Best movies like RKO 281

A film company hires a gangster to mock himself holding up a bank, but he succeeds too well and makes off with the money. But all ends well.

In 1920s New York City, W. C. Fields is a successful headlining entertainer, but when his girlfriend leaves him and his broker loses his money, Fields begins anew in California. Working at a wax museum, Fields eventually lands a film role that ascends him to stardom. Back in the limelight and palling around with John Barrymore and the like, Fields meets an aspiring actress Carlotta Monti at a party, with whom he forms a rocky relationship.

An exploration of the appeal of horror films, with interviews of many legendary directors in the genre.

In 1940s Los Angeles, when womanizing composer Keith Vincent is found dead, the inquest concludes it was a suicide but police detective Joe Warne isn't so sure.

Shot in France, England, Switzerland and the United States, this documentary covers director Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre) and his 1974 Quixotic attempt to adapt the seminal sci-fi novel Dune into a feature film. After spending 2 years and millions of dollars, the massive undertaking eventually fell apart, but the artists Jodorowsky assembled for the legendary project continued to work together. This group of artists, or his “warriors” as Jodorowsky named them, went on to define modern sci-fi cinema with such films as Alien, Blade Runner, Star Wars and Total Recall.

Father goes to an American Legion convention in Hollywood and the family goes along, visiting a studio a causing havoc on the set.

Documentary about the battle between Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst over Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). Features interviews with Welles' and Hearst's co-workers also acts as a relatively complete biograph of Hearst's career.

A glamorous film star rebels against the studio, her pushy press agent and a family of hangers-on.

Two lazy screenwriters need a story for the studio's cowboy star. A studio waitress turns out to be pregnant. This gives them the idea for a movie about a cowboy and a baby. The waitress's baby becomes the star. The cowboy and his agent run off with the waitress and her valuable asset. The writers retaliate by hiring an unemployed extra to impersonate the baby's father. But the extra already knows the waitress...

The career of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo is halted by a witch hunt in the late 1940s when he defies the anti-communist HUAC committee and is blacklisted.

This historical and critical look at slasher films, which includes dozens of clips, begins with Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Prom Night. The films' directors, writers, producers, and special effects creators comment on the films' making and success. During the Reagan years, the films get gorier, budgets get smaller, and their appeal wanes. Then, Nightmare on Elm Street revives the genre. Jump to the late 90s, when Scream brings humor and TV stars into the mix.

The career of a disillusioned producer, who is desperate for a hit, is endangered when his star walks off the film set. Forced to think fast, the producer decides to digitally create an actress "Simone" to sub for the star — the first totally believable synthetic actress.

New York, 1937. A teenager hired to star in Orson Welles' production of Julius Caesar becomes attracted to a career-driven production assistant.

The extraordinary life of Orson Welles (1915-85), an enigma of Hollywood, an irreducible independent creator: a musical prodigy, an excellent painter, a master of theater and radio, a modern Shakespeare, a magician who was always searching for a new trick to surprise his audience, a romantic and legendary figure who lived only for cinema.

This documentary revisits the making of Gone with the Wind via archival footage, screen tests, insightful interviews and rare film footage.

1930s Hollywood is reevaluated through the eyes of scathing social critic and alcoholic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as he races to finish the screenplay of Citizen Kane.

A grief-stricken screenwriter unknowingly enters a three-way relationship with a woman and her film executive husband - to chilling results.

Down-on-his-luck film director Jimmie Dale takes a job at a fly-by-night acting school. He is drawn into the plans of the school's owner to bilk a wealthy young man out of the funds he has supplied to shoot a movie starring pretty student Alice Perkins. But Jimmie hopes to bilk the bilkers by actually completing the movie as ostensibly planned.

Ding Dong Williams, a clarinet player who can neither read nor write music is employed at a motion picture studio. The studio plans to use him and his six-piece band but his musical deficiencies are discovered and the plan scrapped. But the secretary of the head of the music department intercedes on his behalf and he is given a chance in the film.

THE AUTEUR follows formerly renowned porn director Arturo Domingo (Five Easy Nieces, Requiem for a Wet Dream) through a bizarre weekend as he receives a lifetime achievement award at a film festival in Portland, OR. Encountering crazed fans, former collaborators, bitter enemies and free-loving hippies, Arturo attempts to put the pieces of his broken career and personal life back together.

Still reeling from the painful breakup of his marriage to screen siren Rita Hayworth, filmmaker Orson Welles makes his way to Rome, where he gets pulled into a tangled political plot involving murder and mysterious motives. A beautiful actress proves a tempting distraction. But if they want to stay alive, Welles and his young Italian driver need to stay focused.

A movie producer who made a huge flop tries to salvage his career by revamping his film as an erotic production, where its family-friendly star takes her top off.

Starting in 1913 movie director Connors discovers singer Molly Adair. As she becomes a star she marries an actor, so Connors fires them. She asks for him as director of her next film. Many silent stars shown making the transition to sound.

J. D. Forbes, head of the almost-bankrupt Four Star Studios in Hollywood contacts band leader Kay Kyser, who puts on a radio and-live theatre program called "The Kollege of Musical Knowledge," to appear in films. When manager Chuck Deems gets the studio offer, he and band members Ginny Simms, Sully Mason, Ish Kabiddle, Harry Babbitt and the others are all fired up at the prospect of going to Hollywood and working in the movies, but band-leader Kay is all against it and says his old grandmother has told him to stay in his own back yard, but he relents. Once there, Stacey Delmore, a Four Star associate producer left in charge of the studio while Forbes is out of town, discovers that the screenplay writers have prepared a script that has Kay Kyser playing a glamorous lover in an exotic European setting.

Joe Mulholland, Head of Production at a Hollywood studio, makes a rather fool-hardy promise to a dying friend. He undertakes to make a major movie using the title - if not the content - of a best-selling sex manual "Love in Sex". Enlisting the help of depressed screenwriter Herb Derman and rather off-centre director Sid Spokane to try and come up with an idea or two, Joe soon wishes he was not one of those people who always try to keep their promises.

James Cagney has a rare chance to show his song-and-dance-man roots in this low-budget tale of a New York bandleader struggling with a Hollywood studio boss.

An aspiring director working as a lowly production assistant, conspires with his aspiring producer roommate to steal the reels of a mega budgeted film he's working on.

Rival reporters (George Brent, Joan Blondell) investigate a Hollywood star (Adele Jergens) and the box she receives with a dead man inside.

A biography about the love affair between 1930s Hollywood superstars Clark Gable and Carole Lombard.

Since the early days, Jerry Lewis—in the line of Chaplin, Keaton and Laurel—had the masses laughing with his visual gags, pantomime sketches and signature slapstick humor. Yet Lewis was far more than just a clown. He was also a groundbreaking filmmaker whose unquenchable curiosity led him to write, produce, stage and direct many of the films he appeared in, resulting in such adored classics as The Bellboy, The Ladies Man, The Errand Boy, and The Nutty Professor.

Naive Iowa farm boy Lewis Tater dreams of being a famous Western novelist like his hero, Zane Grey. He leaves home to answer a writing correspondence course's ad for on-campus classes, only to discover that the school consists of a row of postboxes at an isolated Nevada train depot. On the run from the con men responsible, Lewis stumbles across "real" cowboys--cowboy actors shooting a movie in the desert. The would-be writer soon finds himself instead acting in Westerns, for the rundown Tumbleweed Productions studio, in Depression-era Hollywood.

During a bizarre chapter of WWII, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels decided to make a movie based on the sinking of the Titanic. This epic film was so large in scale that the Nazis were forced to divert men, material and ships from the war effort in order to complete it. Titanic was filmed aboard cruise ship SS Cap Arcona in the Baltic Sea. The movie’s director Herbert Selpin was arrested by the Gestapo over comments he made about the ship’s crew and he was questioned by Goebbels. Selpin was found dead the next day in his cell. The Gestapo’s verdict was suicide. Titanic never received the impressive premiere that Goebbels intended, being first shown in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1943. We reveal this little known but fascinating story by looking at the making of the film, as well as the fate of the German ship Cap Arcona.

A look at the history of British B-movies.

The trials and tribulations of David O. Selznick as he attempts to find an actress to play the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939).

This documentary traces the life and work of the legendary "America's Sweetheart" Mary Pickford, silent film star, movie pioneer and keen businesswoman. Pickford's life also parallels an even larger story, telling of the birth of the cinema itself.