Cinema's Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood

Eight hundred German filmmakers (cast and crew) fled the Nazis in the 1930s. The film uses voice-overs, archival footage, and film clips to examine Berlin's vital filmmaking in the 1920s; then it follows a producer, directors, composers, editors, writers, and actors to Hollywood: some succeeded and many found no work. Among those profiled are Erich Pommer, Joseph May, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Peter Lorre. Once in Hollywood, these exiles helped each other, housed new arrivals, and raised money so others could escape. Some...

I Was an Adventuress

Posing as the fabulously glamorous Countess Tanya Vronsky, a poor young ballet dancer and her two accomplices are really a team of skilled con artists! They mingle with Europe's high society, always looking for the next wealthy victim to fleece with their fake jewellery scam... Then Tanya meets the dashing young Paul Vernay. At first she wants to rob him. Then she decides she wants to marry him and to leave her criminal past behind her. Her accomplices agree but only if she'll join them in one last, big swindle...

Hell Ship Mutiny

A ship's captain in the South Seas battles a villainous pearl trader who uses island natives as slaves for his business.

Peter Lorre: The Master of Menace

Documentary overview of Peter Lorre's ascension to fame as a master purveyor of silky but disquieting peril.

Secret Agent

After three British agents are assigned to assassinate a mysterious German spy during World War I, two of them become ambivalent when their duty to the mission conflicts with their consciences.

F.P.1 Doesn't Answer

F.P.1 is a huge airplane landing dock in the Atlantic where pilots making the transatlantic flight can stop. Yet a saboteur tries to sink the technical wonder in this classic German science fiction film from 1932. The film was also created with English and French speaking actors at the same time.

What Women Dream

In this pre-WWII German mystery-comedy, a lovely kleptomaniac with a taste for fine jewelry is unable to resist temptation. Strangely, every time she steals something, a mysterious man pays for it. A clumsy detective begins investigating and finds a crucial clue: a strongly scented woman's glove. The perfume is an expensive scent and the detective's pal realizes that it belongs to a popular nightclub singer. The friend quickly becomes enamored of the girl, but then so does her mystery man, a notorious international criminal. Eventually he ge...

The White Demon

When Albers takes his drug-addicted opera star sister Gerda to a sanitarium, they both become targets of slimy dope peddler Peter Lorre, who fears that Gerda will blow the whistle on him. Lorre kidnaps the woman, leading Albers on a frantic chase.

Moto Is Missing

Featurette about the demise, during the early 1940s, of the once-popular Mr. Moto B-films series that starred Peter Lorre.

Casino Royale

American spy James Bond must outsmart card wiz and crime boss LeChiffre while monitoring his actions.

No. 5 Checked Out

A young deaf women confronts desperate crooks who are using one of her remote resort cabins for a hideout.

The Double Face of Peter Lorre

Peter Lorre achieved international fame for his performance in the myth-making role in M. This character has held a peculiar fascination for generations of cinephiles. However, at the time, whilst such success meant recognition, it also weighed on the Hungarian actor as a constrictive burden. Using photographs and film extracts, Das doppelte Gesicht reconstructs the ups and downs of Lorre's career, taking into consideration the economic imperatives and workings of the film industry at the time. (Arnold Hohmann, 1984)