The California Newsreel Essential Collection.

When Fred Staples is recruited onto the board of a high-powered New York corporation, he finds his ethics and ambition at odds.

A boy leaves his small country town and heads to the big city to get a job. As soon as he makes it big his sweetheart will join him and marry him.

A man in a gleaming white suit comes to a small Southern town on the eve of integration. He calls himself a social reformer. But what he does is stir up trouble--trouble he soon finds he can't control.

Janice and Donald Jakes have fallen out of love and into police protection along with their son, Simon. Being at the wrong place at the wrong time sends Simon and his parents to a journey where they will rediscover what it really means to love each other.

A longstanding director of ingenuity, heart and meticulous detail, Charles Burnett has earned his reputation as "one of America's very best filmmakers" from The Chicago Tribune. Focusing on everyday life in Black communities rarely featured in American cinema, Burnett's films combine lyrical storytelling with a starkly neorealist, documentary-style approach most famously seen in KILLER OF SHEEP, the chronicle of a slaughterhouse employee's daily struggles and the emotional baggage he carries home. Burnett once said of the film, "[Stan's] real problems lie within the family, trying to make that work and be a human being. You don't necessarily win battles; you survive."

Starring studio-era legends Sophia Loren and Clark Gable, IT STARTED IN NAPLES follows an American lawyer who travels to the Italian city to settle the estate of his recently deceased expatriate brother. When he arrives, he discovers that his sister-in-law was also killed in the accident, leaving their son Marrietto in the guardianship of an aunt he hardly knows. Though the two share a mutual suspicion towards one another at first, they eventually find love in this picturesque romantic comedy. Nominated for Best Art Direction at the **Academy Awards**. Nominated for Best Motion Picture - Comedy and Best Actress - Comedy or Musical (Sophia Loren) at the **Golden Globes**.

Early cinematic pioneers directed these seven charming, emotional silent films based on the plays of William Shakespeare. Considered a "lowbrow" medium at the time, the movie industry sought to elevate its status by immortalizing the Bard's classics and casting the greatest actors of the day. As most of these early photoplays were only one or two reels long, adapting the Bill's work proved both challenging and inspiring. Whatever these films gave up in language and length, they make up for in exuberance, cinematic artistry, and visual wit.

In 1911, photographer Edward S. Curtis traveled to British Columbia and visited the Kwakwaka'wakw, an Indigenous tribe belonging to the Pacific Northwest Coast. Hard up for cash and loaded with a year's worth of footage, Curtis decided the best way to capture the life and ceremonies of the Kwakwaka'wakw was to make a feature-length motion picture - one of the first of its kind. Over the course of three years, Curtis and his assistant, a Kwakwaka'wakw interpreter named George Hunt, crafted an elusive fusion of documentary and dramatic recreation in collaboration with the tribe's significant figures. Selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, this early piece of cinema may have released in 1914, but remains a fascinating document with artistry and attention rarely seen today.

An irreverent black comedy adapted by Frank Launder (The Lady Vanishes) and Sidney Gilliat (Night Train to Munich) from their play Meet a Body, THE GREEN MAN marked the directorial debut of camera operator Robert Day (Tarzan the Magnificent). A scintillating Alastair Sim (An Inspector Calls) plays Hawkins, a timid watchmaker with a part-time job-he is also a professional assassin who bumps off the people we love to hate. But when pompous MP Sir Gregory Upshott (Raymond Huntley, So Evil My Love) is the intended target, bungling vacuum cleaner salesman William Blake (George Cole, Cleopatra) always gets in the way. As the time of the assassination draws even closer and Hawkins tracks his victim to a dilapidated seaside hotel called THE GREEN MAN, the laughs and the tension steadily rise to a brilliant climax. A perfect companion piece to Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers, THE GREEN MAN is an enormously entertaining farce that dutifully ticks all the genre's expected boxes (mistaken identities, compromising positions, much panicking and slamming of doors). Co-starring comedy legend Terry-Thomas (Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies).