New on Disc: 'All Quiet on the Western Front' and more …

All Quiet on the Western Front (Blu-ray)

Universal, Drama, $39.98 Blu-ray/DVD/digital combo pack, NR.
Stars Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, Slim Summerville.
1930. Universal production chief Carl Laemmle Jr. spent a fortune amid a looming Depression to film Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel, though the early 1930s were interesting years for pacifistic content in Hollywood pictures (see also the Fredric March-Cary Grant-Carole Lombard The Eagle and the Hawk from 1933). With audiences caught between two world wars (though obviously, they didn’t know the horrors that were coming), it was a susceptible time for a movie that is still unflinching in its portrayal of the grunt’s burden at the hands of political opportunists, and even the shoehorned inclusion later at one point of a few frisky females for pacing relief seems in keeping with what could likely happen. The story was, of course, taken from the German point of view during World War I, and in addressing the question of how Americans could be rooting for these guys, it was pretty obvious that “universal” didn’t just refer to the film’s distributor — not that you could see in later years the original release print, which clocks in at about 133 minutes. By the time the picture starting getting TV showings in either the very late ’50s or very early ’60s, re-issues and other tinkering (this always was a controversial masterpiece) had seen it whittled down to about 101. Brilliantly directed by Lewis Milestone and shot by Casablanca’s Arthur Edeson, the extensive combat sequences are second to very, very few and still have tremendous clout. The print here is taken off the original negative — but what surprises is how good that negative must be for its age and/or the degree to which restorer techno-wizards at the Library of Congress knocked it into shape. There are movies that came out a year ago that don’t look anywhere near this great on Blu-ray, proof that when the money is spent, an old movie really can look the way it did on opening night, long before most of us were born.
Extras: The silent version also is included, and I can see why some prefer it: the presentation is more seamless (though the two running times are very close), and the score is effective (the talking version has effects and an occasional vocal utterance here and there but no full score).
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American Experience: Billy the Kid

PBS, Documentary, $24.99 DVD, NR.
2012. I appreciated this documentary, in which even former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson throws in a couple cents about the degree to which the former William H. Bonney (atop other aliases) has captured the mass imagination for more than a century. There’s a great anecdote here about how immediately the news of Billy’s death at the hands of pursuer Pat Garrett reached the Midwest and beyond in the days of primitive communication.
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The Young Stranger

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars James MacArthur, Kim Hunter, James Daly, James Gregory.
1957. John Frankenheimer made his directorial debut with this 1957 expansion of a TV drama he himself had staged about a year-and-a-half earlier. It ranks among the sturdier juvenile delinquency dramas released in the wake of game-changers Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, although this more modest endeavor is more in the “mixed-up kid” genre. James MacArthur (with Disney movies and then “Hawaii Five-O” in his future) gives a solid performance as a kid whose only real transgression is to display movie auditorium hooliganism.
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New on Disc: 'On the Bowery' and more …

On the Bowery: The Films of Lionel Rogosin Vol. 1

Street 2/21/12
Milestone, Documentary, two-disc set, $34.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-ray, NR.
1957. John Cassavetes, who mentored Martin Scorsese early in the latter’s career, regarded the late Lionel Rogosin as one of the great filmmakers and On the Bowery as a major filmmaking influence (think Cassavetes’ Shadows right out of the box). Thus, it’s rather fitting that Scorsese introduce the home release of Milestone Films’ highly successful theatrical re-issue from 2010, which includes a wealth of supplementary materials that only strengthen the package of a fiction/nonfiction hybrid (though feature documentary Oscar nominee) that can pretty well stand on its own. Scorsese notes that when he looked out the window from where he grew up, the Bowery is what he saw. The subject is not the domain of Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall and the Bowery Boys. Bowery is a drama constructed around raw faces, which is one reason why Cassavetes must have loved it — and if the acting here is a little in and out, it absolutely seems authentic and serves the filmmaker’s purpose. The squalor quotient was, in fact, so high that usually estimable interviewer Dave Garroway is fairly patronizing to Rogosin in a 1956 TV clip included as one of the bonus extras. Why, Dave asks, would the latter want to make a movie bound to depress anyone who saw it?
Extras: This material dovetails effectively with then-and-now short subjects included as bonus material (one a look at Bowery life in 1933). Included as well is a making-of look back at the production — treatment afforded to this release’s second feature as well. This would be Good Times, Wonderful Times, made and shown on the early side of the mid-1960s when protests against the Vietnam War hadn’t taken full hold.
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Woody Allen: A Documentary

Docurama, Documentary, $29.95 two-DVD set, NR.
2011. From roughly 1973’s Sleeper (but certainly follow-up Love and Death) through, say, 1994’s Bullets Over Broadway, Woody Allen was on one of the great rolls of the modern era — occasionally stumbling (usually with his dramas) but rarely going more than a couple pictures, artistically speaking, without a loud extra-base hit. Allen has amassed 15 Oscar nominations for screenwriting and seven for directing. This is the kind of life achievement that ultimately gets you pedigreed “American Masters” treatment, and Robert B. Weide’s three-and-a-half-hour portrait indeed aired during two nights in November. Though this is so much an authorized biography that it utilizes the same opening-credits font style that we automatically associate with Allen’s own movies, Weide isn’t hesitant to bring up Allen’s early 2000s fallow period — nor is he afraid to bring up Allen’s marriage to quasi-stepdaughter Soon-Yi Previn.
Extras: The entire bonus section here is a highlight, but the Q&A part is special: Weide says he labored to ask Allen 10 that no one else had ever asked.
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Taxi

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars James Cagney, Loretta Young, Guy Kibbee.
1932. Perhaps best known as the movie where consummate Irishman James Cagney speaks Yiddish in an early scene, Taxi is transported over its plot holes (sometimes wide enough to swallow up an entire cab caravan) by the palpable chemistry between the actor and co-star Loretta Young, who in one scene even joins him in a dance contest.
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New on Disc: 'Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story' and more …

Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story

Street 2/14
Docurama, Documentary, B.O. $0.013 million, $29.95 DVD, ‘G.’
Narrated by Zachary Levi.
2011. Competitive Monopoly gets its day in a portrait that’s more interesting around the edges (the game’s history and the collector mania it has launched) than it is down the middle (the final game of the 2009 World Championship and events leading up to it). 
Extras: This is one of those occasional DVDs for which the chief selling point is the bonus section, which includes about 40 minutes of a fascinating course lecture from super expert Tim Vandenberg on the “methods, math and myths” of the game. There’s a statistical analysis of which properties get landed on the most; why Park Place and Boardwalk are somewhat overrated as desired buys; when it’s smart and not to use “jail” as a tool; and why you have to follow the rules to the letter if you want to wrap a game in a civilized amount of time. (Playing the contest variation where players put all fees in the middle of the board and collect this major booty by landing on Free Parking will only allow a near-whipped opponent to get back on his feet.)
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The Geisha Boy

Street 2/14
Olive, Comedy, $24.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Jerry Lewis, Suzanne Pleshette, Nobu McCarthy, Sessue Hayakawa, Marie McDonald.
1958. Jerry Lewis rarely got the lines between slapstick and sentiment to intersect as harmoniously as much as he did here. Frank Tashlin was Lewis’s best director, other than perhaps Lewis himself, and this bright Technicolor comedy gets off to a good start with an opening credits sequence much akin to the one in Tashlin’s Hollywood or Bust, the 16th and final Martin and Lewis vehicle. Picturing geisha dancers brandishing large Japanese fans, it sets the tone for a farce in which magician Lewis (complete with white rabbit named Harry Hare) takes a USO job after a long period of unemployment. Featured here in her big-screen debut is Suzanne Pleshette, looking good within the limitations of army garb and hindered some by some aggressive lipstick that the makeup person should have toned down.
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Lady and the Tramp: Diamond Edition

Blu-ray available now; Standalone DVD Streets 3/27
Disney, Animated, $29.99 DVD, $39.99 Blu-ray/DVD, $44.99 BD combo pack with digital copy, ‘G.’
Voices of Barbara Luddy, Larry Roberts, Peggy Lee, Bill Thompson, Bill Baucom, Stan Freberg, Lee Millar.
1955. Lady and the Tramp was Disney’s first widescreen feature cartoon (2.55, baby!), and I think it was the animated achievement that most hit its demographic where it lived at the time of release. The Blu-ray presentation really brings back what seeing Lady was like in ’55, and I dug the 7.1 dts-HD Master Audio enhanced soundtrack (there’s a super rendering of the original 3.0 as well). The culmination of Disney’s perennial is a brood spawned by Tramp and Lady, which led to a spin-off puppy who, as Scamp, eventually rated his own comic strip and, in 2001, a direct-to-video sequel.
Extras: A lot of extras, including a nice making-of featurette, are carried over from earlier DVDs. And there’s a newly added “Second Screen” function involving apps, allowing viewers to check out a variety of featurettes as they watch the film.
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New on Disc: 'Project Nim' and more …

Project Nim

Street 2/7/12
Lionsgate, Documentary, B.O. $0.4 million, $19.98 DVD, ‘PG-13’ for some strong language, drug content, thematic elements and disturbing images.
2011. James Marsh’s new documentary makes it clear that Nim Chimpsky didn’t relish his time in the limelight. In the case of this chimpanzee, screen appearances were restricted to scientifically mandated home movies, which provide a lot of rich source material for Marsh in his follow-up to 2008’s Oscar-winning Man on Wire, which this also-amazing story nearly equals.

It was the 1970s, which meant that when Columbia Prof. Herbert Terrace hatched a brainstorm to raise a young chimp in a human environment to see if the creature could end up communicating in sign language, at least one of the participants (beyond, it sometimes appears, Terrace himself) would turn out to be a flake. The biggest, at least from Nim’s presentation, was probably the wife of a wealthy poet who offered her family’s Manhattan brownstone as a kind of chimp flophouse. Nim occasionally was given alcohol and even a reefer, and he enjoyed knocking the poet’s books of the shelf in an offbeat form of domestic violence. Much later, with the now much-larger Nim treated to intended peace that didn’t quite pan out on writer Cleveland Amory’s ranch for abused animals, his “attitude” escalated. This is when he picked up a pet dog that had proven to be a personal irritant and smashed it to death against a wall. The story has several more byways, and while it isn’t a black-and-white harangue against using animals for research, it likely will be a subject of conversation at PETA mixers and fundraisers because this is one melancholy story.
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The Jazz Singer

Street 2/7/12
Inception, Drama, $14.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Jerry Lewis, Anna Maria Alberghetti, Eduard Franz, Del Moore.
1959. For all its importance as the technological and marketing innovator that put talking pictures into popularity more than any other single movie, Al Jolson’s corn repository The Jazz Singer wasn’t that far away from being an instant museum piece when it opened in 1927. But let’s not forget this Jerry Lewis NBC-TV version intended as homage to Jer’s childhood idol Jolson — one that’s been too obscure in recent years to be notorious, though it certainly was at the time when I watched it live. We can and should view this print from the Lewis archives as the archeological find it is.
Extras: The nicest feature of this release is its inclusion of not just a kinescope of the black-and-white version that actually aired but (as a bonus) one of the earliest color videotape versions that currently exists of a TV show.
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Tall Story

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Anthony Perkins, Jane Fonda, Marc Connelly, Bob Wright, Ray Walston, Tom Laughlin, Anne Jackson, Murray Hamilton.
1960. If you recently saw 74-year-old Jane Fonda looking so smashing on the Golden Globes, it’s possible that you can project how she affected, at age 22, young boys who were entering puberty. The object of Fonda’s affection here is a college hoops star played by Anthony Perkins, who soon after would appear in Psycho. Between the sports and sex angles, I’ve always had some mild affection for what undeniably is romantic piffle, a modest black-and-white comedy running less than 90 minutes.
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New on Disc: 'Revenge of the Electric Car' and more …

Revenge of the Electric Car

Docurama, Documentary, B.O. $0.15 million, $29.95 DVD, ‘PG-13’ for brief strong language.
2011. Director/co-writer Chris Paine’s sequel to his 2006 film Who Killed the Electric Car? exists in an interim universe it simultaneously captures, much as last year’s Page One: Inside the New York Times became a permanent time capsule of the newspaper industry at a crossroads of change. Will electric cars catch on in any great measure if the prices can ever come down? I don’t know. But their owners (like featured Danny De Vito) seem to like or even love them, and the vehicles certainly tap into an American yearning that will never go away. You know: the one that says to Foreign Oil, “We’re not interested anymore.” The other principals featured here are Carlos Ghosn, whose Nissan Leaf may determine the fate of Renault/Nissan; Greg “Gadget” Abbott, who soups up existing cars with electric technology and has to survive an arson attack on his makeshift factory; and Elon Musk, an entrepreneur-ish developer of the Tesla who also has a parcel of other interests, including five children and a fiancée (later wife) who says she wants more. Paine’s film makes reference to doomed ‘40s auto maker Preston Tucker (who never was able to buck a system that demanded endless resources of capital), and Musk’s home life has some of the hustle-bustle seen in the very underrated Tucker: The Man and His Dream from 1988. Paine’s portrait, which includes a nourished menu of DVD extras, isn’t exactly in your face. Dramatically speaking, it lacks the natural story arc of its predecessor and isn’t necessarily the kind of documentary that makes one say, “Hey, you gotta see this” to friends. And yet, if you’ve seen the original (which is still burned fairly prominently into my movie mind), you may think it a story that virtually demanded to be filmed, given its back-from-the dead hook.
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American Madness

Manufactured on demand via online retailers
Sony Pictures, Drama, $20.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Walter Huston, Pat O’Brien, Kay Johnson, Constance Cummings.
1932. I have a sweet spot for Frank Capra’s early talkies, and American Madness is one of my favorites. It is nothing if not topical. You don’t find too many Hollywood movies sympathetic to bankers, but the one Walter Huston plays here is a straight shooter with an altruistic streak. Huston’s character trusts his customers and his own instincts in loaning money (which, of course, puts him on the outs with his board of directors). In about 75 zippy minutes, Capra and his longtime screenwriter Robert Riskin manage to work in boardroom battles, Huston’s mildly straying wife (Kay Johnson, real-life mother of actor James Cromwell), a gangster subplot, a bank robbery that erroneously implicates a bank clerk (Pat O’Brien), and a run on the bank by depositors who don’t need Depression economics and heist artists with their own ways of depleting bank funds.
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Youngblood Hawke

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars James Franciscus, Suzanne Pleshette, Geneviéve Page, Mary Astor.
1964. There’s not exactly an eBook-era feel to the quaint movie version of Herman Wouk’s doorstop novel about the novelist’s angst, but this is probably the trashy selling point for a black-and-white potboiler about a Kentucky truck driver who comes to New York as a hotshot writer to conquer publishers, editors, agents, effete critics (well, at first) and the bed of another man’s wife. It’s all very broad and overripe in that early-1960s Warner fashion.
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New on Disc: 'Godzilla' and more …

Godzilla

Street 1/24
Criterion, Sci-Fi, $29.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Akira Takarada, Momoko Kochi, Takashi Shimura.
1954. Though no one will ever categorize the vintage Toho library holdings as a cache of pristine print sources, the fact is that the new Criterion DVD of 1954’s Gojira (which launched the by now all-but-eternal “Godzilla” franchise without necessarily intending to) looks and sounds even better than the Blu-ray version of it that Classic Media put out in 2009. So let’s get this not insignificant point established right up front — even if the real fun from this release is in learning about Gojira’s production and its re-editing into the most commercially successful Japanese import that had reached U.S. shores at the time — as, of all possibilities, one of screen history’s stranger Raymond Burr showcases.

This latter and largely English-dubbed version, which became the source of much school playground discussion when I was in the third grade, was titled Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Directed by the era’s well-known “film doctor” Terry O. Morse (who was often called upon to reconstruct and save the life of ailing productions), it is included in full here as a bonus feature, which effectively makes this Criterion release a two-fer.

The fun of watching director Ishiro Honda’s original comes in being able to appreciate it as a more solemn (even mournful) Godzilla pic, one that is not quite as sensationalistic as the American re-edit.

Extras: The Criterion extras here touch upon the special effects, actor reminiscences and the effective score — plus an interview with film critic Tadao Sato. Film historian David Kalat offers commentaries for both versions of the film, though the Morse-Burr cut (which he likes and defends) offers more opportunities for voiceover revelry.
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The Last Hunt

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Western, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Robert Taylor, Stewart Granger, Lloyd Nolan, Debra Paget.
1956. In this Richard Brooks Western released two years before the end of his MGM run, Robert Taylor played one of the few bad guys of his career. I’ve known or read of more than a couple of people who think The Last Hunt contains Taylor’s best performance, and I’d probably concur. Swashbuckler Stewart Granger plays a former Dakota buffalo hunter wary of resuming his old trade, who gets nudged into doing so by a cattleman hopeful (Taylor) whose stock is stampeded by an already endangered species.
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Frontline: The Anthrax Files

PBS, Documentary, $24.99 DVD, NR.
2011. The material forming the basis for this documentary led to editorials calling for investigations into the FBI’s wobbly case against the late army scientist Dr. Bruce Ivins. But whether you’ve determined for yourself that Ivins didn’t — or actually did — send anthrax-filled letters to government officials in 2001, this multilayered cautionary tale shows how a mere accusation of having done “A” can cause a lot of hitherto well-concealed “Bs” to become a part of the public record to abject embarrassment and despair. This was a major tragedy with huge national security ramifications — yet it’s this documentary’s portrayal of a personality disintegrated (Ivins is portrayed as a sometimes very jolly, funny guy) that gives it the extra kick that a lot of viewers may not expect going into a film with this kind of title.
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New on Disc: 'The Hellstrom Chronicle' and more …

The Hellstrom Chronicle

Olive, Documentary, $24.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray, ‘G.’
1971. Producer David Wolper’s rather astonishing documentary Oscar-winner — as in astonishing that it beat Marcel Ophuls’ more or less nonpareil The Sorrow and the Pity — comes close to being what you’d expect from a screen portrait of the insect world that happened to be directed by the co-screenwriter of The Wild Bunch. Any of that feel-good, Walt Disney wonder-of-nature stuff is a no-go here for Chronicle director Walon Green, whose worldview seems to be that insects almost certainly have man’s number in any survivalist battle of the fittest. Apparently, it was one shared with Chronicle scripter David Seltzer, who later penned The Omen. There’s nothing wrong with taking such a defeatist attitude when the premise is more than credible, yet the film’s frequent scenes involving humans are so transparently staged (these Green did not direct) that I’ve never felt that the film should have even qualified as a documentary. As the fully fabricated Dr. Nils Hellstrom, who handles the on-camera narration, actor Lawrence Pressman is so over the top that the effect is risible. Shaky as art but not bad as entertainment, Chronicle was so brilliantly marketed it turned into a kind of hit in the summer of ’71.
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Rapture (Blu-ray)

Available at www.screenarchives.com
Twilight Time, Drama, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Gozzi, Dean Stockwell, Gunnel Lindblom.
1965. Transferred from its source novel British setting to the coast of France, the picture headlines Melvyn Douglas not long after he won his Oscar for a sizable supporting performance in Hud and Hollywood was trying to figure out if he was still lead material (as he had been in younger days before a long period of screen inactivity from the early ‘50s through early ‘60s). Playing this widower’s daughter as a 15-year-old was 12-year-old Patricia Gozzi, previously a critics’ sensation in 1962’s Sundays and Cybele. Rounding out the dynamics here are a handsome escaped prisoner played by Dean Stockwell, and we also see Gunnel Lindblom playing the kind of friskily available housekeeper who’d have most traveling salesman wanting to play (quoting Preston Sturges) “Hey Hey in the Hayloft.” Embittered by his wife’s death, Douglas plays one of those guys (here, it’s a judge) who wants to do a lot of socially conscious favors for mankind in the abstract — yet is kind of a task-masterish prig at home. George Delerue’s score (isolated here on a separate track in Twilight Time fashion) is a plus, though the release’s chief selling point is the black-and-white cinematography by Marcel Grignon. Here’s a case where Twilight Time has come up with B&W of Criterion caliber.
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The Constant Nymph

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Charles Boyer, Joan Fontaine, Alexis Smith, Charles Coburn.
1943. The long-awaited unearthing of this absolute Warner Bros. treasure apparently shows how potent vintage marquee power remains even today when it comes to marketability. Oscar-nominated Joan Fontaine is 25 playing a love-struck 14 over Charles Boyer, and the arithmetic shows. Otherwise, this is probably the 94-year-old actress’s all-time performance (note her dead-on adolescent body language). Boyer is just about Fontaine’s equal in what is arguably his career performance as a symphonic composer who wallows in “dissonance” instead of making music from the heart. The other selling point here is Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s famous score.
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New on Disc: 'Mildred Pierce' and more …

Mildred Pierce

HBO, Drama, $39.98 two-DVD set, $49.99 four-BD set, NR.
Stars Kate Winslet, Guy Pearce, Evan Rachel Wood, Melissa Leo, Brian F. O’Byrne, James LeGros, Mare Winningham, Morgan Turner, Hope Davis.
2011. Despite Kate Winslet’s Emmy-winning performance (and Todd Haynes’ HBO miniseries of the James M. Cain novel got 21 nominations in all), she couldn’t have been anyone’s knee-jerk casting choice for the famed title hard-knocks restaurateur here. Yet by the time all five-and-a-half hours of this miniseries have elapsed, many or most should concede that she has met enough of the challenge to add even more heft to her filmography in the career long run. At the heart of the story is the still-true degree to which parents bust themselves for their children, often without getting thanks in return. This version has it detractors — but on the other hand, I’ve noted it on some year-end critics’ best lists devoted primarily to theatrical releases. On balance, it really kept me going for the duration without quite knocking me out, despite an explosive and then wistful wrap-up that I found extremely satisfying.
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Stars and Stripes Forever (Blu-ray)

Fox, Musical, $34.98 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Clifton Webb, Robert Wagner, Debra Paget, Ruth Hussey.
1952. What Blu-ray can do to showcase real-deal Technicolor goes a long way to carry this (high-side-of) boilerplate biopic that combines patriotic music with not-exactly-obligatory shots of Debra Paget in tights and other safely suggestive dress for the Korean War 1950s. But what really lingers in my memory is the degree of fun it is to watch Clifton Webb in splashy conductor’s duds and a John Philip Sousa beard in front of what passes for the United States Marine Band and later Sousa’s traveling own — plus the zeal Webb applies to his conducting labors, which is infectious to watch. Whenever Paget isn’t dancing, this 89-minute release keeps its eye on the rah-rah ball.
Extras: According to nonpareil movie musical historian Miles Kreuger and other experts featured in the bonus section, Lamar Trotti’s script is uncommonly adherent to the facts, even though it concocts a sometimes obtrusive love story built around a pair of then-new contract players being groomed for stardom: Paget (who’s given several decidedly non-Sousa-ish musical numbers) and Robert Wagner (decades before fatal boat outings and reverse mortgages were even a glint in his eye).
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Death of a Scoundrel

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars George Sanders, Yvonne De Carlo, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Victor Jory, Nancy Gates, Coleen Gray.
1956. This late-in-the-game RKO release does a good job concealing what had to be a frugal budget, thanks in part to its Max Steiner score and James Wong Howe cinematography. Star George Sanders and fast pacing, even over a full 120 minutes, carry the day — as does some intriguingly topical stock market finagling practiced by its fact-inspired protagonist. We are talking about real-life con man Serge Rubenstein, whose real-life 1955 murder was never solved after his body was found in the kind of posh New York apartment you’d expect a wheeler-dealer/femme magnet to have. Sanders, as fictional stand-in Clementi Sabourin, is pumped full of lead to open the movie, with only the assailant’s identity (not necessarily the one you’d expect) concealed until the end. What our scoundrel does with stock manipulation gives the movie a little extra narrative oomph in these troubled times.
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New on Disc: 'A Farewell to Arms' and more …

A Farewell to Arms

Street 12/20
Kino Lorber, Drama, $24.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Helen Hayes, Gary Cooper, Adolphe Menjou.
1932. In addition to winning the Academy Award for sound, Frank Borzage’s adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s World War I perennial got Charles Lang a companion Oscar for his prototypically “1930s Paramount” cinematography, which gets in the marrow not just in the love scenes but during the more grimy combat scenes as well. You really do believe that Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper are in love here, which carries this rendering over some bumps. Hayes playing opposite a Cooper we see evolving from semi-cocksure to vulnerable is a pairing that clicks. And historically, you can probably advance the case that this is the movie that took Cooper from popular leading man to the next level of his career. Certainly, by 1935’s The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, he was a superstar, and it’s doubtful that the movies Cooper made between Farewell and Lancer are the ones that did it.
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The Nickel Ride/
99 and 44/100% Dead (Double Feature)

Shout! Factory, Drama, $19.93 DVD, ‘PG.’
Stars Jason Miller, Richard Harris, Edmond O’Brien.
1974-75. Whenever DVD box art slaps something as impersonally generic as “Action Double Feature” in larger typeface than the respective movies’ titles, you naturally expect the result to be a pair of 1947 John Ireland ‘B’-melodramas about insurance fraud taken from scratchy 16mm prints. But, no: this two-fer highlights not only a pair of 20th Century-Fox/DeLuxe Color productions from, say, the Average White Band era — but a duo that’s even from name filmmakers: Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird) and John Frankenheimer. For director-oriented completists, you can’t say the price isn’t right for a playbill where the Mulligan contribution turns out to be the more assured of the two yet less entertaining than its slipshod companion. The Mulligan is 1975’s The Nickel Ride, a decidedly un-slick underworld mood piece that fell in the director’s career between The Other and the early Richard Gere showcase Bloodbrothers. Frankenheimer’s contribution is the tone-deaf but not unwatchable gangland oddity 99 and 44/100% Dead (1974), which I suspect is a title that market-tested well with only a certain demographic. Chronologically, it followed the director’s four-hour American Film Theater epic of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, which he once called his best movie.
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Lost Horizon

Manufactured on demand via online retailers
Sony Pictures, Musical, $20.95 DVD, ‘G.’
Stars Peter Finch, Liv Ullmann, Sally Kellerman, George Kennedy.
1973. On an apparently never-completed promotional featurette that’s part of the surprisingly extensive bonus material for this on-demand release, the now long-deceased producer Ross Hunter claims that this remake of Frank Capra’s famed 1937 played-straight drama “wasn’t a musical.” Now, don’t you love hearing something like that when the movie’s score has 11 Burt Bacharach-Hal David songs?  Anyway, the picture was such a colossal disaster that its belated DVD release constitutes a contribution to film history. One reason this very handsome DVD gets billed as “uncut” has to do with a beefcake musical interlude that got jettisoned (I was told) because audiences were falling out of their seats with hysterical laughter. I do have a soft spot for big-budget disasters as long as they don’t drag or run for four hours.
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New on Disc: 2011 World Series Film and more …

2011 Official World Series Film
St. Louis Cardinals 2011 World Series Collector’s Edition

A&E, Sports, World Series Film $29.95 DVD, $34.95 Blu-ray; Collector’s Edition $79.95 eight-DVD set, NR.
2011. The St. Louis Cardinals (with, of course, a major assist from the Texas Rangers) sparked one of the cream entries in postseason MLB contests from the past quarter century. The Cards beat the heavily favored Phillies in the prelim National League Division Series despite the fact that teams more than 10 games out in late August aren’t even supposed to be in the NLDS. And then the Cards advanced to a six-game NLCS victory over the Milwaukee Brewers — an ascension made possible, lest we forget, by pitcher Chris Carpenter’s 1-0 shutout over the Phillies in the NLDS deciding game 5, which is about what it takes when you’re facing the latter’s Roy Halladay in a money game. That Cards-Phils clincher is included as one of the bonuses on the World Series 2011 Fall Classic DVD and Blu-ray whose documentary portion is narrated by St. Louis native Jon Hamm. Like past MLB wrap-ups of any October action that has just transpired, it stands to rise or falls on the quality of the Series in question. The full evidence of how good this one was (20-hour running times have a way of making a case) is set forth in The St. Louis Cardinals 2011 World Series Collector’s Edition — the annual Series boxed which is naturally bathed this year in Cardinals red. The boxed set proves that this was a Series to be savored.
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Meet Me in St. Louis (Blu-ray)

Street 12/13
Warner, Musical, $35.99 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Judy Garland, Margaret O’Brien, Tom Drake, Lucille Bremer.
1944. This long-awaited Blu-ray version of Vincent Minnelli’s own career-maker is a kind of color alternative to what Warner did earlier this year with black-an-white on its release of Citizen Kane — employing a kind of “artful grain” that shows up if you’re fairly close to the screen but contributes marked detail if you move just a few inches back. This is how neighborly 1903-04 should have looked for anyone not totally hooked by the ultra-urban experience. 
Extras: The release rates the same cardboard book-like packaging that Warner reserves for its most prestigious Blu-ray releases, and also included is a short CD of the Hugh Martin-Ralph Blane staples (“Have Yourself a Marry Little Christmas,” “The Trolley Song,” “The Boy Next Door”) the movie produced. The other extras recycle a lot of what was on the deluxe 2004 standard DVD version.
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Lafayette Escadrille

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Tab Hunter, Etchika Choreau, David Janssen, Clint Eastwood.
1958. The story here deals with a spoiled high school jock (Tab Hunter) whose father is something of a swaggering lout. After a serious brush with the law, the aggressively blond Hunter starts thinking about the French Foreign Legion — but instead ends up as a volunteer flyboy in France before America’s belated entry into World War I. Director William A. Wellman is said to have called his big-screen swan song the worst movie of his four-and-a-half-decade career. Thanks to uncommonly specific WWI subject matter plus ahead-of-its-time casting, this pronouncement is something of a negative stretch — though, this said, it’s true that a picture into which Wellman put so much of himself was severely compromised and artistically bludgeoned by the studio.
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