Movies: Claudette Colbert

A film scrapbook, images, phrases from our past, hiding their meanings behind veils. Let's lift those veils, one by one, to find how images, at one time seeming innocent, have revealed, after decades, to have homosexual overtones....

Mrs. Ramsey sent Jean Oliver to prison on a false charge. To get even, Jean (disguised as Madame Mystera) plans to kidnap her daughter and turn her into a thief. Love entanglements with a gangster known as "The Fox" and newspaperman Grant complicate ...

Nora Shelley is a tax expert for the accounting company which is led by Paul Martin. She thinks she can find a suitable husband by inspecting their clients' tax documents. Martin finds out and tries to dissuade her from this approach, later enlisting...

A woman whose husband never came home from World War I finds herself in love with her doctor. She travels with him to Switzerland, and as they check into the hotel there, she is astounded to see her supposedly dead husband....

Elderly schoolteacher Nora Trinell, waiting to meet presidential nominee Dewey Roberts, recalls him as her student back in 1916 and his relation to Dan Hopkins, the man she married and lost....

This short promotes the premise that movies often create a demand for the fashions seen in them. It starts with a vignette in rural America. A mother and daughter go to town to buy a new dress. In the dress shop window is a designer dress worn by Joa...

Too bad for presidential hopes of banker T.K. Blair; his party feels he has too little flair for savoir faire. But at a medicine show, the party bosses find Blair's double: huckster Doc Varney. Of course, they scheme to make Varney T.K.'s public spok...

The House That Shadows Built (1931) is a short feature, roughly 48 minutes long, from Paramount Pictures made to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the studio's founding in 1912. It was a promotional film for exhibitors and never had a regular theatri...

The wife of a rubber plantation owner must put her marriage problems on hold when her family is forced to defend themselves during a native uprising....

Three stories, very different in space and time. Lysistrata, a dancer from ancient times, Jeanne d'Arc, medieval warrior and Elisabeth, American war widow who comes on pilgrimage in Italy....

Jerry Stafford falls for his secretary, Julia Traynor, but instead she marries a shady character who causes trouble for both of them....

Tough Caribbean freighter Captain Sam Whelan engages Sally Clark, a tramp masquerading as a missionary's daughter, to care for an abandoned baby on board his ship. En route to New York, ships mate Gatson sexually attacks her. The Captain knocks Gatso...

Three men join forces to raise an adopted son....

Claudette Colbert plays Prudence Webb, who arrives in the wide-open town of Fort Ralston, Texas, to assume control of her late father's newspaper. Her first major print crusade is aimed at gambler Chris Mooney (Barry Sullivan), whom Prudence holds r...

Two flappers try to get their newspaper reporter boyfriends to pay attention to them....

Flubs and bloopers that occurred on the set of some of the major Warner Bros. pictures of 1938....

This short shows how Hollywood gets ready for the world premiere of an "important" movie. The film celebrated here is Marie Antoinette (1938), which had its premiere at the Carthay Circle Theatre. We see the street leading to the theatre transformed ...

A singing Frenchman meets an American heiress and gets a job at her father's chewing-gum factory....

When upper-class Parisian Charles Dupont and his family hire Tina and Michel as their servants, they have no idea that the domestics are in fact Tatiana, the Grand Duchess Petrovna, and her husband, Mikail, Prince Ouratieff. Recent exiles from the Ru...

Elizabeth Rimplegar inhabits a household populated by virtual lunatics. Her mother, Nellie, mishandled the family fortune, and, alas, the stock market crash has depleted their worth. Elizabeth's goofy brothers cannot easily adjust to the life of the ...