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The show that first defined the Broadway musical has never come to the screen intact, despite three tries. But take this splashy 1951 MGM extravaganza on its own terms, and it boggles the eyes. Not to mention the ears: The Kern-Hammerstein score includes some staples of the American songbook, such as "Make Believe," "After the Ball," and "Can't Help Lovin' That Man." Perhaps a riverboat ...

Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
Starring: Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, Howard Keel, Joe E. Brown, Marge Champion
Directed By: George Sidney

Rock Hudson became a beefcake star playing a self-absorbed, thrill-chasing millionaire playboy in the first of Douglas Sirk's glossy Technicolor melodramas. In a classic example of the wicked machinations of soap opera fate, Hudson's showboating antics kill the most saintly man in motion-picture history and stalk his newlywed widow (Jane Wyman), driving her into an accident that leaves her blind. ...

Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Starring: Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Barbara Rush, Agnes Moorehead, Otto Kruger
Directed By: Douglas Sirk

Manufacturer: MGM (Warner)
Starring: Grace Kelly, Alec Guinness, Louis Jourdan, Agnes Moorehead, Jessie Royce Landis
Directed By: Charles Vidor

One of the unlikeliest pop stars of the 1960s gets the bio treatment in The Singing Nun, a fictionalized account of the Belgian nun dubbed "Soeur Sourire" (Sister Smile). The cute tone is regrettable, and it's difficult to adjust to Debbie Reynolds in a habit, but the movie isn't bad for its kind. It's the light version of The Nun's Story, with Hollywood conflicts substituted for ...

Manufacturer: MGM (Warner)
Starring: Debbie Reynolds, Ricardo Montalban, Greer Garson, Agnes Moorehead, Chad Everett
Directed By: Henry Koster

Made two years after Citizen Kane, this 1943 version of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre sure looks like star Orson Welles muscled his way behind the camera much of the time. (In fact, costar Joan Fontaine--who plays the title character--has maintained that Welles methodically did just that every day on the set.) Not that the film's official director was a hack: Robert Stevenson, who ...

Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox
Starring: Orson Welles, Joan Fontaine, Margaret O'Brien, Peggy Ann Garner, John Sutton
Directed By: Robert Stevenson

Arguably the greatest of American films, Orson Welles's 1941 masterpiece, made when he was only 26, still unfurls like a dream and carries the viewer along the mysterious currents of time and memory to reach a mature (if ambiguous) conclusion: people are the sum of their contradictions, and can't be known easily. Welles plays newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, taken from his mother as a boy ...

Manufacturer: RKO Radio Pictures
Starring: William Alland, Georgia Backus, Fortunio Bonanova, Sonny Bupp, Ray Collins

Manufacturer: MGM (Warner)
Starring: Edward G. Robinson, Margaret O'Brien, James Craig, Frances Gifford, Agnes Moorehead
Directed By: Roy Rowland

Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Starring: John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendáriz, Agnes Moorehead, Thomas Gomez
Directed By: Dick Powell

Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman were so successful in Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession that they reteamed for this, his first melodrama masterpiece. Young hunk Rock is a strapping son of mother nature, a gardener who woos middle-aged, middle class widow Wyman to the snooty disapproval of her conservative social circle and embarrassment of her self-centered children. Wyman discovers a new ...

Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Starring: Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorehead, Conrad Nagel, Virginia Grey
Directed By: Douglas Sirk

James Stewart and June Allyson enjoyed one of their gee-whiz pairings in The Stratton Story, a baseball biopic with an easy swing. Stewart plays Monty Stratton, who, according to the film, is a country boy plowing the back forty when a transient scout (Frank Morgan) discovers him and hooks him up with the Chicago White Sox. Stratton has a couple of great years, only to be accidentally shot ...

Manufacturer: MGM (Warner)
Starring: James Stewart, June Allyson, Frank Morgan, Agnes Moorehead, Bill Williams
Directed By: Sam Wood