The Good Marriage

Film told in flashbacks of an older man's obsession for a woman who can belong to no-one but can frustrate everyone. The backdrop is SternbergÍs surreal and fantastic Carnaval in Spain. In a café the older man details his encounters with the heart breaker that his younger friend has only just met at the parade. Forewarned, the young man swears he will avoid the fate of his friend, but rushes all the same to his evening rendezvous. A dreamlike story of frustrated, lost romance, spoken in the past tense, never really resolved.

Mikio Naruse was a contemporary of the great post-war Japanese masters Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi and indeed his works lie somewhere in between Ozu’s natural rhythms of everyday family life and Mizoguchi’s outlook on female issues and social injustices. In some respects Naruse even surpasses these two great directors in their own areas, his films being more naturalistic and not as formally rigid as Ozu, tackling a wider range of subjects and issues, those concerns often being adapted from the works of female authors, giving them a truer perspective on female issues than Mizoguchi, whose films can often seem like a man’s guilt-ridden perspective on the treatment of women in society.

Marfa (Lillian Gish), a Russian peasant girl, is in love with Jan (Frank Bennett). However, her uncle and aunt (A.D. Sears and Pearl Elmore) want her to marry an older, wealthy man. Colonel Griegoff (Walter Long) wants her, but Marfa will have nothing to do with him. When he tries to have his way with her, she knocks him out with a club and runs off. Along with her uncle and aunt, she emigrates to America. Jan, who wants to make his fortune, is on the same ship. They all settle in the Russian district of Los Angeles. Once again, Marfa's pushy relatives try to force her into an arranged marriage, but they are foiled by Jan and the police. A quick glance at this plot shows why Lillian Gish preferred to downplay many of the films she made with directors other than D.W. Griffith.

Elmer is a dry cleaner. He is madly in love with stage star Trilby Drew; for each of her 35 performances, he dons someone else's tuxedo and races to the theatre. When Trilby's co-star boyfriend gets engaged to a socialite, she marries Elmer to get even, assuming Elmer is a millionaire (since his clothes are so snazzy.) But she's clearly still in love with her scoundrelous co-star, and her manager makes her leave Elmer, trying to pay him off so the papers don't hear about her marriage to a "cheap pants presser." Can Elmer win her love? Maybe a sea voyage will help.

Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer includes eleven of the joyful modern-dress comedies, westerns, satires, dream-fantasies and romances which, though mostly seldom-seen, made Fairbanks a tremendously popular hero. In addition to Fairbanks' unique talent, these ebullient films showcase his gifted collaborators including writer Anita Loos and directors Allan Dwan, Victor Fleming, and John Emerson.

Through dramatic reconstructions and his own passionate narration, Dr. David Starkey, the controversial Tudor historian, profiles the six women who married Henry Vlll.

For two decades Doc and Lola Delaney avoided coming to terms with what Doc considered a "shot gun" marriage. Lola lost the baby and gives a lot of her affection to Sheba, a dog that disappeared a few months before the film opens. Doc blames Lola for having to drop out of medical school and not becoming a "real" doctor. Until joining AA a year ago, his escape was alcohol. Then college student Marie rents a room in their home. Doc feels passion for the first time in 20 years. But Marie has two suitors her age. Lola – unaware of Doc's emotions – becomes as interested in Marie's future as if Marie were her daughter.

A family one day discovers that they’ve fallen into a web of indiscretion. A sixty-year-old grandmother finally discovers meaning in her life through an affair with her elementary school sweetheart. But instead of condemnation, the daughter-in-law silently applauds her mother-in-law’s confessions of “folly.” The husband presents himself as a model citizen-attorney, but in fact he’s a born playboy who untiringly focuses his energy on wooing women despite his love and devotion to his family. The wife meanwhile observes her spouse’s hypocrisy with disdain rather than anguish….