Betty Compson

Among the pieces featured in Fragments are the final reel of John Ford's The Village Blacksmith (1922) and a glimpse at Emil Jannings in The Way of All Flesh (1927), the only Oscar®-winning performance in a lost film. Fragments also features clips from such lost films as Cleopatra (1917), starring Theda Bara; The Miracle Man (1919), with Lon Chaney; He Comes Up Smiling (1918), starring Douglas Fairbanks; an early lost sound film, Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), filmed in early Technicolor, and the only color footage of silent star Clara Bow, Red Hair (1928). The program is rounded out with interviews of film preservationists involved in identifying and restoring these films. Also featured is a new interview with Diana Serra Cary, best known as "Baby Peggy", one of the major American child stars of the silent era, who discusses one of the featured fragments, Darling of New York (1923).

Period music, film clips and newsreel footage combined into a visual exploration of the American entertainment industry during the Great Depression.

A blundering rookie reporter runs into some unexpected difficulty when he is assigned to cover the police beat.

Jewel thieves battle investigators.

Sach just lost his job as an assistant to a private detective, but he wasn't paid. Slip goes with him down to the detective's office to demand payment, but finds the office empty. A woman enters the office and mistakes Slip for the detective and convinces him to take on a case to find her sister after offering a $50 retainer.

A boy's tall tale about a gun puts his parents and school principal in jail.

Three women inherit a 10-ton truck and decide to go into business. Hi jinks ensue.

On the eve of his execution, a vice-rackets bigshot recalls his various exploits in crimes such as abortion and white slavery, in which he frequently operated under an alias.

Happily married for three years, Ann and David Smith live in New York. One morning Ann asks David if he had to do it over again, would he marry her? To her shock, he answers, "No". Later that day, they separately discover that, due to a legal complication, they are not legally married.

A pair of nightclub owners run a string of escort bureaus where men pay for the "companionship" of young women. The district attorney sends an undercover agent to infiltrate the bureaus.