They called him Papillon, meaning butterfly. If only he had wings to go with the name. Unable to fly, Henri Charriere virtually willed himself free. He persisted until he did the impossible: escape Devil's Island. Based on Charriere's bestseller and shot in Spain and Jamaica, Franklin J. Schaffner's film of Papillon united two stars at key career junctures. After a decade of fine work in The Great Escape, The Sand Pebbles and Bullitt, Steve McQueen found in Charriere another ideal tough-guy...

When Nicolas Ray (Johnny Guitar, Rebel Without a Cause) turns his talents to a gangster movie, a familiar genre becomes startling and new. Set in 1930s Chicago, Party Girl follows a bum-legged mouthpiece for the mob (Robert Taylor) and a gorgeous, wised-up vamp (Cyd Charisse) who fall in love, try to go straight and head straight for trouble. Ray deepens the drama and heightens the violence with filmmaking artistry that has given Party Girl cult status: a screen painted in sinister ebony and...

Humphrey Bogart reunites with director Michael Curtiz and other key Casablanca personnel (including costars Claude Rains, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet) for a tension-swept Passage to Marseille. Bogart plays Jean Matrac, a World War II French patriot who escapes Devil's Island, survives a dangerous freighter voyage and becomes a gunner in the Free French Air Corps. Passage sailed into theaters on stormy seas. Controversy surrounded the scene in which Matrac machine-guns the helpless...

The sun will sneak by a rooster before sports promoter Mike Conovan (Spencer Tracy) lets opportunity pass him by. So the first time he sees genteel Pat Pemberton (Katharine Hepburn) swing a five-iron, he decides to ink her to a pro contract. "Not much meat on her ," Mike later says, "but what's there is cherce." For this chercest of romantic comedies, George Cukor directs, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin provide the Oscar -nominated screenplay, and a deft cast plays various Damon Runyonesque...

Can armed robbery save a marriage? This comedy starring Natalie Wood, Peter Falk, Dick Shawn and Jonathan Winters debates this and other questions about modern relationships. Penelope (Wood) marries James Elcott (Ian Bannen) after a very brief courtship, and as his star rises in the banking business, he spends less and less time with her. Penelope devises what she thinks is a good plan to get James' attention -- disguising herself as an old lady and robbing his bank. Unfortunately, the robbery...

In the 1920s, a small band playing the speakeasies has trouble when a racketeer decides he's going into the agency business and wants a cut from the band. Jack Webb ("Dragnet") directs and stars in this fascinating tale of jazz and gangsters in prohibition-era Kansas City. Featuring an all-star cast including Janet Leigh ("Psycho"), Lee Marvin ("The Dirty Dozen"), 50s pin-up star Jayne Mansfield, and legendary singers Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee ("The Jazz Singer"), who was nominated for an...

Newly remastered from the original Technicolor negatives! A treasure trove of fun awaits when a Caribbean beauty (Judy Garland) with a mad crush on a legendary pirate meets a vagabond actor (Gene Kelly) who poses as the scoundrel. Vincente Minnelli directs, bringing his uncanny skill with color and design to this joyous romp set to Cole Porter tunes. Mixing tremulous girlishness with hellcat hilarity, Garland was never better as a comedienne. Parodying the rakish style of Fairbanks and...

Lost at sea for decades -- this set collects the first two Technicolor seasons of Popeye's animated theatrical shorts (1943-44 and 1944-45), making them available for the first time ever on home video: complete, intact and outrageously funny. What else would you expect from a two-fisted, spinach-munching sailor man? The 1940s brought new sights and sounds to America's favorite cartoon star. Regulars Olive Oyl and Bluto return, while Popeye resumes his riotous relationship with his shipmate...

Here come 15 previously unreleased adventures featuring our favorite two-fisted fighter that are literally out of this world! The secret to the seaman's success is "location, location, location," and with this new collection, you'll travel with Popeye and crew into outer space, all around the globe and under the sea! Continuing the chronological theatrical releases, this set covers the years 1946 and 1947. Popeye not only rockets to Mars, he explores the ocean deep, becomes a cowboy out West,...

Prepare for 17 newly adventures featuring our favorite spinach-eating sailor man and his lovely leading lady, Olive Oyl. This set finishes out Popeye's second decade of screen stardom with cartoons originally released to movie theaters in 1948 and 1949. Providing more globe-trotting and time-traveling adventures, the cartoons have been restored to look their lavish best utilizing the techniques of three classic color systems. The Polacolor process was a short-lived 3-strip technique designed...

Academy Award winner Joan Crawford earned another Best Actress nomination for her tour-de-force performance in Possessed (1947) which opens with Crawford portraying a woman found wandering the streets of Los Angeles. Taken to a mental hospital, she weaves a harrowing tale of insanity, murder and the passion by which provides the basis for the film's apt title. Louise Howell's (Crawford) psychiatrist learns that she is a nurse hired to care for a dying woman and that she rekindled a former...

Like the arrows she launches at an archery target during an elegant lawn party, Elizabeth Bennet's wit is pointed and unerring. "If you want to be really refined, you have to be dead," she says, skewering the imperious airs of her hosts. Jane Austen's timeless 1813 novel of unlikely romance is richly adapted in this lavish Academy Award winner.* Greer Garson portrays spirited Elizabeth, one of five Bennet sisters hoping for matrimony. Laurence Olivier plays Darcy, whose arrival at a nearby...

"The first thing a cop learns is that he can't trust nobody but his partners," Detective Danny Ciello tells an assistant D.A. "I sleep with my wife, but I live with my partners. I will never give them up." From Robert Daley's riveting book about New York City police-corruption investigations, director/cowriter Sidney Lumet's film portrays a squad that pays a terrible price when one in its ranks does just that. Treat Willams (as Ciello, inspired by real-life undercover narcotic cop Robery...

Bette Davis and Errol Flynn made The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex fascinatingly public, striking sparks in this lavish Technicolor tale of the ill-fated love between the aging Elizabeth I and the dashing Earl of Essex. Thoroughly unglamorous here -- eyes and hairline shaved, face painted chalky white -- double Academy Award winner* Davis exudes such intelligence, energy and ardor that her romance with the decades-younger Essex (Flynn at the peak of his remarkable good looks and...

By day, Mark Hunter (Christian Slater) is a painfully shy new kid in a small Arizona town. But by night, he's Hard Harry, the cynical, uncensored DJ of a pirate radio station. Idolized by his high school classmates (who are unaware of his real identity), Harry becomes a hero with his fiercely funny monologues on sex, love, and rock and roll. But when he exposes the corrupt school principal, she calls in the FCC to shut Harry down. An outrageous rebel with a cause, Slater gives a brilliant...

Greta Garbo stars in one of her greatest roles, as the 17th century Swedish queen fiercely devoted to her country who fights at the head of her army like a man but who loves like a woman--Queen Christina. Crowned queen when she was five years old, the beautiful Christina (Garbo) leads a sexually ambiguous life as she fights to defend her Protestant country against the Counterreformation, dressing as a man and vowing to live as a bachelor. Christina has built her country into a formidable...

Breaking news from space! The bad: An intrepid captain and his men have landed on a planet where males are outlawed. The good: Some women there are eager to break the law! Queen of Outer Space is a milestone of movie camp. Eric Fleming plays the granite-jawed leader who shares with his crew the crime of maleness. That's just the start of their troubles. The man-hating Venusian Queen (Laurie Mitchell) aims to destroy Earth once a Beta Disintegrator is operational. But a gossamer-gowned...

The star of Caddyshack, Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day headlines and codirects this uproarious Big Apple heist-and-pursuit caper. Bill Murray plays Grimm, a frazzled urbanite who disguises himself as a clown -- and sets out to rob a bank. Geena Davis and Randy Quaid play accomplices in Grimm's daring scheme and Jason Robards is the blustery cop caught up in Grimm's "Clown Day Afternoon." Swiping a million bucks is a snap compared to getting out of town. Grimm and cohorts commandeer a car, a...

William Holden, Loretta Young and Robert Mitchum are the powerhouse performers in this great Western classic that The New York Times hailed as "excellent moviemaking." Splendidly depicting the untamed frontier of the 1820s, the film tells the impassioned story of Big Davey Harvey (Holden), a stoic backwoodsman who "buys" and marries a bondswoman, Rachel (Young), to care for and educate his motherless son. Neither the father nor son find much to appreciate in Rachel until Jim Fairways...

Golden Globe-winner Joanne Woodward portrays of a frustrated schoolteacher in this beautifully sensitive, mature film about a lonely woman who tries to come out of her shell.

In his third and final Western, Fritz Lang unsaddles the genre to create a tempestuous cult favorite. Critics have likened the film and its theme of a man twisted by vengeance to a Lang film of a wholly different genre: film noir's The Big Heat.

Jason Scott Lee (Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story) and Esai Morales (La Bamba) play boyhood friends turned fierce rivals in this tumultuous tale of love and war. Each loves the same woman (Sandrine Holt of Black Robe) -- and each intends to win her in marriage by competing for the island leadership in a genuine tribal contest. But the bitterness of the competition spills over into a savage civil war . and the isolated island's destiny that hangs in the balance.

The flow of time is in disarray now that Chrovos has been freed from their old prison, and the Reds and Blues are unwittingly trapped, reliving their past memories. Fortunately, there's still one person in the universe who can do something about it: Donut. Thanks to his quick thinking, Donut manages to trap Chrovos in a temporary cell, but it won't hold for long. Chrovos' lackey, Genkins, travels through time with the Reds and Blues and changes the events of their history, creating cracks in...

It's social season in London, and amid the swirl of coming-out balls, the aristocratic Broadbents (real-life marrieds Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall) are intent on giving their American-educated 17-year-old daughter, Jane (Sandra Dee), the right entry into society and a proper upper-class beau. One complication: Flighty Mabel Claremont (Angela Lansbury) is eager to match that same beau with her daughter. And another: Jane, of course, has her own ideas about these matters -- and an eye for a guy...