Betty Compson
Actor · 1897 – 1974 · Beaver, Utah, USA
Betty Compson (March 19, 1897 – April 18, 1974) was an American actress and film producer. Most famous in silent films and early talkies, she is best known in her performances in The Docks of New York and The Barker, the latter earning a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Movies24
Movie5.9ComedyRomanceHappily married for three years, Ann and David Smith live in New York. One morning Ann asks David if he had to do it over again, would he marry her? To her shock, he answers, "No". Later that day, they separately discover that, due to a legal complication, they are not legally married.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
1941 · 261 votes
Movie6.3DocumentaryHistoryPeriod music, film clips and newsreel footage combined into a visual exploration of the American entertainment industry during the Great Depression.
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
1975 · 9 votes
Movie5.9MysteryCrimeA fog-shrouded house provides the setting for a weekend party prank gone wrong and the resulting murder being blamed on an innocent man.
Midnight Mystery
1930 · 8 votes
Movie6.4ComedyCrimeFormer bootlegger Remy Marco has a slight problem with foreclosing bankers, a prospective son-in-law, and four hard-to-explain corpses.
A Slight Case of Murder
1938 · 47 votes
Movie7.0DramaRomanceConvicts escaping from Devil's Island come under the influence of a strange Christ-like figure.
Strange Cargo
1940 · 56 votes
Movie3.3CrimeDramaSkin Deep is a 1929 American talking drama film directed by Ray Enright and starring Monte Blue. It was produced and distributed by the Warner Brothers. It was also released in the U.S. in a silent version for theaters not equipped yet with sound. The film is a remake of a 1922 Associated First National silent film of the same name directed by Lambert Hillyer and starring Milton Sills. All copies of this film are now lost. However, the Vitaphone soundtrack, of music and effects, survive.
Skin Deep
1929 · 3 votes
Movie8.0ComedyRomanceWhen a rich young man marries, he lets the books and letters left him by his dead mother guide his life.
Virtuous Husband
1931 · 1 votes
Movie4.0RomanceDramaA sea captain comes to rescue of a prostitute in Shanghai, who is being run out of town. He takes her aboard his ship and heads out to sea. Not long afterwards the ship sinks but the pair manage to get into a lifeboat before it goes under. They are later picked up by a passing ship, but it turns out that the crew had just mutinied against their captain and taken over the ship.
Scarlet Seas
1928 · 4 votes
Movie6.6MusicNow hear this. The studio that gave the cinema its voice offered 1929 audiences a chance to see and hear multiple silent-screen favorites for the first time in a gaudy, grandiose music-comedy-novelty revue that also included Talkie stars, Broadway luminaries and of course, Rin-Tin-Tin. Frank Fay hosts a jamboree that, among its 70+ stars, features bicyclers, boxing champ Georges Carpentier, chorines in terpsichore kickery, sister acts, Myrna Loy in two-strip Technicolor as an exotic Far East beauty, John Barrymore in a Shakespearean soliloquy (adding an on-screen voice to his legendary profile for the first time) and Winnie Lightner famously warbling the joys of Singing in the Bathtub. Watch, rinse, repeat!
The Show of Shows
1929 · 5 votes
Movie9.0DocumentaryTV MovieAmong the pieces featured in Fragments are the final reel of John Ford's The Village Blacksmith (1922) and a glimpse at Emil Jannings in The Way of All Flesh (1927), the only Oscar®-winning performance in a lost film. Fragments also features clips from such lost films as Cleopatra (1917), starring Theda Bara; The Miracle Man (1919), with Lon Chaney; He Comes Up Smiling (1918), starring Douglas Fairbanks; an early lost sound film, Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), filmed in early Technicolor, and the only color footage of silent star Clara Bow, Red Hair (1928). The program is rounded out with interviews of film preservationists involved in identifying and restoring these films. Also featured is a new interview with Diana Serra Cary, best known as "Baby Peggy", one of the major American child stars of the silent era, who discusses one of the featured fragments, Darling of New York (1923).
Fragments: Surviving Pieces of Lost Films
2011 · 1 votes
Movie7.3ComedyRomanceA girl who's just lost her job meets a drunk millionaire on a bridge who's just lost his money. They go back to his house, and eventually come up with a plan to benefit them both: he'll scrounge enough money together to teach her how to be a lady, and then introduce her to his rich friends so she can snag a husband, after which she'll pay him a finder's fee. Complications ensue.
False Pretenses
1935 · 3 votes
Movie5.3HorrorCrimeThe town's leading citizen becomes a homicidal maniac after his wife deserts him.
Invisible Ghost
1941 · 57 votes
Movie7.0DramaRomanceA blue-collar worker on New York's depressed waterfront finds his life changed after he saves a woman attempting suicide.
The Docks of New York
1928 · 121 votes
Movie5.2ComedyA blundering rookie reporter runs into some unexpected difficulty when he is assigned to cover the police beat.
Here Comes Trouble
1948 · 8 votes
Movie6.0DramaA bank teller's love life falls apart when he's accused of embezzling.
Three Who Loved
1931 · 6 votes
Movie7.0DramaIt is the fate of a small frontier town, adjoining the no-man's-land where the Russians and Austrians are fighting out one of the final campaigns of World War I, to be occupied one day by the Russians, the next by the Austrians, and the inhabitants soon acquire a complacent view of the changing allegiances. To the town comes Ann Warschaska, intent on avenging the suicide of her sister, who has killed herself after being betrayed by an Austrian officer. She knows no more about his identity than the number of his room at the "Hotel Imperial".
Hotel Imperial
1939 · 3 votes
Movie6.7RomanceDramaDirector Karl Brown's 1938 circus drama stars Marjorie Main as a tough, fur-coat-wearing circus boss who raises her orphaned niece to be a trapeze star.
Under the Big Top
1938 · 3 votes
Movie9.0ComedyDramaAngela comes to Hollywood with only two things: Her dream to become a movie star, and Grandpa. She leaves an Aunt, a brother, Grandma, and her longtime boyfriend back in Centerville. Despite seeing major movie stars around every corner, and knocking on every casting office door in town, at the end of her first day she is still unemployed. To her horror, when she arrives back at their hotel, she finds that Grandpa has been cast in a movie by William DeMille and quickly becomes a star during the ensuing weeks. Her family, worried that Angela and Grandpa are getting into trouble, come to Hollywood to drag them back home. In short order Aunt, Grandma, brother, boyfriend and even the parrot become superstars, but Angela is still unemployed...
Hollywood
1923 · 3 votes
Movie7.5CrimeMysteryA wealthy young woman, racked with guilt because she wasn't there when her mother died, is so desperate to contact her that she gets involved with a phony mystic who promises to put her in touch with her mother's spirit, but who is really after her money. A reporter who loves the young woman sets out to expose the phony "psychic" for the charlatan he is.
Religious Racketeers
1938 · 2 votes
Movie8.5DocumentaryThe House That Shadows Built (1931) is a short feature, roughly 48 minutes long, from Paramount Pictures made to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the studio's founding in 1912. It was a promotional film for exhibitors and never had a regular theatrical release and includes a brief history of Paramount, interviews with various actors, and clips from upcoming projects (some of which never came to fruition). The title comes from a biography of Paramount founder Adolph Zukor, The House That Shadows Built (1928), by William Henry Irwin.
The House That Shadows Built
1931 · 2 votes
Movie4.8ActionComedyNewspaper editor (Foster) will do almost anything to increase circulation. He campaigns to free a condemned man while accusing a wealthy ex-criminal of a string of murders.
News Is Made at Night
1939 · 4 votes
Movie5.8CrimeComedyTorchy, Steve, and Gahagan are on the trail of a bank robber aboard an ocean liner traveling from New York to L.A. via the Panama Canal.
Torchy Blane in Panama
1938 · 8 votes
Movie7.0ComedyCrimeNan Carey ( Betty Compson ), a shoplifter, is caught by the police but acquitted through the influence of Lazare ( Lucien Littlefield ), a crooked lawyer, who places her with a gang of crooks. Posing as the Brockton family, they move to a seaside home, where they plan to steal the jewel collection of the Palmers, their neighbours. Nan wins the confidence of the family by flirting with Tom ( Kenneth Harlan ), who becomes infatuated and wants to go away with her, but she refuses him. Tom is caught red-handed in the Brockton mansion attempting to steal their jewels while Nan is making a success of the Palmer robbery.
Cheating Cheaters
1927 · 1 votes
Movie6.2ComedyCrimeTwo thieves discover a professional and personal relationship when individual heist plans are thrown together by circumstance.
Paths to Paradise
1925 · 12 votes