New on Disc: 'Journey to the Center of the Earth' and more …

Journey to the Center of the Earth (Blu-ray)

Available via ScreenArchives.com
Twilight Time, Adventure, $29.95 Blu-ray, ‘G.’
Stars Pat Boone, James Mason, Arlene Dahl, Diane Baker, Thayer David.
1959. My stock line about the summer of 1959’s biggest family blockbuster has always been that it’s the one movie that enables one to compare and contrast the acting disciplines of Pat Boone and James Mason. This version of Journey to the Center of the Earth’s true auteurs are its then cutting-edge effects, the production design and Bernard Herrmann’s typically wonderful score (offered as an isolated audio track), which — appropriate to the subject matter — hits some very low ranges as Verne’s subterranean trekkers take on buried-deep salt repositories, toadstools tough as leather and prehistoric creatures with porn-star tongues. But to give the cast its due as well, even Boone is more than tolerable here — and a great deal more capable playing a Scottish university student than his onetime pop rival Elvis would have been. Mason, of course, is fantastic as Prof. Oliver Underbrook, who spearheads the attempt to go underground against a deceitful scientific competitor and after an added attempt by a predecessor has turned the latter’s wife (Arlene Dahl) into a widow.
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Run for Cover

Olive, Western, $24.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars James Cagney, Viveca Lindfors, John Derek, Ernest Borgnine.
1955. Sandwiched between Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause in the spotty but (in seven or eight instances) glorious career of director Nicholas Ray, Paramount’s indoor/outdoor Western from the early days of VistaVision isn’t too peggable as anyone’s auteur work, though it does have a couple things going for it. One, of course, is VistaVision itself, which adds a few hundred sacks of currency to a film set in New Mexico but shot to significant degree in glorious Colorado. In fact, when the picture was re-issued in 1962, its title was changed to Colorado.  This is one of the most satisfactory VistaVision replications that Olive Films has issued to date, and Cover’s handsome visage is its No. 1 selling point. The other key virtue is seeing James Cagney in his peak career-year of middle-age; he takes well to the mentor role his character is asked to take on — when he struggles to improve the lot of a callow youngster (John Derek) who’s been shot by an overzealous sheriff (Ray Teal, in the kind of dim-bulb role he always owned).
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Bright Road

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $17.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Dorothy Dandridge, Philip Hepburn, Harry Belafonte.
1953. Louis B. Mayer wanted the studio of Andy Hardy to tell screen stories viewed through rose-colored glasses, while Dore Schary (who in 1951 became Mayer’s MGM successor — and not without rancor) preferred projects that reflected changing times and more expansive audience tastes. This not un-engaging footnote in African-American cinema is something of an oddball because it seems to combine both approaches, having been shot early in the latter’s Metro regime (late summer, 1952). An all-black cast (with one exception) gets plunked into a schoolroom that totally oozes rose-colored sensibilities — and the result was released a mere year before the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education decision. In one of her first major movie lead roles, singer Dorothy Dandridge toned down her nightclub-ish glamour to become fully convincing as an uncertain but fully ladylike instructor running a rural schoolroom full of the usual assortment of class jesters.
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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: '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: '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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New on Disc: 'Fort Apache' and more …

Fort Apache (Blu-ray)

Warner, Western, $19.98 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Shirley Temple, John Agar, Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond, George O’Brien.
1948. Like “film noir,” the term “John Ford Cavalry Trilogy” took a while to get coined and then become part of general usage, though it didn’t take all that long following the bunched-up release of two outdoor beauties the director filmed at RKO and then a third at Republic, all between 1948 and 1950. Given the instant familiarity sparked by this Western trio’s early release to TV, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande have been pretty well regarded as a unit for more than a half-century. With a hard-case Henry Fonda cast as a thinly disguised George Custer against John Wayne’s warily rank-respectful subordinate pro, Apache is one of my 10 favorite Fords (out of seven decades’ worth) for a few reasons. For one thing, it was the first movie to team the director with Frank Nugent, Ford’s best screenwriter (apologies to Dudley Nichols). For another, it might be the richest single showcase of the director’s famed stock company. And for another, it pretty well launched that later period of Ford’s career when, in addition to having become reflective, he began to indulge in broad comedy relief. 
Extras: Apache was always my favorite of the trilogy, an opinion with which the always enjoyable writer-historian F.X. Feeney (a possible Ford cousin from the old country) seems to agree in his bang-up commentary for this spectacularly sharp black-and-white Blu-ray rendition.
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American Experience: Clinton

PBS, Documentary, two-disc set, $29.99 DVD, $34.99 Blu-ray, NR.
2012. By my count, “American Experience” has profiled every 20th-century-and-beyond U.S. president from Clinton back to Woodrow Wilson with the exception of Coolidge and Harding (as scintillating a view as a Harding go-round might be). I own and have seen all of them, and director Barak Goodman’s Clinton portrait is right up there — though as any documentarian must, Goodman must go where the material leads him. Among the many heavy hitters interviewed to offer formative detail is writer David Maraniss, whose First in His Class is generally considered to be the best biography ever of a sitting president. The other major theme here (in terms of personal life) is the law school-and-beyond professional link with wife Hillary, whose brains and judgment Clinton respected more than anyone else’s, and how she was forced to submerge her own personality — and did — in those early Arkansas days and beyond before getting the belated opportunity to act upon on her heavy collegiate potential to become a political late bloomer.
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No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos

Cinema Libre, Documentary, $19.95 DVD, NR.
2008. There’s a special and very specific tale to tell in this documentary about cinematography that would be foolhardy to shortchange. It is not only one of friendship — though Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs remained inseparable soulmates until the latter’s 2007 death — but of the events that formed it. Endangering your life by photographing the short-lived Hungarian Revolution against the Soviets in 1956 could serve as the climax of a lot of stories, but for the two young students at Budapest’s Academy of Drama and Film, it was just the beginning. Between the two of them, it seems as if Kovacs and Zsigmond eventually shot about half of the interesting films to come out of the almost incomparably rich pre-Star Wars era of the late 1960s and early ’70s.
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New on Disc: 'Anatomy of a Murder' and more …

Anatomy of a Murder

Criterion, Drama, $29.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars James Stewart, Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick, George C. Scott, Joseph N. Welch.
1959. Never again would director Otto Preminger get his act together the way he did with his almost universally praised adaptation of a monster late-1950s bestseller by Robert Traver — a pseudonym for Michigan Supreme Court Justice John D. Voelker, who previously had been defense attorney in a case that served as the novel’s inspiration. Ben Gazzara plays the army officer on trial for shooting his wife’s alleged rapist, and Lee Remick is perfect as a naturally frisky young woman who may or may not like to exploit the effect she has on men. One doesn’t automatically think of Murder as a cinematographer’s picture, but Sam Leavitt’s (A Star Is Born) intriguing angles earned him one of Murder’s seven Oscar nominations and definitely have something to do with the fact that a 160-minute courtroom drama grips throughout (and never more so than in the trial scenes). In fact, it’s not a stretch to claim that this probably  is the best courtroom drama of all time, an assertion with which many agree.
Extras: The Criterion extras hit the major points. Preminger biographer Foster Hirsch talks a lot about the filmmaker’s style, marketing savvy and moral umbrage he took over censors (Hirsch also reminds us that Preminger was trained as a lawyer as well). There’s also a section on Saul Bass’ genius with opening credits and movie ads (often with Preminger) during an era when the latter were so much more exciting than now. There’s also an interview with the great Gary Giddins about Duke Ellington’s famous Murder score, whose recording I’m guessing has never been out of print.
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Frontline: The Interrupters

PBS, Documentary, $24.99 DVD, $29.99 Blu-ray, NR.
2011. Working with an array of collaborators who surely deserve their share of the credit, documentarian Steve James continues to amass an impressive body of work on socially relevant subjects. Everyone knows James’ Hoop Dreams, of course, but nearly as impressive was 2002’s Stevie, one of the most poignant movies ever about a needful kid who fell through society’s cracks. Now comes a documentary basically photographed in a war zone: the toughest parts of Chicago. The documentary is superbly titled: “interrupting” is exactly what its protagonists try to do. As a subdivision of the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention, the central initiative profiled here is called CeaseFire. Its members attempt to interrupt street violence in the making, which often erupts when youngsters try to protect their own turf for often-shaky reasons.
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The Buccaneer

Olive, Adventure, $24.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Yul Brynner, Charlton Heston, Claire Bloom, Charles Boyer, Inger Stevens, E.G. Marshall, Lorne Greene, Henry Hull.
1958. During a pre-credits sequence in the final movie “supervised” by one of the industry’s foremost legends, an aged Cecil B. DeMille appeared on screen to deliver some historical context for what audiences were about to see. The Buccaneer’s gist, which is true, is that Gen. Andrew Jackson (Charlton Heston, who has so much authority in a role that’s something between an extended cameo and a full part) agreed to pardon any pirates who aided Americans on the lines against the invading British at the Battle of New Orleans. Official directing duties were handled by C.B.’s longtime son-in-law, Anthony Quinn. Olive presumably is releasing The Buccaneer (and the original 1938 version with Fredric March on April 24) to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812.
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