksmith (1922) and a glimpse at Emil Jannings in The Way of All Flesh (1927), the only Oscar®-winning performance in a lost film. Fragments also features clips from such lost films as Cleopatra (1917), starring Theda Bara; The Miracle Man (1919), with Lon Chaney; He Comes Up Smiling (1918), starring Douglas Fairbanks; an early lost sound film, Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), filmed in early Technicolor, and the only color footage of silent star Clara Bow, Red Hair (1928). The program is rounded out with interviews of film preservationists involved in identifying and restoring these films. Also featured is a new interview with Diana Serra Cary, best known as "Baby Peggy", one of the major American child stars of the silent era, who discusses one of the featured fragments, Darling of New York (1923).

Director David de Jongh represents the life Otto Frank in his documentary Otto Frank, the father of Anne. The film deals with various facets of Otto Frank’s life: his youth in Germany, including his military service during the First World War, his marriage to Edith Holländer and the birth of their daughters Margot and Anne, their flight to the Netherlands, the time in hiding and the deportation to Auschwitz, his life after the Second World War and his dedication to the diary and the ideals of his daughter Anne, and his second marriage to Fritzi Geiringer. The documentary features many photos and film images, as well as interviews, including new ones, with people who knew Otto Frank. His stepdaughter Eva Schloss is one of the interviewees. The film is produced by Pieter van Huystee Film.

In postwar Vienna, Austria, Holly Martins, a writer of pulp Westerns, arrives penniless as a guest of his childhood chum Harry Lime, only to learn he has died. Martins develops a conspiracy theory after learning of a "third man" present at the time of Harry's death, running into interference from British officer Major Calloway, and falling head-over-heels for Harry's grief-stricken lover, Anna.

An aging doorman, after being fired from his prestigious job at a luxurious hotel, is forced to face the scorn of his friends, neighbours and society.

Murnau’s epic adaptation of Goethe’s tragedy stands with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis among the supreme achievements of German silent cinema. Gösta Ekman plays the alchemist who, his faith shaken in a time of plague, is offered the gift of healing and eternal youth… in exchange for his soul.

Prim professor Immanuel Rath finds some of his students ogling racy photos of cabaret performer Lola Lola and visits a local club, The Blue Angel, in an attempt to catch them there. Seeing Lola perform, the teacher is filled with lust, eventually resigning his position at the school to marry the young woman. However, his marriage to a coquette -- whose job is to entice men -- proves to be more difficult than Rath imagined.

In 16th-century Prague, a rabbi creates the Golem - a giant creature made of clay. Using sorcery, he brings the creature to life in order to protect the Jews of Prague from persecution.

A lawyer tries to exact justice on a woman he defended in court -- a woman whom he found out was guilty after getting her off.

On a Greek island during the 1912 war, several people are trapped by quarantine for the plague. If that isn't enough worry, one of the people—a superstitious old peasant—suspects a young woman of being a vampiric demon.

French language version. A Chinese cabaret singer will do whatever it takes to save her brother when he is sentenced to death for trying to save her from a lecherous Duke.

A former Imperial Russian general and cousin of the Czar ends up in Hollywood as an extra in a movie directed by a former revolutionary.

Frenchwoman Michele de la Becque, an opponent of the Nazis in German-occupied Paris, hides a downed American flyer, Pat Talbot, and attempts to get him safely out of the country.

A neglected Baroness falls in love with her oldest son's military officer friend, their adulterous romance leading the two to flee to Algeria.

German-language version. "Atlantic" is a drama film based on the sinking of the RMS "Titanic" and set aboard a fictional ship, called the "Atlantic". The main plotline revolves around a man who has a shipboard affair with a fellow passenger, which is eventually discovered by his wife. The ship also has aboard an elderly couple, Heinrich and Anna Thomas, who are on their anniversary cruise. Midway across the Atlantic Ocean, the "Atlantic" strikes an iceberg and is damaged to the point where it is sinking into the Atlantic. The German version was filmed at the same time as the British version, with each scene first being filmed in English for the British version, then the same scene being filmed in German by a German cast, using the same sets.

In the middle of the 19th-century, when the social structure of Europe is about to be reshaped, the world of music is shaken by one man: Richard Wagner.

In Eschnapur, a German architect saves the life of the Maharajah's favorite temple dancer and becomes Maharajah's friend but their friendship is tested when the architect and the dancer fall in-love, triggering the Maharajah's vengeful ire.

An American goes to pre-war Germany to find his mother and discovers her in a concentration camp. With the help of an American-born widowed countess he seeks to engineer her escape.

A poet is hired by the owner of a wax museum in a circus to write tales about Harun al Raschid, Ivan the Terrible and Jack the Ripper. While writing, the poet and the daughter of the owner, Eva, fantasize the fantastic stories and fall in love for each other.

A young Chinese woman, working in the kitchen at a London dance club, is given the chance to become the club's main act.

Egyptians Radu and Ma milk British tourists out of their money by offering phony tours of a mummy's tomb-- Radu has the girl lend her eyes to the "mummy" from inside an empty sarcophagus. When adventurer Wendland comes to visit the tomb, Ma is rescued and falls in love with him, leaving Radu in the dust. Needless to say, her former employer / captor follows them abroad in order to exact his revenge.

An anti-Nazi refugee on the run and a young Jewish couple race across Europe trying to escape Hitler's ever powerful influence.

Surviving a plane crash in the Sahara, four oilmen find and manage to repair a German Afrika Corps tank which had been buried in the sand since WWII.

"Raffke" was a war profiteer, shifter, the white-collar criminal, who came to wealth with not very clean methods in a short time and also likes to show it. And this film tells the story of Raffke's daughter Lilli, who, instead of marrying the Baron chosen by the father of vanity, marries a simple employee who is about to perish.

Cainá is a young peasant who lives in a small village in Sardinia together with her goats and parents. She is a wild and free spirit and unconventional for any small and closed communities dominated by old rules. Cainà yearns to escape from such a closed atmosphere and the isolated island, so, as an old tune says: "Somewhere beyond the sea, somewhere, waiting for me…"; When a boat arrives to the island, she will do her best to flee away from her little oppressing village and experience new adventures in the continent with the help of the boat captain.

The story of the ill-fated second wife of the English king Henry VIII, whose marriage to the Henry led to momentous political and religious turmoil in England.

The story of the stormy relationship between King Friedrich Wilhelm and his son, who later became known as King Frederick the Great of Prussia.

A cashier in a bank in a small German town is alerted to the power of money by the visit of a rich Italian lady. He embezzles 60,000 Marks and leaves for the capital city, where he attempts to find satisfaction in politics, sport, love and religion.

A heavily fictionalized version of the RMS Titanic story.

A man who is believed to have murdered a woman, escapes from the insane asylum to find if he was the one to actually kill her using the scarf she was wearing.

After committing a murder for his lover, Gloria, the famous painter Jack is forced to go underground. In the harbor district, he saves the poor Malaysian girl Song in front of two intrusive sailors. She loves him for it, and together Song and Jack appear in the tingle dungeon of the port, he as a knife artist, she as a dancer.

On her way to work at a department store, the pretty cashier Grete encounters a man in a car who offers her a ride. Grete has no idea that he is not a chauffeur, as she initially believes, but Dr. Fred Werder, the co-owner of *Zeitspiegel*. The two meet again by chance when Grete enters a contest in the "Zeitspiegel."