Sunday, Nov. 19, 2006
6 DVD Sets To Get
By RICHARD CORLISS
ESSENTIAL ART HOUSE: 50 YEARS OF JANUS FILMS
In the '50s and '60s, Janus was a leading distributor of foreign films--such instant classics as Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, with Bibi Andersson (above), and Franc,ois Truffaut's Jules and Jim. Janus later spawned the Criterion Collection, the ultra-classy DVD outfit. Now the child is paying tribute to the parent company, with a 13-lb. 12-oz., foot-wide box containing 50 discs of wonderful films once handled by Janus, plus a 240-page, lavishly illustrated book. With important works by Jean Renoir, Sergei Eisenstein and Michelangelo Antonioni, this package really is essential--the perfect starter set for a full film education.
LUBITSCH IN BERLIN
His admirers called it "the Lubitsch touch"--a deft, vigorous approach to comedy that graced Hollywood romances like Trouble in Paradise, Ninotchka and Heaven Can Wait. But before Ernst Lubitsch arrived in the U.S., he had helped establish the infant German cinema as a beacon of sophisticated drama and innovative technique. Kino, the top DVD label for silent films, offers a four-disc sampler of the director's early work, all from 1919 to 1921, including lavish historical dramas (Anna Boleyn), mountain films (The Wildcat, with a very feral Pola Negri) and delightful comedies. Best is The Oyster Princess, "a grotesque in four acts," in which the director sets a pinwheeling series of sight gags in motion like a vaudevillian with his spinning plates. He's not yet working at his Hollywood level, but he's getting there.
PRESTON STURGES: THE FILMMAKER COLLECTION
Hollywood once believed in the division of labor: writers wrote, and directors directed. Sturges, who did both with ease, changed all that in a whirlwind few years (1940-44) at Paramount, where he auteured an incredible eight films--amazing in their quantity and quality. Seven of those comedies (all but The Miracle of Morgan's Creek) are amassed here as a reminder of how fast, reckless and smart movies can be. Sturges' social satire fizzes in The Great McGinty and Hail the Conquering Hero. But the pearl is The Lady Eve, with con artiste Barbara Stanwyck seducing naive Henry Fonda on the high seas and, just for fun, doing it again as a different woman on land.
FORBIDDEN HOLLYWOOD COLLECTION, VOL. 1
The precode era was a rowdy four-year span (1930-34) when the movies had just learned to talk and were mouthing off about what Sturges called Topic A: sex. This liberated period featured dozens of sagas of tough broads on the make or on the skids. Three of the best are collected here. Mae Clarke plays a world-weary prostitute in Waterloo Bridge. Jean Harlow is an unrepentant gold digger, leaving broken hearts and two corpses in her wake, in Red Headed Woman. And the great Stanwyck, as sharp as a slap, sleeps her way to the top in the all-time sleazerrific Baby Face, now available in the original version, which was too hot for the censors.
JAMES BOND: THE ULTIMATE COLLECTION, VOLS. 1-4
Now in its mid-40s (it made its debut in 1962), the movies' longest-running series faces middle age by both toning up, with the muscular new Casino Royale, and looking back, with this multi-DVD pack of all 20 of the "official" films, with the first five of the superspies. The Bond tropes may be as codified--and believable--as Kabuki, but the films can still shake and stir you.
MARTIN & LEWIS COLLECTION: VOL. 1
In the early '50s, they owned show business: TV, nightclubs, records, stage shows and, of course, movies. The duo that one mogul called the organ grinder (Dean Martin) and the monkey (Jerry Lewis) created inventive comedy out of a tense and bizarrely intimate palship. This set has the first eight of the 16 movies they made as a team. No masterpieces here, but each film summons up the time when Dean did his sexy crooning and Jer ran splendidly amuck.