Films with: Ruggles, Wesley

Chaplin's Essanay comedies.

A collection of Chaplin's films at Essanay Studios. Shanghaied: Hired to shanghai a crew, Chaplin is himself shanghaied and becomes assistant cook aboard a rolling boat. A Night in the show: Chaplin appears in a dual role as a playboy seated in the orchestra and as an obnoxious workman on a night out seated in the balcony. The latter closes the theater down by turning a fire hose on the fire-eating act. Police: The Tramp released from prison meets a former cell-mate and sets out to rob the home of a young woman. Charlie Chaplin's Burlesque on Carmen: Parody of the popular Cecil B. DeMille film Carmen. Triple trouble: Charlie works in the home of an eccentric inventor from whom some German spies are attempting to obtain a formula.

DVD 1081

Mae West the glamour collection /

Mae West had an inexhaustibly playful interest in language, and a rare, sometimes perplexing, and even lofty wit, spiced by low-down slang. Well before the second wave of feminism, she wrote all her own material, insisted on total control of her work, and was wildly popular for a short time, right before the Production Code lowered the boom on adult attitudes being expressed in films. She made only 12 movies, but three are first-rate, and these were enough to seal her fame and launch a legend. In her first film appearance, "Night after night," a successful ex-boxer buys a high-class speakeasy and falls for a rich society girl. As the bold Tira in "I'm no angel," she works as a dancing beauty and lion tamer at a fair. For "Goin' to town," West goes Western. Cleo Borden is a former dance hall queen who has become newly rich. She falls for--and pursues--an upper crust Englishman. This is followed by "Go west young man," where she plays Mavis Arden, a movie star stranded in the country. To stifle her boredom, she trifles with a young man's affections. "My little chickadee" pairs West with a legend of similar stature, W.C. Fields. As Flower Belle Lee, she is rightly suspected of illicit relations with the Masked Bandit, and run out of Little Bend. Surprisingly, things change very little when she arrives in Greasewood City to start over.

DVD 10543