American Experience: Alone on the Ice (1999)

At one time explorers were celebrities. Admiral Richard Byrd was considered one of the greatest, a media-certified hero with three New York ticker-tape parades in his honor. This PBS documentary examines the controversy around this self-promoting scientist, inventor and aviation pioneer. In 1926 Byrd was hailed as the first person to fly over the north pole, a claim some now doubt. Three years later he completed a 1,600-mile flight across the south pole.

In 1934 he launched a second expedition to Antarctica to map territory and conduct scientific research. He lived alone for four months in a hut under arduous conditions. When he had to be rescued near death, it became an international media event. Host David McCullough chronicles Byrd's adventures, combining archival film footage and photographs with interviews with polar experts and some of the expeditions' survivors.

Follow the River (1995)

America's conquest of its indigenous peoples was longer and more closely fought than many of us imagine, with dangerous consequences for the early settlers. This TV movie, based on James Alexander Thom's novel, dramatizes a real-life story set during these conflicts in 1755. Mary Ingles is 23 and expecting her third child when the Shawnees raid her Virginia Colony settlement in the Blue Ridge Mountains, kidnapping her and killing others. (An estimated 2,000 homesteaders like her were abducted during the French and Indian Wars.)

Wildcat, the Shawnee chief, admires Mary and proposes marriage. But she chooses to remain faithful to her husband, Will, back at the settlement even though she's not sure he's still alive. She escapes with her sister, Bettie, and struggles her way to safety across 1,000 miles of uncharted Ohio Valley wilderness. The action revolves around the appealing heroine's indomitable spirit.

Henry V (1944)

Kenneth Branagh's 1989 adaptation of Shakes-peare's epic portrait of kingship emphasized “the fog of war” and its senseless violence.

Laurence Olivier's earlier version of Henry V reflects the more straightforward patriotism of his era, World War II when Britain was under attack. Imaginatively structured, Olivier's film begins with a 17th-century staging of the play at the Globe Theater. The proscenium slowly disappears as the stylized sets give way to realistic battle recreations.

The pageantry and language are glorious.