Theodore Bikel

Utilizing potent TV interviews and many forgotten performances from his 30-year career, we are immersed into Frank Zappa’s world while experiencing two distinct facets of his complex character. At once Zappa was both a charismatic composer who reveled in the joy of performing and, in the next moment, a fiercely intelligent and brutally honest interviewee whose convictions only got stronger as his career ascended.

The epic story of how the film The African Queen (1951), directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, was shot on real African locations, barely overcoming all kinds of hardships and disasters.

Based on the novel "Panther in the Basement" by the world-renowned author, Amos Oz, the movie takes place in Palestine in 1947, just a few months before Israel becomes a state. Proffy Liebowitz, a militant yet sensitive eleven year old wants nothing more than for the occupying British to get the hell out of his land.

In September of 2004 at the Toronto Film Festival, the Weavers sang together for possibly the last time.

A modern day adaptation of Dostoyevsky's classic novel about a young student who is forever haunted by the murder he has committed.

A little girl's physical and emotional reawakening after an accident claims her father and her spirit.

Londo Mollari, the Centauri Emperor, recounts the initial contact between the Humans and Minbari, which resulted in a major incident and subsequent war, for an eager pair of youngsters wanting a story about love and conflict.

Bobby Bishop is a special assistant to the President of the United States. Accidentally, he meets his friend professor Pochenko on the street. Pochenko has time to tell Bishop about some conspiracy in the White House but then immediately gets killed by an assassin. Now bad guys are after Bobby as the only man who knows about a plot. Bishop must now not only survive, but to stop the conspirators from achieving their goal. And he doesn't know whom to trust.

This 30th anniversary documentary treats film fans to a behind-the-scenes look at the making of "My Fair Lady," the classic musical about a poor young girl transformed into a woman of society through the tutoring of Prof. Henry Higgins. Includes footage of the filming process, as well as discussion by modern film critics about the impact movie had on later films.

A wealthy arrogant merchant learns the true meaning of Hanukkah when he takes the family of a poor peddler to court for savoring the smell of his wife's pancakes from outside their window.

Twenty two years earlier, Karen helped convict her father, Frank, for the murder of her mother. With his new freedom, thanks to parole, Frank returns home to seek revenge. Having always pleaded his innocence, Frank soon works his way back into Karen's life.

The sister-in-law of an assassin and a CIA agent team-up to save Gorbachev's life.

Dan Merrick comes out from a shattering car accident with amnesia. He finds that he is married to Judith who is trying to help him start his life again. He keeps getting flashbacks about events and places that he can't remember. He meets pet shop owner and part time private detective Gus Klein who has supposedly done some work for him prior to the accident. Klein helps Merrick to find out more...

The Final Days concerns itself with the final months of the Richard Nixon presidency.

Three years after his divorce from his model-wife is the psychologist Larry Livingstone ready for a new commitment. He falls in love with the young widow Beth who has two children. But Beth and the children are still in mourning over their dead husband and father and Larry finds it a bit difficult to penetrate their reservations. Larry himself has to deal with his ex-wife and his love for his own two kids. Slowly both Beth and the children realise that they have to go on with their lives and that they have been giving a second chance.

Religious beliefs clash with the law when an Amish infant is killed in a rural community.

Go behind the scenes at Moscow's Circus School and experience the magic and wonder of the performances that delight millions. See lion tamers risk life and limb, trapeze artists glide through the air, of course, the beloved clowns who inspire imagination and fantasy. With laughter as their language, the Soviet Circus bridges the gap between generations, borders, and all peoples of the world.

A partially under construction office tower is being haunted by a deadly presence which seems to target the building's architect.

Depicts a communal flat in Russia where the Government randomly assigns 20 people to live in a one-bedroom apartment.

A dramatic look at the inner workings of the Kennedy administration.

The most glittering, expensive, and exhausting videotaping session in television history took place Friday February 19, 1982 at New York's Radio City Music Hall. The event, for which ticket-buyers payed up to $1,000 a seat (tax-deductible as a contribution to the Actors' Fund) was billed as "The Night of 100 Stars" but, actually, around 230 stars took part. And most of the audience of 5,800 had no idea in advance that they were paying to see a TV taping, complete with long waits for set and costume changes, tape rewinding, and the like. Executive producer Alexander Cohen estimated that the 5,800 Radio City Music Hall seats sold out at prices ranging from $25 to $1,000. The show itself cost about $4 million to produce and was expected to yield around $2 million for the new addition to the Actors Fund retirement home in Englewood, N. J. ABC is reputed to have paid more than $5 million for the television rights.

Two Hobbits struggle to destroy the Ring in Mount Doom while their friends desperately fight evil Lord Sauron's forces in a final battle.

This cartoon version of A Christmas Carol hails from the production house of Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass--the team that brought you just about every other Christmas special you saw as a kid (including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). Reinvented as a 49-minute musical ghost story, Stingiest stars the voice of Walter Matthau as the bedeviled Scrooge and Tom Bosley as the Jiminy Cricket-type narrator, B. Humbug, Esq.

Three girlfriends -- an author, an artist, and a political activist -- mature and change during the turbulent 1960s.

The film is based on an actual event: Operation Entebbe and the freeing of Israeli hostages at Entebbe Airport (now Entebbe International Airport) in Uganda.

On a flight to London, a note is found stating that there will be murders taking place on the airliner before it lands.

This heart-rending family-oriented drama chronicles the adventure of two Dutch children who temporarily lose their father and mother during the great flood of 1953. Fortunately, they and their animals are taken in by a salty old boatman who helps them reunite with their father.

A doctor trying to fight a diphtheria epidemic comes into conflict with a police captain who is using all his resources to track down a cop-killer.

"Touring makes you crazy," Frank Zappa says, explaining that the idea for this film came to him while the Mothers of Invention were touring. The story, interspersed with performances by the Mothers and the Royal Symphony Orchestra, is a tale of life on the road. The band members' main concerns are the search for groupies and the desire to get paid.

Professional beach bum and 'knight errant' Travis McGee goes up against psychotic body-builder Terry Bartell. McGee pulls out all the stops when he joins a Caribbean cruise to bring the killer to justice.

Film adaption of the novel by Jean Craighead George. A family movie made by Paramount Studios, the story revolves around thirteen-year old Sam Gribley (Teddy Eccles), a devotee of Thoreau, as many were back in the in 1960's. Sam decides to leave the city (set in Toronto) to spend a sabbatical in the Canadian woods and see if he can make it as a self-sufficient spirit after his parents promise a summer trip that doesn't pan out.

A woman refuses to let her romances last longer than one month.

During World War II, a teenage Jewish girl named Anne Frank and her family are forced into hiding in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.

Black and white footage of performances, interviews, and conversations at the Newport Folk Festival, from 1963 to 1966. The headliners are Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan, who's acoustic and electric. Son House and Mike Bloomfield talk about the blues; John Hurt, Howlin' Wolf, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee show its range. The Osborne Brothers perform bluegrass. Donovan, Johnny Cash, Judy Collins, Mimi and Dick Farina, and others less well known also perform. Several talk musical philosophy, and there's a running commentary about the nature and appeal of folk music. The crowd looks clean cut.

In 1941, two Polish brothers escape a Soviet gulag. Their only escape route is through the impossible mountains of Afghanistan and the KGB is on their tail.

A dark tragedy about a farmer's futile act of homicide that takes place on a small dairy farm in southern Texas during the 1890s. Sam Peckinpah directed this original adaptation of the Katherine Anne Porter novel for ABC, and the project became an hour-long presentation for ABC Stage 67, premiering on Nov. 23, 1966.

When a Soviet submarine gets stuck on a sandbar off the coast of a New England island, its commander orders his second-in-command, Lieutenant Rozanov, to get them moving again before there is an international incident. Rozanov seeks assistance from the island locals, including the police chief and a vacationing television writer, while trying to allay their fears of a Communist invasion by claiming he and his crew are Norwegian sailors.

A diverse group of individuals struggle to survive in the Kalahari desert after their passenger plane crashes.

A snobbish phonetics professor agrees to a wager that he can take a flower girl and make her presentable in high society.

The Dybbuk is a made for TV film adaptation of a classic Jewish folktale. The story is about a young Jewish man, Sender (Theodore Bikel) who loves a young Jewish woman, Leah (Carol Lawrence) but her father arranges her marriage with another man. The grief of this causes Sender to die, but his spirit passes into the body of his beloved on her wedding day. Rabbi Azrael (Ludwig Donath), who serves as our narrator through the beginning of the film, is charged with the task of exercising Sender’s Dybbuk (sometimes defined as a malicious spirit or demon who possesses the living) from Leah’s body.

Remake of Josef von Sternberg's 1930 classic.

Nazis chase a U.S. newsman (Robert Mitchum) paid to smuggle names of Greek resistance leaders to London.

After her husband dies in a fire, a woman (Susan Hayward) is left to tend for her young son and the family farm on her own. Soon, she takes in a drifting handyman, they fall in love, and a resentment begins to build between the son and his new "step-father" who treats the boy harshly on purpose to prepare him for life on the frontier.

The emotional story of a boy, his grandfather, and his dog. The boy's dream of becoming a great classical painter appears shattered when his loving grandfather dies.

Barbara Graham is a woman with dubious moral standards, often a guest in seedy bars. She has been sentenced for some petty crimes. Two men she knows murder an older woman. When they get caught they start to think that Barbara has helped the police arresting them. As a revenge they tell the police that Barbara is the murderer.

Two convicts—a white racist and an angry black man—escape while chained to each other.

A newly appointed cemetery chairman believes that, merely by inserting a black plot-marking pin into a wall-sized map of the cemetery, he can cause the deaths of that plot's owner.

In melodramatic fashion, the film tells the tale of a young German woman who finds herself alone in the world when the rest of her family is killed in a WWII air raid. Helping an American military man escape the Gestapo, she finds herself on the run from the Russian Army. Escaping to the American (and safe) side of Berlin, she registers herself as a prostitute (unknowingly) and finds herself caught between the German officer who thinks she is for sale and the American officer who she saved and is now in love with her.

The crew of the American destroyer escort, the USS Haynes, detects a German U-Boat—resulting in a prolonged, deadly battle of wits.

During the Napoleonic Wars, when the French have occupied Spain, some Spanish guerrilla soldiers are going to move a big cannon across Spain in order to help the British defeat the French. A British officer is there to accompany the Spanish and along the way, he falls in love with the leader's girl.

A young Italian fugitive and his older protective brother hide among the grape pickers at a vineyard in Provence.

A Hungarian Secret Service official attempts Western political asylum.

In World War II, the greatest threat to the British navy is the German battleship Tirpitz. While anchored in a Norwegian fjord, it is impossible to attack by conventional means, so a plan is hatched for a special commando unit to attack it, using midget submarines to plant underwater explosives.

Allied prisoners of various nationalities pool their resources to plan numerous escapes from an "escape-proof" German P.O.W. camp housed in a Medieval castle.

During World War II, a German woman, Inga, goes missing and is presumed dead. Her infant son is placed in an orphanage where, years later, he's adopted by a childless couple. The adoptive parents' happiness is shattered when Inga reappears and insists on custody of her son.

A young employee of the British State Department falls in love with the daughter of a top Russian diplomat, much to the panic of their respective countries' officials, who suspect espionage. The cast includes David Knight, Odile Versois, Theodore Bikel and David Kossoff.

Kenyon is a narcotics agent who, with the aid of a titled bird-watcher attempts to trap a brother and sister drug smuggling team.

Rex Allerton is a top Hollywood star and an idol of the female population. To get away from the pressure of the fans who won't leave him alone, he relocates to a remote Italian village where unanticipated trouble arises when unwittingly he becomes the prize for an international lottery.

After losing their father in the Boer War, orphaned brothers Harry and Davy must leave their home in Scotland to live with their grandmother and cantankerous grandfather in Nova Scotia. The boys want nothing more than a pet dog, but their grandfather refuses to get them one. Then, when the brothers find an abandoned baby, they decide to keep it – but the foundling may not have been abandoned after all.

Based on The Hand and the Flower, a novel by Jerrard Tickell, A Day to Remember stars Stanley Holloway as Charley Porter, captain of London darts team. When the team travels to the French town of Boulogne for the annual darts tournament, a good time is had by all--and more besides. Jim Carver one of the team's members, is reunited with a little French girl he'd befriended during the war, who has now developed into a beautiful young woman. And Fred Collins makes a poignant journey to the hotel where he'd honeymooned with his late wife. The film works best as a low-key comedy-drama; it is least successful when it ventures into O. Henry territory and strains for "surprise" story twists. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Rural Australian Nellie Melba becomes an opera star in 1900s Europe and the United States.

An American reporter falls in love with a Russian ballet dancer.

Born into aristocracy, Toulouse-Lautrec moves to Paris to pursue his art as he hangs out at the Moulin Rouge where he feels like he fits in being a misfit among other misfits. Yet, because of the deformity of his legs from an accident, he believes he is never destined to experience the true love of a woman. But that lack of love in his life may change as he meets two women

At the start of the First World War, in the middle of Africa’s nowhere, a gin soaked riverboat captain is persuaded by a strong-willed missionary to go down river and face-off a German warship.