Best movies like Mardi Gras

In the last of the Silly Symphonies season cycle, bears hibernate (or try to), raccoons sneeze, moose swim, and pretty much everyone ice skates. Everyone gathers around the groundhog to see what happens.

A French princess flees an arranged marriage and sails for New Orleans, where she is rescued from pirates by a dashing mercenary.

Old King Cole throws party and invites all of the Mother Goose characters. He warns them that they must leave at midnight. Another collection of characters puts on a stage show. The Ten Little Indian Boys get everyone dancing along. The Hickory Dickory Dock mice announce midnight, and everyone leaves, back into their books.

In 2007 Mobile, Alabama, Mardi Gras is celebrated... and complicated. Following a cast of characters, parades, and parties across an enduring color line, we see that beneath the surface of pageantry lies something else altogether.

Alfalfa gives up being "King of the Crooners" to sing opera, but a nightmare of being under the thumb of an evil producer sends him back to his roots.

In this classic drama, Vicky Page is an aspiring ballerina torn between her dedication to dance and her desire to love. While her imperious instructor, Boris Lermontov, urges to her to forget anything but ballet, Vicky begins to fall for the charming young composer Julian Craster. Eventually Vicky, under great emotional stress, must choose to pursue either her art or her romance, a decision that carries serious consequences.

Two men attempt to prove they committed the perfect crime by hosting a dinner party after strangling their former classmate to death.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a timeless family holiday classic.

A young grizzly bear, undaunted by his mother's warnings of the coming winter, runs away from home only to be confronted by Old Man Winter himself.

Lester and Orville accidentally launch a rocket which is supposed to fly to Mars. Instead it goes to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. They are then forced by bank robber Mugsy and his pal Harry to fly to Venus where they find a civilization made up entirely of women, men having been banished.

The season series of Silly Symphonies continues, with squirrels storing nuts and corn, crows stealing it, beavers building a dam, ducks migrating, and the like, as the first snows fall.

A jealous wife is chasing her unfaithful husband during a parade, after he starts to flirt with a pretty woman.

The Candyman moves on to New Orleans and starts his horrific murders once more. This time, his intended victim is a school teacher. Her father was killed by the Candyman, and brother wrongly accused of the murders.

Arbuckle escapes the watch of his domineering wife and heads for Coney Island. Keaton arrives that same day with his attractive, and rather easy, girlfriend, who is immediately stolen from him by St. John.

Set in the early 1900s in the fictional Catfish Row section of Charleston, South Carolina, which serves as home to a black fishing community, the story focuses on the titular characters, crippled beggar Porgy, who travels about in a goat-drawn cart, and the drug-addicted Bess, who lives with stevedore Crown, the local bully.

On the day before Easter in 1911, Don Hewes is crushed when his dancing partner (and object of affection) Nadine Hale refuses to start a new contract with him. To prove Nadine's not important to him, Don acquires innocent new protege Hannah Brown, vowing to make her a star in time for next year's Easter parade.

A fledgling producer finds himself at odds with his workers, financiers and his greedy ex-wife when he tries to produce live musicals for movie-going audiences.

A TV worker has fickle designs on an aspiring singer for whom she arranges an audition.

For the ventriloquist Gabbo his wooden dummy Otto is the only means of expression. When he starts relying more and more on Otto, he starts going mad.

Bob Jackson and his three Merchant Marine shipmates have each invested $50 in a song Bob has written and which he thinks will be published for a fee of $200. In a taxicab driven by Pat Rogers, they search for the publisher's office but finally realize they have been swindled. Plus, they now owe Pat a large taxi-bill.

An all-star revue featuring MGM contract players.

A bumbling senator investigating graft in Louisiana is the target of a scheme involving a Viennese beauty.

Police try to capture someone who is commiting ritual murders of women during Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

On a summer day in the 1950s, a native girl watches the countryside go by from the backseat of a car. A woman at her kitchen table sings a lullaby in her Cree language. When the girl arrives at her destination, she undergoes a transformation that will turn the woman’s gentle voice into a howl of anger and pain.

Maya Deren’s shortest, two-minute A Study in Choreography for Camera seems like an exercise piece to capture a dancer’s movement on celluloid, which later on developed into her masterpieces such as Ritual in Transfigured Time and Meditation on Violence.

To Jane Falbury's New England farm comes a troup of actors to put up a show, invited by Jane's sister. At first reluctant she has them do farm chores in exchange for food. Her reluctance becomes attraction when she falls in love with the director, Joe, who happens to be her sister's fiance.

Happy sunshine-bottling gnomes battle gloomy swamp-dwellers.

A struggling young singer falls for a nightclub owner whose father, a millionaire, is trying to shut it down.

This 1930 film, a collection of songs and sketches showcasing Paramount Studios' contract stars, credits 11 directors

The Andrews Sisters headline this musical. They play the lead act at a popular nightclub. The trouble begins when they hire a few students from a financially foundering dance school for their newest production. One of the dancers, a rich young socialite, desperately wants to be in it too, but her prurient maiden aunts refuse to allow her to disgrace their family by becoming a common chorine. She and the club owner (who must have the aunt's permission because the girl is underage) try to convince them, but it's not easy.

Bickering brothers unwittingly wind up working together on the same musical production.

Frank Faylen and Charlie Hall (a longtime Laurel & Hardy foil) star as Dolan and Doolittle, a pair of goofy druggists who join the army to escape the wrath of bill collector Mulligan

Patty Nelson lands a job as a singer with orchestra leader Al Tyler, and tours with the band as "Patty Hart." Patty's father Russ is dismissed from his radio-station job, and the disc jockey selected to replace him is Al Tyler. Patty rushes home to keep Russ company on the air for the final few days, and Al wonders why she suddenly walked out on him. The new "Patty and Russ" radio show catches on, causing complications with Al and the radio-station bosses.

Bandleader Tim Hartley's father objects strongly to his son's occupation choice and packs him off to Hawaii to manage the family hotel holdings. This proves to be a wrong move as Hawaiia has more bands than it does pineapples.

The Anthony Newley/Leslie Bricusse London and Broadway musical hit Stop the World, I Want to Get Off is given literal treatment in this filmization. Newley stars as Littlechap, whose allegorical rise to success is countered by the instability of his private life. Like the play, the film is staged impressionistically, with Newley decked out in mime makeup and periodically stopping the action to address the audience, and with all the women in his life -- German, American and "Typically English" -- played by a single actress (Millicent Martin, taking over from the stage version's Anna Quayle). In Wizard of Oz fashion, the play itself is lensed in color, while the brief prologue, showing the actors preparing for their performance, is in black-and-white. The production includes such standards (and perennial audition pieces) as What Kind of Fool Am I? and Gonna Build a Mountain.

Northern lawyer John Reynolds travels to New Orleans to try and clean up the local crime syndicate based around a lottery. Although he meets Julie Mirbeau and they are attracted to each other, the fact that her father heads the lottery means they end up on opposite sides. When her father is killed, Julie becomes more and more involved in the shady activities and in blocking Reynolds' attempts at prosecution.

Two vaudevillians on the run from crooks try to pass themselves off as cowboys.

This musical tells the tales of two movie extras who abscond to an expensive resort with their costumes and pretend to be aristocrats. Included in the film are ice skating numbers and songs.

Wastrel New York millionaire Roland Van Dam travels to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, looking for adventure and romance. Because the costume he is wearing includes a red gardenia, he is mistaken for escaped prisoner Emile Le Duc by a woman (who turns out to be a long-lost cousin) who was to meet Le Duc, who was to be wearing a red gardenia. It turns out that Le Duc is the head of a vicious gang of counterfeiters, and Roland winds up getting in more adventures than he had hoped for.

Made during the early years of the movie musical, this exuberant revue was one of the most extravagant, eclectic, and technically ambitious Hollywood productions of its day. Starring the bandleader Paul Whiteman, then widely celebrated as the King of Jazz, the film drew from Broadway variety shows to present a spectacular array of sketches, performances by such acts as the Rhythm Boys (featuring a young Bing Crosby), and orchestral numbers—all lavishly staged by veteran theater director John Murray Anderson.

The second television adaptation of Once Upon a Mattress was broadcast on December 12, 1972, on CBS. This production, videotaped in color, included original Broadway cast members Burnett, Gilford and White, and also featured Bernadette Peters as Lady Larken, Ken Berry as Prince Dauntless, Ron Husmann as Harry, and Wally Cox as The Jester. It was directed by Ron Field and Dave Powers. Again, several songs were eliminated and characters were combined or altered. Since the parts of the Minstrel and the Wizard were cut from this adaptation, a new prologue was written with Burnett singing "Many Moons Ago" as a bedtime story.

A circus performer falls in love with the son of a plantation owner in antebellum New Orleans. When the young man's stepmother objects to the wedding, the couple break apart and go their separate ways for a time. Also in the mix are two circus comics who feud over the heart of another Southern belle.

Three Broadway chorus girls seek rich husbands.

The Swan (1925) is a silent film produced by Famous Players-Lasky and distributed by Paramount Pictures. The film is based on Melville Baker's 1923 Broadway play adaptation, The Swan, of Ferenc Molnar's play A Hattyu Vigjatek Harom Felvonasbarn. This film was directed by Dimitri Buchowetzki, a recent Russian immigrant working for Famous Players-Lasky. Buchowetzki had directed pictures in Russia, Sweden, and Germany. The story of this film was remade in 1930 as One Romantic Night, an early talkie for Lillian Gish, and in Technicolor as a 1956 vehicle for Grace Kelly.

Relive the dazzling show stopping songs, dances and production numbers from some of your favorite Broadway musicals. Great Broadway Musical Moments from The Ed Sullivan Show brings you legendary musical entertainment performed by a galaxy of great Broadway stars like Ethel Merman in "Annie Get Your Gun," John Raitt in "Oklahoma!," Julie Andrews in "Camelot," and more! This exciting event includes exclusive interviews with legends Shirley Jones, Joel Grey, and Rex Reed.

Lulu Belle is singing in a cheap dive in Natchez, Mississippi in the early 1900's when she meets rising young attorney George Davis. He gives up his fiancée and career to marry Lulu Bell. When his money runs out, Lulu Belle goes to work in a New Orleans club run by tough gambler Mark Brady. She tries to send George back to Natchez by pretending that she has fallen for prize-fighter Butch Cooper but George, in a fit of jealousy, drives a handful of forks into Butch's face. He is sent to prison and Lulu goes to New York with millionaire Harry Randolph, who makes her the singing sensation of Broadway and asks her to marry him. She refuses when she learns that George has been released from prison, realizing that he is the only man she ever truly loved.

The successful short film compilation series continues with six outstanding films focused on school and college-age youth. 6 Shorts: Benny's gym (2007); Flatmates [Kompisar] (2007); Kali Ma (2007); Mr_Right_22 (2007); Secrets (2007); Yeah No Definitely (2007).

In this musical, a gang of college students decide to play a little trick by creating the perfect student. The fictional gal has everything a university would ever want. The trouble begins when the campus psych professor becomes determined to meet this girl. If the gang cannot bring her forward, they will be expelled. They hire a New York actress to portray the imaginary girl and all is well at the end. Songs include: "It Seems I've Heard That Song Before," "You're So Good to Me" "If It's Love," "Man," "Gotcha Too Ta Mee," "You Got to Study, Buddy." All the songs were penned by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne who went on to become one of Hollywood's top song-writing teams.

Filmed in an early Technicolor process, The Runaround tells the story of Broadway dancer Evelyn who refuses to play the gold-digging games indulged in by her fellow chorines

As the world experiences its final winter, desperate measures to hold onto the season awaken a radical labor consciousness.