After killing a prison guard, convict Robert Stroud faces life imprisonment in solitary confinement. Driven nearly mad by loneliness and despair, Stroud's life gains new meaning when he happens upon a helpless baby sparrow in the exercise yard and nurses it back to health. Despite having only a third grade education, Stroud goes on to become a renowned ornithologist and achieves a greater sense of freedom and purpose behind bars than most people find in the outside world.

Lucas Marsh, an intern bent upon becoming a first-class doctor, not merely a successful one. He courts and marries the warm-hearted Kristina, not out of love but because she is highly knowledgeable in the skills of the operating room and because she has frugally put aside her savings through the years. She will be, as he shrewdly knows, a supportive wife in every way. She helps make him the success he wants to be and cheerfully moves with him to the small town in which he starts his practice. But as much as he tries to be a good husband to the undemanding Kristina, Marsh easily falls into the arms of a local siren and the patience of the long-sorrowing Kristina wears thin.

In San Francisco, a psychopathic gangster and his mentor retrieve heroin packages carried by unsuspecting travelers.

The two-man Laurel and Hardy Zoot Suit Band find themselves fronting a scam for "gasolene pills" in wartime oil-short America. They are however soon on the side of the angels helping recover $10,000 for an attractive young lady whose family have themselves been swindled.

Propaganda short film depicting the rise of Nazism in Germany and how political propaganda is similarly used in the United States. The film was made to make the case for the desegregation of the United States armed forces.

The Dancing Masters is a 1943 Laurel and Hardy feature film. The plot involves the team running a ballet school, and getting involved with an inventor. A young Robert Mitchum has an uncredited cameo role as a fraudulent insurance salesman.

The new boarder at a Washington, D.C. rooming house for women likes the fast life, but her recreational activities lead to her involvement in murder.

The story of a scheme to double-cross the syndicate and steal its money, and of a police commissioner '​s efforts to investigate homicides that take place as the scheme unfolds while also fighting corruption in the city government and police department.

When the available evidence in a murder case points to a young woman as the main suspect, her boyfriend, a police detective, arranges for a struggling songwriter who is playing piano in a bar to be blamed for the crime. The girl, knowing that neither she nor the piano player committed the murder, helps him to escape from the police dragnet and try to find the real killer.

A story of of the captain of an oil tanker during World War II, Captain Bart Manson, who rescues Katherine Hall when her ship is sunk by a German U-boat.

Poetry. Multimedia. This follow-up to Downing's 2005 collection DARK BRANDON is the filmic flip-side of that book's dizzying convergence of visual culture and syntactic shock. Drawing on 1960s Bollywood, 1980s Public Access poetry television, poorly rendered nature-documentary graphics, and other heights (and depths) of the moving image, these films, collected here, remain nothing less than poetry.

Michael D'Asaro was a world ranked saber fencer before becoming a collegiate championship coach. He was a man constantly in search of reinvention who taught life lessons through the medium of fencing.