5 Cinematic Couplings That Really Have Legs

By RICHARD CORLISS

MARLENE DIETRICH: THE GLAMOUR COLLECTION

Josef von Sternberg was a famous Hollywood auteur in 1930 and Dietrich a minor Berlin actress when he cast her as Lola, the crass chanteuse of The Blue Angel. Just like that, a star was born: an anti-Garbo who viewed life and love as a series of awful amusements. In their seven films together--of which a terrific trio (Morocco, Blonde Venus and The Devil Is a Woman) are included here--Sternberg swathed Dietrich's wry sexuality in silk, feathers, a gorilla suit and his camera's soft-focus devotion. As his films got more deliriously abstract, she got restless, and the two parted in 1935. Their legacy is these films: a uniquely frilly and profound record of an artist's obsession with his model.

THE ADVENTURES OF ANTOINE DOINEL

In 1959, when he made The 400 Blows--an instant astonishment that set the French New Wave in motion--Franc,ois Truffaut had no idea of following his little hero, a 14-year-old played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, through 20 more years of seriocomic escapades. But the end of that film, a freeze-frame of Antoine on a beach, left Truffaut and his audiences asking, What next? The callow charisma of young Leaud also begged to be used again. What followed was a lovely short film (Antoine and Colette) and three features (Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board and Love on the Run) that fleshed out Antoine's early maturity--or, rather, his prolonged, love-addled adolescence. This Criterion boxed set exhaustively documents the bond between an endearingly quirky actor and the most likable great director in movie history.

THE INGMAR BERGMAN SPECIAL EDITION DVD COLLECTION

Among the superlatives that might be tossed his way, Bergman was surely the most probing writer of women's roles, the most sympathetic director of actresses. Harriet and Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom caught fire in the Swede's existential dramas. He wrote searing roles for them; they gave body and soul to his ideas, becoming for a time his muses, often his lovers. Bergman's last, most lasting actress liaison was with the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann. Her soft features and stern resolve inspired a string of stern masterworks, starting with 1966's Persona, in which she played a mute actress. Ullmann was no mere Trilby to Bergman's Svengali. She became his eloquent interpreter, later directing two of his screenplays. Saraband (2003), with Bergman again directing and Ullmann starring, marks nearly 40 years of an exemplary partnership that began with the five films in this fine collection.

AKIRA KUROSAWA: FOUR SAMURAI CLASSICS

The chemistry between actor and director--the expression of one person's vision through another's physical force--was primal in the work of Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, whose lithe, feral magnetism animated the great Japanese director's most vigorous parables. The titles in this Criterion package are legendary: The Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo and Sanjuro. These ferocious epics were often adapted into better-known films in the West--The Magnificent Seven, A Fistful of Dollars, Star Wars--none of which matched the artistry and machismo of the originals.

JOHN WAYNE JOHN FORD FILM COLLECTION

From 1939 to 1966, the Duke and Pappy made 14 films together. This package contains eight of their burliest, including The Searchers, that towering, troubling essay on race, sex and Manifest Destiny. It also has Wayne's starmaking turn in Stagecoach and the late-'40s cavalry films Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. All these westerns constitute a romantic first draft of American expansionist history, with Wayne as the surly Moses, urging his settlers on toward the promised land.