The Professor

The Anton Chekhov Collection from BBC Video is a six disc set that mines their extensive archives of works created by British master thespians performing the greatest works of the Russian playwright's career. From 1959 to 1991, these plays are presented with excellent production values and sure-handed direction. The transfers are full screen and sometimes spotty in quality, but it is amazing to see these legendary pieces performed by the likes of Anthony Hopkins and Judi Dench. The result is over eighteen hours of sublime theatre loaded down with significant extras and supplemental material.

In the early nineties, theater director André Gregory mounted a series of spare, private performances of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in a crumbling Manhattan playhouse. This experiment in pure theater—featuring a remarkable cast of actors, including Wallace Shawn, Julianne Moore, Brooke Smith, and George Gaynes—would have been lost to time had it not been captured on film, with subtle cinematic brilliance, by Louis Malle. Vanya on 42nd Street is as memorable and emotional a screen version of Chekhov’s masterpiece as one could ever hope to see. This film, which turned out to be Malle’s last, is a tribute to the playwright’s devastating work as well as to the creative process itself.

Young workers are dying because of a mysterious epidemic in a little village in Cornwall. Doctor Thompson is helpless and asks professor James Forbes for help. The professor and his daughter Sylvia travel to Thomson. Terrible things happen soon, beyond imagination or reality. Dead people are seen near an old, unused mine. Late people seem to live suddenly. Professor Forbes presumes that black magic is involved and someone has extraordinary power. He doesn't know how close he is: the dead become alive because of a magic voodoo-ritual, and so they must serve their master as mindless zombies…

An affluent medical professor, Komiya, and his bossy wife, Tokio, are to look after Setsuko, their high-spirited niece from Osaka. Setsuko is a liberated woman who does what she wants, including smoking, even though she is a minor. On Saturday, the professor does not feel like going to his weekend golf game, but his wife packs him off anyway.

The Mongolian Border, 1979: Massive fossils of unknown creatures are discovered in the mountains, and the research team assigned to excavate the remains includes acclaimed Professor Yang (Wang Qingxiang), Hu Bayi (Mark Chao), and Ping (Yao Chen), the professor's beautiful daughter. When a freak explosion, lethal bat attack, and fall to the mountain's floor leaves only a handful of survivors, the small remaining band uncovers a mythic Cyclopean Temple - and an Interdimensional Portal that looses a pack of ravenous Hell-Beasts, leaving only Hu alive. New York City, Present Day: Now living a quiet but tormented life as a librarian, Hu studies demonology manuscripts to find answers for that fateful day. Little does he know that Professor Yang has just been found wandering the mountains thousands of miles from where he supposedly died; a young woman with amnesia was just discovered in a recently-uncovered tomb; and a Northern Chinese mining town has just been ravaged by giant, unknown …

George Stevens' Talk of the Town is a quick-witted comedy driven by wonderful performances by Cary Grant, Ronald Colman and Jean Arthur. Michael Lightcap (Colman) is a stuffy law professor in line to a Supreme Court appointment, who is spending the summer at the house of schoolteacher Nora Shelley (Arthur). But Lightcap is not the only guest at the house. Shelley has also let Leopold Dilg (Grant)–a man who had recently escaped from prison, where he was serving a sentence for false accusations of immolating a local factory–stay at the house, telling Lightcap that he is a gardener..

Fourteen people of different ages - seven men and seven women - gather in a comfortable hotel by the sea to carry out an experiment inspired by the theories of an Austrian psychoanalyst. The creator - Professor Emilio Missiroli - wants to show that only a thousand breaking taboos' that stifle the sexual life can liberate man from his existential malaise. Every night, so, for a whole week, men and women of the group will couple through a draw, without giving any importance to their feelings, thus demonstrating that these can and should do without. The young son of the professor, however, reluctantly participates in the experiment, grieved to see Stella, the girl he is in love, go with indifference from one bed to another. Other complications arise from the presence in the group of husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister, and finally no one, even before the trial has ended, seems to have benefited. Some younger people, and flee with them, even Rita, the young of which the elderly Segre remained hopelessly fascinated. When man, in despair, hangs himself, the left vent their resentment against the professor called the police and the whole thing ends up in court.