New on Disc: 'The Big Heat' and more …

The Big Heat

Available via ScreenArchives.com
Twilight Time, Drama, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin, Alexander Scourby.
1953. As character motivation goes, the movie often cited as the best of Fritz Lang’s Hollywood output must have one of the most convincingly brass-tacks explanations of them all. Direct from having ruffled the feathers of an unnamed city’s “Mr. Big,” here’s hardheaded cop Glenn Ford engaged in a benign daddy-talk respite with his very young daughter just as mommy steps on the driveway gas pedal on her way to go pick up the babysitter. Hear mommy go “Ka-boom!” (and neighborhood property values presumably plummet). But really, the detective-sergeant Ford’s playing wasn’t all that happy about the way things were going even before the explosion. This is a movie where just about everyone in town is under the thumb of an outwardly clean power broker (Alexander Scourby), whose cotillion-type offspring and their friends (whose placid party Ford invades in one memorable scene) are above the grimy fray and likely all members of Eddie Fisher’s fan club. It’s significant that in The Big Heat’s most famous scene — Scourby henchman Lee Marvin throwing scalding liquid into the face of his supposed girlfriend Gloria Grahame — the wuss who’s ordered to get the poor woman to the hospital is the police commissioner. Sidney Boehm’s tough screenplay is a honey — so tight that this Columbia Pictures gem runs 90 minutes.
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Norman Mailer: The American

Cinema Libre, Documentary, $19.95 DVD, NR.
2010. Forever entertaining, though with less intimidation as he approached his eye-twinkling emeritus stage, proudly Brooklyn-raised Norman Mailer always seemed to be everywhere over the decades. As with writing peers James Jones and Irwin Shaw, Mailer’s formative old-school World War II experiences paved the way for a major postwar novel of “Great American” ambitions, but he was also enough of the then-burgeoning times to become a co-founder of The Village Voice. This biographical portrait by Joseph Mantegna (not the actor) makes 85 minutes go very quickly, though it doesn’t fully tap into how mesmerizing Mailer was to listen to — though, bonus extras that capture him on an array of subjects smooth this gap over some. Nor is it particularly explorative of what Mailer could do with nouns, verbs and adjectives (not that this is easy to do on film), emphasizing instead the writer’s psychological state throughout the years. On this level, the result hits at least a triple, thanks to the almost awe-inspiring on-camera participation of key wives.
Extras: It’s kind of eerie to see Mailer speak of the novel’s decline in importance to the general public — and to predict with a very clear crystal ball what mass computer usage would do to people.
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This Could Be the Night

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Comedy, $17.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Jean Simmons, Anthony Franciosa, Paul Douglas, Julie Wilson.
1957. Director Robert Wise’s mildly eccentric sweetheart of a nightclub comedy essentially plunks Snow White into a bookie den. Kinetically directed and shot (by the great Russell Harlan), Night is a kind of a fairly tale about a moonlighting schoolteacher (Jean Simmons) who takes an unlikely secretarial job at a Manhattan nightspot run by an Italian tomcat who lives over the club (Anthony Franciosa in his screen debut) and a gruff but soft-hearted Prohibition veteran (Paul Douglas) who wants to protect her from lowlifes.
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New on Disc: 'Pillow Talk' on Blu-ray and more …

Pillow Talk (Blu-ray)

Universal, Comedy, $39.98 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Tony Randall, Thelma Ritter.
1959. The first and arguably most prototypical Doris Day “career girl” comedy, Pillow Talk is still pretty funny and definitely a watershed movie, more so than I realized until I took a fresh look at the latest entry in Universal’s ongoing “100th Anniversary Collector’s Series.” Producer Ross Hunter and Day’s famously charlatan producer and husband, Marty Melcher, consciously orchestrated their attractive femme lead’s image-alteration at age 35, casting her as a self-sufficient New York career woman who didn’t need a man and dressing her in smart-to-this-day Jean Louis outfits. For a 1959 comedy that was once cutting edge, it was already dated at the time in one respect due to the shared-telephone-party-line hook that turns total strangers Day and Rock Hudson into adversaries. Though party lines still lingered around in smaller towns, they had pretty well become obsolete in places like New York City. With Hudson’s sexually active songwriter clogging their line with his femme pursuits, Day turns disgusted at him sight unseen — while he mistakenly characterizes her as a gotta-be prune. Then, Hudson actually sees her, changes his tune and quickly moves in on this aspired-to conquest. Pillow Talk established the romantic-comedy template in Hollywood until, say, 1967’s The Graduate.
Extras: It is noted on this release’s rousingly entertaining commentary (carried over from the 50th anniversary DVD, which itself is being reissued May 22) that then Universal-International had to give the picture a New York test run of a couple weeks’ duration to gauge how its then risqué content might play in podunk-ier markets.
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The Red House

Film Chest, Thriller, $15.98 Blu-ray/DVD combo, NR.
Stars Edward G. Robinson, Lon McCallister, Judith Anderson, Allene Roberts.
1947. Long among the more prominent residents of “Public Domain Hell,” this supremely moody backwoods melodrama nonetheless is well-remembered by film fanciers. But every time I tried to watch prints of House in the past, I was put off by the soundtrack’s grating tin, a problem not completely alleviated (but to a good degree, is) in this otherwise most welcome spiff-up by HD Cinema Classics, which is releasing the picture as a Blu-ray/DVD combo that also does fairly good justice to Bert Glennon’s (Stagecoach) cinematography. And there’s an added reason the soundtrack issue is paramount, thanks to the movie’s composer. It was Miklos Rozsa — contributing a fairly famous score at that — back when he was in his delirious The Killers/Spellbound noir mode before going all Robert Taylor/Chuck Heston “Biblical” in the following decade. The lead is Edward G. Robinson as a farmer who lives self-sufficiently out in the woods where even the school bus doesn’t go.
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Run for the Sun

Manufactured on demand via online retailers
MGM, Drama, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Richard Widmark, Jane Greer, Trevor Howard, Peter van Eyck.
1956. The script here — credited to Sun director Roy Boulting and screenwriting royalty Dudley Nichols — takes so many liberties with Richard Connell’s short story perennial The Most Dangerous Game that I didn’t think until this viewing that Sun was anything more than someone’s “unofficial” salvo. Widmark plays a boozy author-adventurer who, along with an undercover magazine reporter palming herself off as a stranded hellhole tourist, crash-land in a Central American fortress and must escape its master (Trevor Howard) through the jungle.
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New on Disc: 'The Organizer' and more …

The Organizer

Criterion, Drama, $19.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
In Italian with English subtitles.
Stars Marcello Mastroianni, Annie Girardot, Renato Salvatori.
1963. More than occasionally, Marcello Mastroianni exuded the soul of a character actor in the body of a handsome international leading man, and here we have one of those times, courtesy of a most harmonious collaborator with whom he’d scored a previous triumph. Director/co-scripter Mario Monicelli’s pro-labor rouser with mild comic undertones puts Mastroianni in wire-rim glasses that help make him look positively bohemian. Monicelli’s paean to everyday grunts is a notable look back at strikes and worker duress from the turn of the 19th century into the 20th. The brass in the story’s Turin, Italy, textile mill is a pretty rigid lot, even though the movie treats them with restraint and even tinges of humor. The workers are dissatisfied but have no form to their protest — and then suddenly, there’s this unkempt guy who gets off a train. He looks a little lost, which automatically works for the film. Because though he cajoles them into striking and offers tips on how to finesse a walkout, he is never exactly of them nor does he have universal support.
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Désirée (Blu-ray)

Available via ScreenArchives.com
Twilight Time, Drama, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Merle Oberon, Michael Rennie.
1954. By the time he got around to helping dramatize what we’re told here was Napoleon’s big-time consternation with his extended in-laws, Marlon Brando had blasted out of the big-screen gate with a consecutive streak of movies that were all rebellious or against-the-grain works of one kind or another: The Men, A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata!, Julius Caesar, The Wild One and On the Waterfront. The law of averages was working against him, so next in line came Désirée, which was pure Hollywood and about as rebellious as an Eddie Fisher 45. In many ways, this is an ideal title to be any distributor’s “limited release” because there’s a limited but enthusiastic coterie of fans out there (and they know who they are) likely to covet the latest modest-in-number offering from Twilight Time (it’s limited to a run of 3,000 units). These would include Napoleon junkies, those who like the “bodice-ripper” genre in general (though unless I missed something, no bodice gets literally ripped here) and Brando completists, some of whom have always cut this one-time box office hit a break. The print here is staggeringly good — one of the best Blu-ray renderings of a vintage color title I have ever seen. Based on a popular novel of the day, Désirée not only observes still-studied world events solely through the eyes of the title-designated lover or lover wannabe (played by Jean Simmons) but also conveys key information to us through one of the hoariest devices there is: voice-overed passages from her diary.
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Easy Living

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $17.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Victor Mature, Lizabeth Scott, Lucille Ball, Sonny Tufts.
1949. This pro football movie originated as an Irwin Shaw story; was adapted by The Bad and the Beautiful’s Oscar-winning screenwriter, Charles Schnee; was directed by Out of the Past/Cat People’s Jacques Tourneur; employs footage of the Los Angeles Rams; features Lucille Ball in a straight role; and casts a pre-TV Jack Paar as a team publicist named “Scoop.” If it isn’t exactly high drama, it is a 1940s sports yarn that’s fairly grown-up.
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New on Disc: 'American Experience: Jesse Owens' and more …

American Experience: Jesse Owens

Street 5/1
PBS, Documentary, $24.99 DVD.
2012. Jesse Owens’ down days dealing with racism in America get covered here, but the bulk deals with a sharecropper’s son who came out of Alabama and honed his natural athletic skills in Cleveland before showing up Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
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Pony Express

Olive, Western, $24.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Charlton Heston, Rhonda Fleming.
1953. Pony Express is a splendid-looking crock about Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok teaming up to help launch mail delivery’s one-time best friend against the opposition of California separatists.
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The Jayhawkers

Olive, Western, $24.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Jeff Chandler, Fess Parker.
1959. This oddball project deals with the anti-slavery guerillas who did a lot of burning and rampaging in pre-Civil War Kansas.
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The Strawberry Statement

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $17.95 DVD, ‘R.’
Stars Bruce Davison, Kim Darby, Bud Cort.
1970. This manufactured-on-demand version of the adaptation of James Simon Kunen’s book about student protests includes a second disc containing a “European cut” that runs about six minutes longer.
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New on Disc: 'Cinema Verite' and more …

Cinema Verite

Street 4/24
HBO, Drama, $19.97 DVD, $24.99 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Diane Lane, Tim Robbins, James Gandolfini.
2011. Though it went far beyond your everyday landmark, filmmaker Craig Gilbert’s mammoth documentary An American Family has never gotten an official home release. But last August, PBS’s home entertainment arm did, at least, issue a two-hour DVD commemorating and excerpting the 1973 nonfiction miniseries, which in full form ran six times longer during a three-month air span while pretty well originating what is now familiar as “reality TV.” Santa Barbara’s once instantly famous Loud family in 1971 agreed to allow a crew to film their every move (within merciful biological limitations). At any running time, the showstopper scene/documentarian’s dream was an ambushing divorce proceeding launched by mother Pat against philandering father Bill after filming had gotten underway. This typically polished HBO dramatic treatment about the family’s experience deals in part with what the camera didn’t capture (one senses some creative license here). The Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated result is both compelling and arguably a little gratuitous — yet, in one gotta-see regard, absolutely amazing. Somehow, with no obvious applications of putty or latex, the subtle makeup manages to make leads Diane Lane and Tim Robbins look like both their regular selves and, to a chilling degree, like the real-life subjects they’re playing — simultaneously. Both actors have the Loud speech patterns and body language down dead-on as well, so this is a movie that can make you blink a lot if you’ve seen any portion of the original.
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Wilder Napalm

Manufactured on demand via online retailers
Sony Pictures, Comedy, $20.95 DVD, ‘PG-13’ for thematic elements, language and some sensuality.
Stars Debra Winger, Dennis Quaid, Arliss Howard, Jim Varney.
1993. Usually, it’s a putdown when someone says, “What were they on when they dreamed this one up?” But I’ll make an exception for what has to be one of screen history’s few farces about telekinetic pyromania (or close), a major critical/commercial catastrophe that has been one of my movie pets since day one. I will say only that it belongs on any definite list of films about sibling rivalry — and that it may be the funniest movie I’ve ever seen about somebody possessing a rare or even amazingly unique ability who can’t get rich from it and is regarded as a freak by most members of society for this very skill. This is the situation that faces two brothers who can start fires whenever they want. One of them (aggressive Dennis Quaid) is willing to promote his talent — while the other (Arliss Howard) is wearily resigned and moonlighting as a volunteer fireman. That the latter is wed to a woman the other covets (Debra Winger) has a way of nurturing animosity. Napalm remains a cult item looking for its cult.
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The Youngest Profession

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Comedy, $17.99 DVD, NR.
Stars Virginia Weidler, Edward Arnold, Agnes Moorehead.
1943. This half-labored, half-cute curiosity is a comedy about autograph seekers who toiled in a much more innocent time, before the practice became a big-business concern and even a pathological one. Along the way, we also take away a curious view of upper middle-class New York living by people who seem almost completely divorced from World War II.
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New on Disc: 'A Streetcar Named Desire' Blu-ray and more …

A Streetcar Named Desire (Blu-ray)

Warner, Drama, $34.99 Blu-ray, ‘PG.’
Stars Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden.
1951. The Tennessee Williams-Elia Kazan screen adaptation of their preceding Streetcar stage success still seems contemporary, or at least timeless. Streetcar was filmed predominantly on two sets with predominantly low-key lighting. This may be why the new Warner Blu-ray doesn’t obviously jump out as a notable DVD-to-BD upgrade the same way as Fort Apache or Citizen Kane did. In addition to chronicling the censorship problems the screen version had to endure both before and even after production, this upgrade-from-DVD naturally includes the three-minutes plus of sexually unacceptable footage (in Legion of Decency terms) that was removed before the film could be released — though restored in the ’90s after it was discovered in some unmarked cans.
Extras: The Blu-ray carries over the extras from 2006’s deluxe two-DVD set, which covered the bases even down to containing Marlon Brando’s screen test (which comes from something other than the play) and Richard Schickel’s feature-length director interview, Elia Kazan: A Director’s Journey, which goes a long way toward making us see why Kazan was the greatest actors’ director ever.
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Demetrius and the Gladiators (Blu-ray)

Available at ScreenArchives.com
Twilight Time, Drama, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Victor Mature, Susan Hayward, Michael Rennie, Ernest Borgnine.
1954. According to Julie Kirgo’s liner notes, Fox chief Darryl Zanuck had this follow-up in the works while The Robe was in production — which goes a long way to explain how the first movie could come out in September of one year with the sequel showing up by the following June. The Robe’s title red apparel, which Christ had worn at Calvary, is again a key plot point — making emperor Caligula rabid to obtain it in his quest for personal immortality. Some of what we get is lumbering in that early Scope religious-pic kind of way, but the cast is full of fun faces, led by Victor Mature returning as Demetrius, who is sent to the arena after being arrested for defending the robe. For a Twilight Time release, this version is somewhat of a disappointment — though by default, it still is the best one I’ve seen since the ‘50s. Visually, the source material here isn’t great — and this is true even if you don’t compare it to Fox’s handsome Blu-ray of The Robe (which underwent a costly studio restoration).
Extras: The Blu-ray includes an isolated Franz Waxman score track.
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The Sky’s the Limit

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Musical, $17.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Fred Astaire, Joan Leslie, Robert Benchley, Robert Ryan.
1943. Fred Astaire, the most dapper of all screen history’s dancers, is cast as a nationally famous bomber pilot first seen shooting down Japanese planes in World War II. The bulk of the picture has to do with furloughed Fred striving to keep his true identity away from a pert photographer he is trying to woo without any fuss. This is a minor affair with compensations — in this case, a cute leading lady (Joan Leslie) and the surprise appearance of two introduced pop tune standards by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer from what is otherwise not a particularly voluminous score. Most movies could take their place in history for having simply introduced “My Shining Hour,” but near the end, Astaire performs a solo number of what turned out to become the greatest saloon song of all time: “One for My Baby.”
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New on Disc: 'Come Blow Your Horn' and more …

Come Blow Your Horn

Olive, Comedy, $24.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Frank Sinatra, Tony Bill, Lee J. Cobb, Barbara Rush.
1963. There’s not exactly an endless bounty of movies where Frank Sinatra plays a guy who all but cowers in front of his bellowing (and possibly Jewish) father — especially when it’s Frank at 47 playing someone in his later 30s. For this reason alone, we’re looking at one of the more tolerably amusing (and also the first) in a string of anti-cinematic comedies fashioned from plays and original screenplays by Neil Simon, a cottage industry that stretched well into the 1980s. As a playboy in the final throes of a civilization in which men still wore hats, Sinatra is cast as an older brother who is paying the tab on an elaborate Manhattan pad. As the supposed heir apparent whose heart isn’t really in the family artificial fruit business, he has what seem like a million phones, a huge fireplace, a big TV screen for its day and … twin beds? It’s even more of a mind-melter when his 21-year-old kid brother (Tony Bill, then getting a huge career break) breaks away from their smothering folks to become a roommate. Except for Lee J. Cobb and Molly Picon as their parents, the movie is kind of an in-house exercise to provide work for Sinatra’s friends. It’s fun seeing Sinatra in this kind of role, though the few real laughs come from Cobb, an actor not usually identified with comedy.
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Scarlet Street (Blu-ray)

Kino Lorber, Drama, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea.
1945. The Library of Congress/Blu-ray salvation job of this top-tier contender for Fritz Lang’s best American film is fairly profound, particularly given that this is one Lang-in-Hollywood production where little was otherwise compromised. By this we mean budget-wise, as got to be the case later in the director’s career, by the era’s hardworking censors (though, indeed, some of them did try). The Universal makeup department grayed Edward G. Robinson’s hair some to assist him in playing a henpecked husband who simply wants to get away from the grind and paint — though his character has labored as a cashier for so long that he’s presented with a commemorative pocketwatch for years of service as the story begins. It’s obvious at once that Robinson is being taken for a ride once we see him rescue a trashy, flashy Joan Bennett from a street beating by a supposed robber (Dan Duryea) who really isn’t. The source novel was published in America as The Poor Sap — and as much as Hollywood would allow in those days, it’s pretty obvious that Bennett’s character is what was once called a lady of leisure (far too much of it, as we come to see), with Duryea’s character her pimp. Dudley Nichols’ beautifully sanded Scarlet Street script depends a lot on twists, to say nothing of an ironic boomeranging capper that ranks with the era’s best. Visually, the movie is a characteristic Lang stunner, as bedrock as black-and-white noir gets. The transfer here is spectacular: You can almost shave in the glisten off this baby.
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The Steel Trap

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Joseph Cotten, Teresa Wright.
1952. This primer in what can go wrong after stealing a cool million in 1952 dollars from your own bank stars Joseph Cotten as an assistant bank manager who grabs the Federal Reserve deposit loot and takes off with his vaguely suspicious spouse (Teresa Wright) for Brazil. The film reunited the stars of Alfred Hitchcock’s said-to-have-been personal favorite Shadow of a Doubt from 1943.
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New on Disc: 'Who's Minding the Store?' and more …

Who’s Minding the Store?

Olive, Comedy, $24.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Jerry Lewis, Jill St. John, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Walston.
1963. This fifth of eight Jerry Lewis vehicles directed by one-time Warner animator Frank Tashlin would probably be just as happy without what is, charitably speaking, the limited plotting that it has. Lewis plays a guy in his mid-20s at a time when, in real life, he was either a late 36 or early 37. Cast as a “Norman,” Lewis somehow has managed to attract one of the consummately built babes of the Hollywood day — Jill St. John — whose character pretends to be a department store elevator operator when she is really the daughter of the snob (Agnes Moorehead) who owns the building. In Looney Tunes fashion, Tashlin and his star are much more interested having a grand time staging the physical mayhem that destroys many of the store’s displays. You know this is bound to happen when Norman gets hired as a clerk, and mom Moorehead (working with lackey Ray Walston) plots to sabotage his every move.
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Blessed Event

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Comedy, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Lee Tracy, Mary Brian, Dick Powell.
1932. Until the classic Sweet Smell of Success took the first splashy swipe at a fictional Walter Winchell, he had the ability to make the powerful quake if they had skeletons in their closets — or if he even thought they did. Winchell also ended up in a few movies, usually playing himself or doing voiceover narration (think of his bang-up job on TV’s “The Untouchables”). Blessed Event, though, is a play-to-film that was fashioned on him. Cast as this transparent variation (a columnist named Alvin Roberts) is Lee Tracy, who had few peers in playing irreverent wisecrackers in the 1930s. Tracy was one of the era’s foremost “brash” performers in a screen era full of them, and Event is probably the premier vehicle from his youth or relative youth (he never looked young). Event is also one of the definitive newspaper movies from that same ink-stained era, though it is so contemporary in its attitude — in its heart, it’s a love song to the TMZ kind of ambush — it could probably be remade today. Tracy/Roberts takes over a New York rag’s column when its regular writer is on vacation, soon filling it with coy allusions to “blessed events”  — which are those cute little bundles that either come along without benefit of clergy or at least too soon after shotgun ceremonies involving celebrities or the otherwise well-heeled.
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The Big Night

Manufactured on demand via select online retailers
Fox/MGM, Drama, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars John Barrymore Jr., Preston Foster, Joan Lorring.
1951. This is the fifth and final Hollywood movie that Wisconsin-born Joseph Losey directed (in pretty much anti-Hollywood style) before he took refuge in British cinema during the HUAC witch hunts. Night is almost all nocturnal mood and reminds me a little of some of the Brit black-and-whiters Losey made in the late ’50s before his mostly uneven career took off a decade later. For reasons that have more to do with curiosity factor than what’s actually on the screen, it is quite a curio. The lead is John Barrymore Jr. (real-life father of Drew), and he’s playing the earliest teen I can ever recall on screen where an authority figure tells him to get a haircut. And then there’s the early scene that sets up the rest: The teen’s saloon-owner father (Preston Foster) getting flogged with the cane of a limping newspaper sportswriter (Howard St. John).
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New on Disc: 'Corman's World' and more …

Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel

Street 3/27/12
Anchor Bay, Documentary, B.O. $0.003 million, $26.98 DVD, $29.99 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for some violent images, nudity and language.
2011. Even if he were nothing more than the marketer who managed to book Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers into drive-ins when he theatrically distributed it through New World Pictures, Roger Corman would be a character worth endless discussion. But then here also are Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, the late production designer Polly Platt, Peter Fonda and even The Man himself — Jack Nicholson — talking of how much the producer-director-distributor and still-handsome guy did for their careers. I have good memories of Christian Blackwood’s Roger Corman: Hollywood’s Wild Angel, but a lot of time has passed, and perspective has obviously solidified since that earlier documentary played festivals and specialized theaters in the late 1970s. Alex Stapleton’s fresher look is a needed update because the industry began changing around the time Blackwood’s portrait began circulating. The clip reel here covers the bases going back to the ’50s, and the interviews are so plentiful that at least three subjects have died since Stapleton recorded them (Platt, director George Hickenlooper and David Carradine). Stapleton’s great coup was landing Nicholson, who isn’t exactly ubiquitous on talk shows.
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The War Room

Criterion, Documentary, $29.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-ray, NR.
1993. An even more rambunctiously scrappy view after 19 years, the Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker look at the “new breed” strategists who got Bill Clinton elected president might have ended up being borderline unreleaseable because there were times early on in the ’92 campaign (Gennifer Flowers, anyone?) when it looked as if Clinton might end up in third place. Indeed, it is The War Room that let the world know just how much of a savvy jester campaign manager James Carville was — turning him into an instant media star (if not quite matinee idol) and giving no small boost as well to the subsequent public-eye careers of colleagues George Stephanopoulos and Paul Begala. As confirmed in a 43-minute reunion of the filmmaking principals included as an extra, the film has always left an impression that the crew missed or didn’t have access to a lot of key material. The narrative is so tightly spun that it all but ignores one incredible story: that Carville and George H. W. Bush campaign heavyweight Mary Matalin were falling for each other, but this missing material is covered by the included 2008 Showtime sequel Return to the War Room.
Extras: Also included is a good contextual essay by Louis Menard; pollster Stan Greenberg (a presence in the film) explaining the evolution of his profession; and a 25-minute clip from a discussion that C-SPAN aired in which Clinton himself talks about the run up to higher office.
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No Man of Her Own

Street 3/27/12
Olive, Drama, $24.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Barbara Stanwyck, John Lund, Jane Cowl, Lyle Bettger.
1950. Barbara Stanwyck plays a pregnant single woman who poses as another pregnant woman who is killed with her husband in a train wreck. Hit-and-miss director Mitchell Leisen, who could be quite capable when he hit, handles the action very well, and the yarn (which rates a pretty decent print here) plays much better than it sounds.
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New on Disc: 'To Catch a Thief' Blu-ray and more …

To Catch a Thief (Blu-ray)

Paramount, Thriller, $22.99 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, Jessie Royce Landis.
1955. Even with Alfred Hitchcock behind the camera with longtime right-hand Robert Burks, it’s doubtful that his famed French Riviera jewel-heist confection would engender the same affection it still does today — or have the home entertainment shelf-life it has had — if the stars had been different. Thief isn’t Vertigo, or Rear Window or Notorious or even the also-light North by Northwest because, as many have noted, the oft-termed master of suspense doesn’t offer much suspense here. Judged purely as a romantic comedy that throws in a few suspenseful elements against magnificent scenic values, I think Thief rates humongously high on the all-time scale of hetero male/female cinema, particularly since a tanned Cary Grant and a tanned Grace Kelly are the greatest-looking pairing in the history of movies. Technicolor Thief was shot in VistaVision — a process that, visually speaking, is as good as movies ever got.
Extras: The Blu-ray imports the DVD extras, with a commentary by a Hitchcock historian, a censorship featurette and other behind-the-scenes documentaries.
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Swamp Water (Blu-ray)

Available at ScreenArchives.com
Twilight Time, Drama, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Walter Brennan, Walter Huston, Dana Andrews, Anne Baxter.
1941. To even launch the first of five films making up the uneven but at times unjustly shrugged-off collection of Jean Renoir’s American work, this greatest of French directors (at least up to the New Wave — and arguably beyond it) didn’t just have to flee the Vichy threat in his homeland. There also were those cinematically tone-deaf critics. Upon landing, a filmmaker renowned in part for his pastoral sensibilities found himself in the middle of that rural American milieu in which 20th Century Fox productions often excelled. But this picture feels different from many of these other backwoods Foxes for reasons that have always eluded me — until I read Julie Kirgo’s notes on another crisp Twilight Time release from the Fox library. To my surprise, this was a rare case where the studio sent a crew to the story’s real setting — Georgia’s Okefenokee swamp — though before we extrapolate too much from this, the location shooting was brief, and Dana Andrews was the only actor who went along for the ride. But symbolically, it must have been enough: Even the studio footage doesn’t particularly have that studio look. Water’s story hook always got to me: a guy, falsely accused of murder, forced to live off the land (better make that muck) because the local law is too intimidated by water moccasins and other elements to pursue him all that vigorously.
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Thirteen Women

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy.
1932. This movie probably wouldn’t be worth talking about here if the cast had gone on to become no more famous than say, the third-most prominent TV weathergirl in ’60s Duluth, Minn. But I cannot tell you the last movie I saw with an acting lineup that so made my eyes pop out of my head like someone in a Tex Avery cartoon. What we have here is a ridiculous plot propelled by Myrna Loy, whose exotic character hatches a revenge plot against the now-older members of a seminary sorority who once made her life miserable. The women then start meeting their doom in Agatha Christie Ten Little Indians style.
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