Like the musical Chicago that won the Best Picture Academy Award and five other Oscars in 2002, this original 1927 version descends from a 1926 hit Broadway play by Maurine Watkins. It's a terrifically entertaining mix of humor and melodrama as well as a pungent critique of trash journalism. Frank Urson signed onto Chicago as director, although it is substantially the work of Cecil B. DeMille and his A-list technical staff. Chicago is silent filmmaking at its peak, with an outstanding score for this edition by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. The 1927 Chicago was long believed a lost film, but a perfect print survived in Cecil B. DeMille's private collection. Restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive in 2006, it has since been widely performed to rapturous audiences...Sexy, jazz-loving and dressed to kill, Roxie Hart has a doting, handsome husband in Victor Varconi; not to mention a gold-digging affair on the side with Eugene Pallette, who pays and pays, eventually with his life. Put on trial for murder, Roxie secures lawyer Billy Flynn, equal part mob "mouthpiece"and publicity agent. When Roxie hits the headlines, the courtroom theatrics begin.

Buster Keaton goes back to school and stages a hilarious send-up of university life in COLLEGE. Keaton stars as Ronald, an idealistic freshman who attends Clayton College in pursuit of higher learning, but finds himself instead embroiled in a war of athletics as he fights for the heart of his beloved coed, Mary. *"Buster on the playing field, failing gloriously at every sport but executing each one beautifully when he dashes to his girl's rescue, is a study in precision and grace." - Don Druker, **Chicago Reader***

A decaying mansion and a stormy night are the archetypal setting for mystery and chaos when a pack of greedy relatives gather for the reading of a twenty-year-old will. But before the West fortune can be handed down, the family must endure a night in the cavernous manor, unnerved by the news that an escaped lunatic is at large.

Returning to a pre-Russian Revolution mode of narrative storytelling, this melodrama focuses on two peasant women-one the victim to an abusive father-in-law and the other emancipated. Preobrazhenskaia takes her time, repeating shots of objects in action, hands at work, and the dizzying movements that comprise the rituals of rural life. The film ends on a hopeful note, celebrating the self-sufficient new (Soviet) woman. Music by Sergei Dreznin.

When collegiate bookworm Keaton falls for a pretty co-ed who only has eyes for jocks, he hits the playing fields in a series of wildly hilarious attempts to win her.

QUALITY STREET is a 1927 MGM silent film based on the 1901 play by James M. Barrie which starred Barrie favorite Maude Adams. The film starred Marion Davies and Conrad Nagel and was directed by Sidney Franklin. Prints of this film are preserved at the Library of Congress and in the Turner Archive.

Two young men, one rich, one middle class, who are in love with the same woman (Hollywood's first "It-girl," Clara Bow), become fighter pilots in World War I. Stunningly realistic flying sequences, all filmed without faking or processing shots, highlight this story of two airmen pals and an ambulance nurse they both love, first winner of an **Academy Award** for Best Picture. Winner of Best Picture and Best Effects, Engineering Effects at the **Academy Awards**. Chosen for preservation by the **National Film Preservation Board, USA**. *"It is, in fact,* the *masterpiece of war production." - Irene Thirer, **The New York Daily News***

Jack 'One Round' Sanders is a young boxer traveling the country with a boxing booth in a fair. After his ex wife dumps him for the reigning champion, he falls in love with the beautiful cashier, his only goal being to beat all challengers, in and off the ring. *"Arguably the finest of Hitchcock's silent films." Geoff Andrew, **Time Out***

Rene Clair's sparkling comedy of manners is a witty, delicate, inspired satire on propriety and behavior in the bourgeois mind-set. Transposing the action of the perennial stage farce from 1851 to a summer wedding day in 1895 - the birth of cinema - Clair recalls detail, costume and design captured by the first movies. The Italian Straw Hat (Un Chapeau de paille d'Italie) triumphantly survives its 1927 journey from stage to screen; a dozen eccentric characters, superbly acted, try desperately to keep up appearances in the face of disaster, their attitudes, concerns and gestures exquisitely stylized under Clair's deft orchestration. The sets and costumes, too, are a charming combination of the suffocating and the exact...A bridegroom is riding to his marriage when his horse eats a straw hat hanging on a branch while its owner, a married lady, enjoys a tryst behind the bush with her love, a fierce hussar. She cannot go home without her hat, so the groom interlaces his wedding with an attempt to find madam a twin chapeau, launching a series of misunderstandings and embarrassments. The Italian Straw Hat has few cinematic equals and inspired Pauline Kael to observe "One of the funniest films ever made... so expertly timed and choreographed that farce becomes ballet."..This is the only fully complete edition of The Italian Straw Hat ever available to American viewers. The film was mastered in high definition at 19 frames per second from the original 35mm negative used for the English release in 1930. As that version had been subjected to about twenty edits, all the missing pieces were restored from an original French print. Intertitles are in English, with optional subtitles of the original French text. There is a choice of two new accompaniments, one by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra and the other by pianist Philip Carli, each providing a unique interpretation on this delightful film.

October: Ten Days That Shook the World is a 1927 Soviet silent propaganda film by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, sometimes referred to as October. It is a film epic about the 1917 October Revolution and Revolution in Petrograd. The title is taken from John Reed's book on the Revolution, Ten Days That Shook The World. The film was commissioned by the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution. Its premiere took place at the Bolshoi Theatre on November 7, 1927.

A rich historical romance starring John Barrymore as poet Frances Villon who battles against nasty King Louis the XI in 17th Century France.