(This drama chronicles the foundation of the real life Hud...)
This drama chronicles the foundation of the real life Hudson's Bay Trading Company of Canada, and the fur trapper that somehow convinced King Charles to finance the entire operation. There were many obstacles for the trapper to overcome including impending war with the natives and treachery on the part of a deceitful aristocratic. Shown in 4:3 full frame presentation.
When sold by Amazon.com, this product will be manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
(One of the most influential movies of all time, the origi...)
One of the most influential movies of all time, the original Scarface is an exciting story of organized crime's brutal control over Chicago during the Prohibition era. Academy Award winner Paul Muni gives an electrifying performance as Tony Camonte, an ambitious criminal with a ruthless drive to be the city's top crime boss. Produced by the legendary Howard Hughes and directed by Howard Hawks, this compelling tale of ambition, betrayal and revenge is a groundbreaking masterpiece that influenced all gangster films to follow. Filmed during the "pre-code" era before censorship shaped the way movies were made, "this powerful gangster film is the most potent of the 1930s" (Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide).
(Paul Muni gives an Oscar-winning performance as Louis Pas...)
Paul Muni gives an Oscar-winning performance as Louis Pasteur in this richly entertaining biographical drama. Ridiculed over his theory that germs cause disease, Louis Pasteur continues his work and eventually finds a cure for anthrax. Despite the warnings of his fiercest critic, Dr. Charbonnet (Fritz Leiber), Pasteur risks imprisonment when he proceeds with the radical idea that injecting humans with the rabies virus will lead to immunization. His beliefs are soon put to the test when Charbonnet agrees to attend Pasteur’s pregnant daughter (Anita Louise) but will only sterilize his instruments if the scientist agrees to sign a letter stating his hypotheses are worthless. “A monument to the life of a man” (The New York Times), The Story of Louis Pasteur was directed by William Dieterle and nominated for four 1936 Academy Awards, winning for Actor, Original Story and Screenplay.
When sold by Amazon.com, this product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
Paul Muni, born Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, was an American stage and film actor, who grew up in Chicago.
Background
Paul Muni was born on September 22, 1895, in Lemberg, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine), the son of Phillip Weisenfreund and his wife, Salli, itinerant entertainers. As a child he traveled in Austria-Hungary with his parents, who performed brief plays, songs, and dances for Yiddish-speaking villagers. When Muni was four the family moved to London, where his father played bit parts at a Yiddish theater in Whitechapel. He then opened his own variety theater, which prospered until customers were frightened away by the street wars of neighborhood gangs.
Education
In 1901 the family resettled in New York City, on the Lower East Side, where Muni attended public school. Unable to find work in Yiddish theater companies, Muni's father moved the family to Cleveland in 1904. There Muni attended Case-Woodland Elementary School.
Career
Muni made his first stage appearance at the Perry Theatre in the summer of 1908, as a last-minute replacement for the character man. His performance as an old man in Two Corpses at Breakfast so impressed his parents that they kept him in the cast.
Muni was thirteen when the family moved to Chicago, where they opened Weisenfreund's Pavilion Theatre on 12th Street, and he became a full-time actor, specializing in portraying old men. From the start his characterizations depended heavily upon his skill with makeup.
The Wiesenfreund troupe disbanded when Muni's father died in 1913, and Muni peddled wick trimmers and read gas meters between stints with regional Yiddish theater groups. During World War I he worked at Yiddish theaters in Boston and Philadelphia.
In 1919 Maurice Schwartz, founder of the Yiddish Art Theatre, invited Muni to join his newly formed company in New York City. Muni's first role was Zazulye, a comic postal clerk, in Sholom Aleichem's Tevye, the Dairyman. He then played the grandfather in The Blacksmith's Daughter. Despite his youth Muni saw himself as a character actor specializing in comic old men. Others saw in him, even in such limited roles, a budding genius of the American stage.
In October 1920 Schwartz gave him the leading role in Aleichem's Schver tzu sein a Yid; his performance made him a major star of the Yiddish theater.
Muni remained on the Yiddish stage until 1926, when Sam Harris hired him to replace Edward G. Robinson in We Americans, billing him as Muni Wisenfrend. His transition to the English-speaking theater came as the great age of the Yiddish theater was ending. Many of its finest actors were leaving for Broadway or Hollywood, and with immigration restrictions and assimilation, the audience for Yiddish productions was dwindling.
Again billed as Muni Wisenfrend, he starred as an ex-convict in Four Walls (1927). He was uncharacteristically cast as a young man, but nevertheless the New York Post devoted an editorial to his performance. Rechristened Paul Muni, he appeared in The Valiant (1929), an early sound film.
The studio exploited Muni's penchant for makeup by dubbing him "the new Lon Chaney" and assigning him to Seven Faces (1929), a mediocre film in which he portrayed the aged caretaker of a wax museum and six of his charges who come to life.
Muni returned to Broadway in Sidney Buchman's This One Man (1930). Although the New York Times called his acting "overpowering and magnificent" and named him "one of the giants of his profession, " after two flops in 1931 he was ready for Hollywood again.
In Scarface (1932) Muni's riveting portrayal of the murderous gangster Tony Camonte made him a major Hollywood star. Prior to its release, Muni had opened to great success in Counsellor-at-Law (1931), by Elmer Rice. It remained a popular vehicle for him; he revived it for the stage in 1942 - 1943 and 1947, and on television for "The Philco Playhouse" in 1948.
In 1932 Muni signed a three-picture contract with Warner Brothers. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) triggered a succession of social-consciousness films by the studio. Based on an actual case, it dramatized the plight of an unemployed veteran unjustly convicted of robbery and sentenced to a chain gang.
After The World Changes (1933) and Hi, Nellie! (1934), Muni's new contract with Warner Brothers gave him final approval of his film projects and freed him to return to the stage each year. Such authority was unprecedented for an actor in Hollywood's studio system of the 1930's.
His next series of roles made him one of the most respected American actors of the day. As Johnny Ramirez in Bordertown (1935) and Joe Radek in Black Fury (1935), he portrayed noble but misused ethnic figures in two hard-hitting social melodramas. He persuaded Warner Brothers to produce the historical biography The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936). The movie was a critical as well as commercial hit.
He was a long-suffering Chinese peasant in The Good Earth (1937), a prestigious production by Irving Thalberg. Also he appeared in the film such as The Life of Emile Zola (1937). In a cover article Time (August 16, 1937) proclaimed him the "first actor of the American screen. "
Juarez (1939), in which he portrayed the Mexican patriot, further enhanced his reputation. His final picture for Warner Brothers was We Are Not Alone (1939), a romantic melodrama.
Muni's association with Warner Brothers ended in 1940 when, after a season on Broadway in Maxwell Anderson's Key Largo, he refused to star in High Sierra. After leaving the studio, he made only eight more films, most of them undistinguished.
During the 1940's he was on the radio sporadically, narrated pro-Israel pageants, revived Counsellor-at-Law for stage and television, and starred in an unsuccessful Broadway revival of Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted (1949). He gave an inspired performance as Willy Loman in the London company of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949). Stranger on the Prowl (1952), an ill-fated Italian film, and a negligible role on television's "Ford Theatre" (1953) seemed to mark the end of his career.
In 1955 Muni made a comeback in Inherit the Wind, a play based on the Scopes trial. His subsequent television role was an aging lawyer in Last Clear Chance (1958) on "Playhouse 90. " His final film appearance was as the star of The Last Angry Man (1958). Poor health and failing vision ended Muni's career, after twenty-three films, twelve Broadway plays, and more than 300 roles in the Yiddish theater. He spent his final years in Montecito, California, where he died on August 25, 1967.
Quotations:
"I've never tried to learn the art of acting. I have been in the business for years but I still can't tell what acting is or how it's done. "
"Nature's far too subtle to repeat herself. "
"I don't want to be a star. If you have to label me anything, I'm an actor - I guess. A journeyman actor. I think "star" is what you call actors who can't act. "
Personality
Neither handsome nor athletic, Paul Muni seldom played romantic leads. Muni's stature derived almost entirely from the completeness and integrity of his impersonations.
Connections
On May 8, 1921, Paul Muni married Bella Finkel, niece of the actor Boris Tomashefsky. They had no children.