Wild River

A young bureaucrat for the Tennessee Valley Authority goes to rural Tennessee to oversee the building of a dam. He encounters opposition from the local people, in particular a farmer who objects to his employment (with pay) of local black laborers. Much of the plot revolves around the eviction of a stubborn octogenarian from her home on an island in the river, and the young man's love affair with that woman's widowed granddaughter. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation.

The Glass Menagerie

An adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play about a restless young warehouse worker and would-be poet, Tom Wingfield, his fragile, reclusive sister, Laura, and his colorful but overbearing mother, Amanda, all living together in a shabby apartment in St. Louis during the Depression and struggling to dilute the grim realities of daily living by way of memories, fantasies, and grandiose dreams about the future.

The Frontier Experience

The Westward movement — and a woman's perspective of that movement — emerges in the dramatic story of Delilah Fowler's first year on the Kansas frontier in 1869. Based on diaries of the period, the program reveals the cruel violence, and even crueler loneliness, which early settlers encountered — but above all, it shows the quiet courage of those who lived it.