Oskar Matzerath is a very unusual boy. Refusing to leave the womb until promised a tin drum by his mother, Agnes, Oskar is reluctant to enter a world he sees as filled with hypocrisy and injustice, and vows on his third birthday to never grow up. Miraculously, he gets his wish. As the Nazis rise to power in Danzig, Oskar wills himself to remain a child, beating his tin drum incessantly and screaming in protest at the chaos surrounding him.
A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.
In 1927 Hollywood, a silent film production company and cast make a difficult transition to sound.
A former Prohibition-era Jewish gangster returns to the Lower East Side of Manhattan over thirty years later, where he once again must confront the ghosts and regrets of his old life.
Set in 1929, a political boss and his advisor have a parting of the ways when they both fall for the same woman.
A man who was a confidant of Adolf Hitler dies and leaves a fortune to make amends for his Nazi past—but his son has to search the world to find it.
Semi-true story of the Hollywood murder that occurred at a star-studded gathering aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht in 1924.
England, 1926. An American journalist looks for mystery writer Agatha Christie when she suddenly disappears without explanation, leaving no trace.
Millie Dillmount, a fearless young lady fresh from Salina, Kansas, determined to experience Life, sets out to see the world in the rip-roaring Twenties. With high spirits and wearing one of those new high hemlines, she arrives in New York to test the "modern" ideas she had been reading about back in Kansas: "I've taken the girl out of Kansas. Now I have to take Kansas out of the girl!"
A lighthouse keeper and his wife living off the coast of Western Australia raise a baby they rescue from an adrift rowboat.
The hidden memoir of an elderly woman confined to a mental hospital reveals the history of her passionate yet tortured life, and of the religious and political upheavals in Ireland during the 1920s and 30s.