New on Disc: 'City Island' and more …

City Island

Anchor Bay, Comedy, B.O. $6.7 million, $29.98 DVD, $34.98 Blu-ray, ‘PG-13’ for sexual content, smoking and language.
Stars Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies, Steven Strait, Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Ezra Miller, Alan Arkin, Emily Mortimer.
2010. City Island’s screenplay is an original by director Raymond De Felitta and has a few roots in old-style sitcoms. All of the performances are spot on, with Andy Garcia as the patriarch of a family filled with people keeping secrets. There’s nothing fancy about this movie, but it has an assured tone that juggles comedy and pain against the implied advice it gives that people who live with each other might be better off if they just talked to each other at least once in a while.
Extras: One of the bonuses on the disc reunites the cast for a dinner table sit-around with real food, a kind of communal affair very much in keeping with the camaraderie it takes to get a labor of love like this made, to say nothing of breaking out of the pack.
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Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg

Docurama, Documentary, B.O. $1.1 million, $29.95 two-DVD set, NR.
2009. Someone in Aviva Kempner’s documentary about a multileveled pioneer calls Gertrude Berg an anomaly, which is as good a way as any to describe a well-dressed, opera-loving Park Avenue resident who created matriarch Molly Goldberg. The character was the centerpiece of television’s first successful sitcom ever, “The Goldbergs,” premiering in January 1949.
Extras: In addition to Kempner’s commentary, the extras are plentiful and require a second disc. They include a substantial tally of interview segments not included in the film and a sampling of complete “Goldberg” episodes including one with young actress Anne Italiano, later renamed Anne Bancroft when she went to Hollywood.
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L’enfance nue

Criterion, Drama, $29.95 DVD, NR.
In French with English subtitles.
Stars Michel Terrazon, Linda Gutemberg, Raoul Billery.
1968. The late Maurice Pialiat’s film about foster care focuses on Francois (Michel Terrazon), who is frequently in scrapes, despite moments of tender behavior that keep the viewer off balance. The movie’s make-or-break moment comes early. Francois, with co-conspiring buddies, takes the cat belonging to the family with which he currently resides and drops it several floors down a stairwell. L’enfance nue is, actually (cat aside), quite accessible and journeys not an inch beyond the lives that uncountable people live everyday.
Extras: The movie isn’t at all an indictment of the French foster home system, though in a TV interview included in the bonus section, Pialiat chides himself for withholding insights his research had revealed — as in the significant number of foster children who commit suicide.
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Yellowstone Kelly

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Western, $24.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Clint Walker, Edward Byrnes, John Russell, Andra Martin.
1959. Though more familiarity might breed indifference were the movie not so infrequently shown these days, there’s definitely a nostalgic kick in re-seeing what was a very heavily promoted cross-demographic Western in its day. Kelly is ultimately a kiddie Western with Edd “Kookie” Byrnes of “77 Sunset Strip” for the teen girl demographic.
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New on Disc: 'Me & Orson Welles' and more …

Me & Orson Welles

Warner, Drama, B.O. $1.2 million, $18.98 DVD, ‘PG-13’ for sexual references and smoking.
Stars Zac Efron, Christian McKay, Claire Danes.
2009. Relative newcomer Christian McKay serves up one of the most on-the-button portrayals of a 20th-century pop figure that I have ever seen. The story’s setting is New York City in 1937 — four years before Welles directed Citizen Kane and a year before he terrorized the nation with his radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. So at a just-turned-22, he’s mounting a Mercury Theatre production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar his own way. Zac Efron is the young acting hopeful and makeshift ukulele practitioner hired on the spot for a small role. The DVD is sold exclusively at Target.
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Black Orpheus

Criterion, Drama, $29.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-ray, NR. In Portuguese with English subtitles. Stars Breno Mello, Marpessa Dawn.
1959. Writer-director Marcel Camus’ panoply of pigmented costuming (against an equally kinetic beat) remains something close to a one-of-a-kind. Certainly, it was in terms of the filmmaker, whose other movies didn’t amount to much given all the vitality here. Liberally adapted from a Vinicius de Moraes play called Orfeo do Carnaval, the movie’s male protagonist (Breno Mello) is a Rio de Janeiro streetcar conductor with guitar-playing aspirations. Its Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) is a visitor at carnival time — an event that consumes a year of prep because it offers the one brief annual respite from squalor.
Extras: Criterion has provided a ton of extras not on its original 1999 DVD about the movie’s history and influence, including a full-length documentary. As film scholar Robert Stam points out in an excellent supplement, this is not an Brazilian film but a French one whose point of view or emphasis is one a native filmmaker probably wouldn’t have taken.
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The Great Waldo Pepper

Universal, Drama, $14.98 DVD, ‘PG.’
Stars Robert Redford, Bo Svenson, Susan Sarandon, Bo Brundin.
1975. Historically significant as both a star-power footnote and something close to aviation-buff nirvana, this cult box office underachiever has finally received its DVD due. No widescreen movie deserves to be released in cruddy pan-and-scan, as happened to Great Waldo Pepper in 1998. Even without extras, this DVD is a beauty. An odd and even clashing mix of early aviation comedy-drama, Pepper’s period spans the post-World War I era all the way through the 1920s, with Robert Redford’s title character obsessed with the heroic efforts of onetime German flying ace Ernst Kessler.
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Les Paul: Live in New York

Questar, Music, $19.99 DVD, $34.99 Blu-ray, NR.
2010. Electric guitar pioneer Les Paul died just over a year ago at 94, but this uplifting homestretch release clarifies why it was normal to think that he’d always be around to play. New York captures Paul’s twilight performances at the Iridium Jazz Club when he jammed Monday nights on stage with guests (even Keith Richards made the pilgrimage).
Extras: The bonus material is copious and goes beyond additional Iridium performances. There’s an episode from the old “Les & Mary” TV show and the famous episode from “Omnibus” in which the couple has fun explaining multitracking against occasional crew laughter.
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New on Disc: 'A Prophet' and more …

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

Kino Lorber, Romance, $29.95 DVD, $34.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars James Mason, Ava Gardner, Nigel Patrick.
1951. Along with writer-director Albert Lewin’s better-known 1945 screen adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, this is the signature work of a filmmaker who didn’t make many movies but had a flair for portraying the rich (or well-off, at least) and infamous. The film opened in the United States about three weeks before star Ava Gardner married Frank Sinatra.
Extras: Pandora was previously issued in a DVD version taken from a 35mm print source. The earlier release’s limitations are dramatically evident in a before-after comparison included with this version, which visually swamps just about any normal movie.
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A Prophet

Sony Pictures, Drama, B.O. $2.1 million, $27.96 DVD, $38.96 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for strong violence, sexual content, nudity, language and drug material.
Stars Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif.
2009. When the evidence runs a consistently intriguing two hours 35 minutes despite taking place predominantly indoors amid oppressively grubby settings, there can’t be much doubt about the degree of vitality left in the prison picture, whose heft as a genre goes back to the earliest days of the talkies. France’s recent nominee for foreign-language Oscar is as good as Argentinian winner The Secret in Their Eyes and German nominee The White Ribbon.
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Tapped

Disinformation, Documentary, $19.98 DVD, NR.
2009. Director Stephanie Soechtig’s polemic has to do with the scourge of drinking water out of plastic bottles — a heavily marketed habit that started in about 1989 after the first wave of bottled water (Perrier in glass, circa 1973) ran its course. A lot of the material here was previously covered in Flow: For Love of Water, but the presentation in this one-sided but convincing exposé seems more dynamic with its trenchant visuals (ill people; oceanside views that look like landfill; oceanic water samples littered with chunks of plastic) that are hard to shake. Less speculative are the corporations that pump water out of local communities without offering any remuneration — which is especially nice when there’s a drought and consumers are ordered to curtail their own use while the water companies are not.
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The Locket

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Brian Aherne, Gene Raymond, Henry Stephenson, Laraine Day, Ricardo Cortez, Robert Mitchum, Sharyn Moffett.
1946. The Locket is the twisted telling of a twisted story via one of the messiest time structures ever. The film’s biggest claim to fame is that it contains a flashback within a flashback within a flashback. The story is also psychologically compelling. Director John Brahm pulls out the stylistic flourishes for the finale, a scene that ultimately puts over the movie. It’s grown-up, tantalizingly ambiguous and, in its way, credible — not the usual melodramatic comeuppance scenario (say, falling off a cliff) that screen women like Laraine Day’s character often have to endure. The actress’s performance (very good) is served by an array of changing hairstyles but doesn’t lean on them. This is, after all, a character who’s always reinventing herself — remaining unflappable throughout constant accusations of duplicity by men going down for the count.
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New on Disc: 'Elvis on Tour' and more …

Elvis on Tour

Warner, Documentary, $19.96 DVD, $34.99 Blu-ray, ‘G.’
Stars Elvis Presley.
1972. Elvis Presley’s last movie was this unpretentious but now rather affecting performance film. The Blu-ray presentation is a pleasing rendering, and I enjoyed this swan song substantially more than I had the two or three previous times over the years. With the passage of time, it’s now easy to see that Elvis’ final screen appearance came at exactly the apt moment. Elvis on Tour turns out to be something of a stew that includes a tribute to old Elvis movies and a look back at his Ed Sullivan heyday.
Extras: You get a sense of what the metabolic grind the road is on performers. A touring schedule included with the Blu-ray lists 15 consecutive days of shows, including two-a-day performances each in Knoxville, Macon and Jacksonville — the last two engagements on consecutive days.
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The Kim Novak Collection

Sony Pictures, Drama, $39.95 three-DVD set, NR.
Stars Kim Novak, James Stewart, Frank Sinatra, William Holden, Fredric March.
1955-59. The set includes three previously available Novak starrers — Picnic (1955), Pal Joey (1957) and Bell Book and Candle (1958) — and two new to DVD — Jeanne Eagels (1957) and Middle of the Night (1959). Jeanne Eagels is director George Sidney’s misconceived biopic of the stage actress. The set’s revelation is the inevitably uncommercial Middle of the Night, which reunited writer-playwright Paddy Chayefsky with director Delbert Mann four years after they’d collaborated on the Oscar-winning Marty.
Extras: A couple of the films have Novak commentaries for selected scenes, but there are also several featurettes with the actress and Stephen Rebello, who does an outstanding job of drawing her out (it’s obvious that they hit it off) and asking intelligent questions.
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Louie Bluie

Street 8/10
Criterion, Documentary, $24.95 DVD, NR.
Featuring Howard Armstrong.
1985. Terry Zwigoff’s little seen Louie Bluie is a 60-minute documentary on late country-blues musician Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong, a man whose many talents included looking natural in an orange sport jacket and matching shirt and being one of those rare non-military personnel to look cool in a beret.
Extras: Critic Michael Sragow’s liner notes are full of welcome information about the production and of how Zwigoff cleaned out his life savings to make a movie that didn’t stand a chance of getting wide distribution. Zwigoff’s own DVD commentary is very entertaining and often very frank.
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Devil’s Doorway

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Robert Taylor, Louis Calhern, Paula Raymond.
1950. The leap of faith audiences have to make is the casting of Robert Taylor as an Indian bilked out of his land and the cattle fortune that’s gone with it by laws that give Native Americans no rights — and he a Civil War Congressional Medal of Honor winner to compound the insult. The print hasn’t been remastered but is quite acceptable, though certainly it’s not up to what Criterion did with director Anthony Mann’s The Furies in 2008 (which is almost breathtaking).
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New on Disc: 'Piranha: Special Edition' and more …

Piranha: Special Edition

Street 8/3/10
Shout! Factory/Vivendi, Horror, $19.93 DVD, $26.97 Blu-ray, ‘R.’
Stars Heather Menzies, Bradford Dillman, Kevin McCarthy, Keenan Wynn, Dick Miller.
1978. I had never seen Piranha before its new Blu-ray edition, which, like the company’s other recent high-def editions from the Roger Corman library, polishes the appearance of a frugally budgeted production to the highest level we’re likely to see.
Extras: You have to love hearing Corman, on the bonus section here, conceding that his picture was “influenced” by Jaws.  The bonus section is largely devoted to the blue-smoke-and-mirrors work director Joe Dante and his effects people had to pull off to disguise the reality that the so-called piranhas were fake and nailed/glued to sticks, which were then manipulated by technicians.
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Home

Kino Lorber, Comedy, $29.95 DVD, $34.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet.
2009. Smoothly situated in that spot somewhere between a plausible story surreally told and a surreal story told reasonably realistically, Switzerland’s submission for the most recent Oscars is another chapter in the career of its marvelously chameleonic lead Isabelle Huppert. The movie’s credible base emanates from something all of us have noted at one time or another: those households that manage to function even though they’re plunked right up against the highways our speeding cars zoom down.
Extras: The movie’s visuals burn in the brain, and bonus features tell of how director/co-writer Ursula Meier’s debut feature was inspired by, in fact, whipping down the freeway and noting oblivious adjacent residents enjoying life despite the noise and pollution.
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Appointment With Danger

Olive, Drama, $24.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Alan Ladd, Phyllis Calvert, Jack Webb, Harry Morgan.
1951. The movie opens with a familiar-sounding announcer voice-overing standard boilerplate about how great the post office is — but quickly gets down to business with the welcome noir array of third-rate hotels, a foiled robbery, seedy gang hideout and a resident blonde chippie. By the time Danger came out, Jack Webb was only months away from transferring “Dragnet” from radio to TV and on a permanent “enforcement” perch; as a result, audiences never got too many opportunities to see him on the wrong side of the law. (But in a juicy footnote, he is, again, in Charlton Heston’s 1950 debut vehicle Dark City — another of the five launch titles, along with this release, in Olive Films’ new distribution deal with Paramount to release several of the latter’s catalog titles.)
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Brewster McCloud

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Comedy, $24.95 DVD, ‘R’ for language, drug references and sexuality.
Stars Bud Cort, Michael Murphy, Rene Auberjonois, Sally Kellerman, William Windom.
1970. This is a movie about all things birds — and specifically, about a young man (Bud Cort, so early in his career that he hadn’t even made Harold and Maude yet) who yearns to fly in the Houston Astrodome via a complex makeshift contraption that demands he keep his arms in shape by doing hundreds of pull-ups. Despite self-indulgent dead spots, the movie has the comic tone and look of prime Robert Altman (it’s his first movie after MASH brought him overnight lionization).
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New on Disc: World Series 1985 and 'Crack in the World'

The Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 5

Warner, Thriller, $49.92 four-DVD set, NR.
Stars John Cassavetes, Dick Powell, Richard Kiley, Susan Hayward.
1945-56. The easy standout pick here is the most eagerly awaited and overdue: director Phil Karlson’s trenchant 1955 The Phenix City Story, which deals with the much publicized (at the time) postwar corruption in Phenix City, AL — once the so-called “Sin City” just across the river from Columbus, Ga., and Fort Benning. The set also includes Dial 1119 (1950), Cornered (1945), Desperate (1947), Armored Car Robbery (1950), Crime in the Streets (1956), Deadline at Dawn (1946) and the underachieving Backfire (1950).
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Kansas City Royals: 1985 World Series Collector’s Edition

Street 7/27
A&E, Sports, $69.95 seven-DVD set, NR.
1985. Chronicling what was called the “I-70 Series” due to the atypically close proximity of the Kansas City Royals and St. Louis Cardinals in Missouri, here’s a set that transcends specific fandom of one team or another due to the drama that took place on the field, punctuated by Don Denkinger’s blown call that allowed the Royals to win Game 6, and a melee in the Royals’ Game 7 clincher that threatened to resemble one of the saloon brawls in John Ford’s Donovan’s Reef.
Extras: According to a couple interviews in the supplements, the Royals got riled when they went into St. Louis two games down and saw a banner prematurely congratulating their opponents as “World Series Champions.” The extras also include the Royals’ post-game locker-room celebration, and it’s good to see George Brett not just spraying teammates with champagne — but also swigging the stuff, then spitting it out, on national television.=
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Crack in the World

Street 7/27
Olive, Sci-Fi, $24.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Dana Andrews, Janette Scott, Kieron Moore, Alexander Knox.
1965. The kind of movies for which 1960s drive-ins were invented, this dramatically lukewarm but thematically scorching sci-fi melodrama is of interest for its environmental topicality and for its status as one of the “launch” titles in a welcome new line of Paramount oldies now being distributed by Olive Films. The peril is encroaching heat from the Earth’s core — which is intended to solve the world’s energy needs but is instead engendering earthquakes and causing animal populations to run for the hills, or at least cooler temperatures. The workmanlike direction is by Andrew Marton, who is probably best known for co-directing 1950’s King Solomon’s Mines and the only bad movie Grace Kelly ever made (Green Fire) — plus the American exterior episodes in The Longest Day and the famous chariot race for William Wyler’s Ben-Hur.
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College, Inc. (Frontline)

PBS, Documentary, $24.99 DVD.
2010. The $400 billion for-profit higher-education system leaves many graduates saddled with massive student loan debt. “Frontline” continues to do what it does so well: tell a story that other documentaries are not inclined to cover, even though the subject is one that effects huge numbers and probably someone on your block. Like most muckraking documentaries, this one deals with “excesses” — which means the volume of them is either several instances of simple bad apple-dom or the kind of numbers you get when an entire system whose potential for abuse is endemic.
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Prodigal Sons

First Run, Documentary, DVD $24.95, NR.
2008. There’s a cartoon from the 1970s that I used to love from, if memory serves, The New Yorker — though if not, it had a decidedly New Yorker tone. The set-up is a domestic scene that pictures something like a frumpy mom in pin-curlers, one son who’s either gay or a cross-dresser and another on his way out the door dressed for what in the ’50s would have been rumble. In the center of the frame is dad in his chair, reading Ozzie Nelson’s autobiography.

I was thinking about this — and how life can play tricks on all kinds of parental plans and assumptions — while watching this deservedly praised documentary about the surprises that were in store for a Helena, MT, physician and the woman from Texas who married him. Older son Marc (adopted) eventually suffered a severe frontal lobe injury as a young adult and became subject to violent outbursts that went against the grain of his everyday demeanor. Next in line came this film’s transgendered director Kimberly Reed — who turns out to be a role model for displaying grace under stress — who is now a woman but was once a male quarterback for the high-school football team.

Marc and Kim (who was in the same high-school class because Marc got held back in pre-school) have never truly gotten along, due in part to her onetime local star status. Now, after a long layoff, and as Kim pays a visit with her New York female companion as the story begins, they are trying.

Just by itself, this warm-up would make an interesting movie. Here’s married Marc the tinderbox primed to explode unexpectedly at any time, as he does late in the movie when he commits violence against a younger brother whose gayness he sometimes won’t accept (so you can imagine the issues he has with Kim). And Kim is going through what many transgendered individuals do, which is to go into such complete denial of one’s former existence that even seeing old snapshots can conjure up pain. And Marc is a guy with a fondness for old snapshots.

But there’s an added twist, which, unlike the rest of the story, made news a few years back. Marc, who has always been searching for his own identity in a sibling rivalry, finds one in spades when he discovers that the biological mother he never even saw until she was in a casket at her funeral was Rebecca Welles, daughter of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. And the physical resemblance between Marc and his grandfather is unmistakable.

Reed deserves a lot of credit for juggling what could have been some dangling elements, which include a family visit to Croatia at the request of Oja Kadar — Welles’ companion for the last two decades of his life and a memorable presence in 1973’s F for Fake, the last film he directed. Marc and the others swim outside her home in what looks as if it could be anyone’s ideal honeymoon spot, and given the almost folkloric financial woes that plagued Welles for almost his entire career, it’s good to see Kadar apparently living large. More power to her.

Assisting Kim in her own journey are a group of old Helena friends who come off as being non-judgmentally supportive — though when the story opens, she’s on her way a 20th high school class reunion after a long absence and isn’t certain how she’ll be received. Her mother, too, seems to be constituted of uncommonly sound bedrock, and the older woman’s reflections are featured on a DVD bonus section that deals with this film’s festival showings and a special film-related church weekend back in Helena. The story ends, though, with Marc’s plight at an impasse, and just about anyone will exit this haunting documentary wondering about his ultimate outcome.
 

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New on Disc: 'Black Narcissus' and more …

Black Narcissus

Street 7/20
Criterion, Drama, $39.95 DVD or Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Sabu, Jean Simmons.
1947. Thanks to an unusual story stirringly told plus apt and imaginative casting, the high-Fahrenheit film version of Rumer Godden’s novel played well even when shown in black-and-white in early TV showings decades ago. The Blu-ray pretty well equals the impressive theatrical print of this Technicolor psychological drama with religious overtones that dramatized the challenge of British Anglican nuns to bring a sense of order to what is at least physical paradise in the Himalayas, which merits serious consideration as one of the 10 most beautiful color movies of all time.
Extras: A booklet contains magnificent color stills and an essay by Kent Jones, plus several more supplements (some that carried over from a 2001 DVD) that relay a lot of information about the production.
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White House Revealed

Street 7/20
Infinity, Documentary, $14.98 DVD, NR.
Narrated by Martin Sheen.
2010. You have to believe that no one ever says “it’s just a job” when it comes to the 95 resident staffers in the White House detail, who begin and end their day (which can last up to 20 hours if a state dinner is on the calendar) serving the leader of the free world, family members and a dog or two. Martin Sheen (an apt choice considering his role on “The West Wing”) narrates this 50-minute history, which frequently cuts to the senior George Bush and first lady Barbara for warm recollections.
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New York Confidential

VCI, Drama, $19.99 DVD, NR.
Stars Broderick Crawford, Richard Conte, Anne Bancroft, Mike Mazurki.
1955. If you don’t expect too much beyond grown-up subject matter and actors who can carry the show, there’s a hefty body count to be enjoyed from what the DVD box art refers to as “the Holy Grail of missing noir films.” Seen by relatively few at the time and fondly remembered by a few, the movie basically fell off the face of the earth until a recent well-received public showing at the American Cinematheque’s annual noir festival in Los Angeles.
Extras: On the commentary by Alan K. Bode and Kim Morgan — one of the most entertaining and certainly the funniest I’ve heard in a while — the film is not unjustly described as “roots” of The Godfather.
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Verboten!

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $24.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Dick Kallman, James Best, Susan Cummings, Tom Pittman.
1959. Fans of writer-director Samuel Fuller will let him get away with anything and even relish the nerviness of his conceits. How many movies do you know that feature Beethoven’s Fifth on the soundtrack, followed by the voice of an unbilled Paul Anka singing the title tune? Fuller’s extensive combat experiences in World War II no doubt colored this rather raw ‘B’-pic (or close) about a conquering G.I. (James Best, later of the filmmaker’s quintessential 1963 Shock Corridor) who is cared for in a rubble-surrounded house by an anti-Nazi fraulein (Susan Cummings). Best so specialized in playing good ol’ boys that he later ended up as Sheriff Roscoe in TV’s “The Dukes of Hazzard,” and there’s a little of that here.
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New on Disc: 'Dragnet 1968' and more …

Dragnet 1968: Season 2

Shout! Factory, Drama, $44.99 six-DVD set, NR.
Stars Jack Webb, Harry Morgan.
1967-68. The successful 1960s revival of the classic cop drama packed in some camp value during the counter-culture heyday. The jokiness began to seem more forced when juxtaposed against more adult subject matter like sex predators, LSD and racial turmoil. Even so, these episodes do give a hint of where the country was at the time.
Extras: The set includes the 1966 pilot episode, a sit-around with longtime associates of Jack Webb and informative essays by Webb’s daughter (Stacy) and Webb’s official biographers.
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Jason and the Argonauts (Blu-ray)

Sony Pictures, Adventure, $24.95 Blu-ray, ‘G.’
Stars Todd Armstrong, Honor Blackman, Nancy Kovack, Gary Raymond.
1963. Generally, the colors on the darker Jason Blu-ray aren’t as bright as those on my old and generally brighter DVD copy, though I noticed certain reds on the Blu-ray that carried the day. Overall, the grainier Blu-ray is sharper, though there’s visual inconsistency in both versions. The result is kind of a litmus test for how much or little Blu-ray can do for a movie shot on a limited budget.
Extras: The Blu-ray offers a pair of commentaries, one of which is with stop-motion special effects guru Ray Harryhausen (who just turned 90) and film historian Tony Dalton. The other discussion features visual effects artist Randall William Cook (The Lord of the Rings) and Peter Jackson.
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Obama’s Deal: Inside the Battle for Health Care Reform

PBS, Documentary, $24.99 DVD, NR.
2010. April’s “Frontline” special from its top creative gun (Michael Kirk) is about the grimy hands that resulted from presidentially mandated arm-twisting on the long road to getting a bill passed. Expect the usual array of Washington characters and confrontations, though here, of course, the stakes were upped. You get a great sense of how arduous the process is and how many unsavory things one has to do even to win a squeaker, which Kirk gives us in just under an hour.
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Five Star Final (Remastered)

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $24.95 DVD, $14.95 Download, NR.
Stars Edward G. Robinson, Marian Marsh, Boris Karloff.
1931. Though a couple of its supporting performances have their overwrought moments, this pioneer best picture Oscar nominee is still the real deal when it comes to the screen’s most acidic portrayals of the tabloid press. And there’s nothing overwrought about Edward G. Robinson, who proved to audiences that his range went well beyond playing iconic hood “Rico” in Little Caesar, which had made an overnight star of the Broadway import earlier in the year. Said to be based on the experiences of a vengeful former newshound, this play-to-film casts Robinson as the managing editor of a rag called the New York Evening Gazette. With the sales force wanting more sensationalism, Robinson reluctantly gives it to them by dredging up a society shooting from 20 years before. What follows is escalating tragedy that turns the stomach of Robinson — who, in an effective symbolic gesture, is always seen sudsing up his hands with hot water, as if to excise layers of Gazette dirt.
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New on Disc: 'Film Noir Classics II,' 1927's 'Chicago'

Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics II

Street 7/6
Sony Pictures, Drama, $59.95 five-DVD set, NR.
Stars Glenn Ford, Fred MacMurray, Kim Novak, Gloria Grahame.
1954-59. This boxed set contains, in order of personal preference: Human Desire (1954), Pushover (1954), City of Fear (1959), Nightfall (1957) and The Brothers Rico (1957). All five are correctly presented in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio.
Extras: Martin Scorsese introduces one of the selections, and there are further bonus cameos from Shutter Island colleague Emily Mortimer (talking about noir women and situations), plus Memento/The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan on “Pulp Paranoia” and the fact that noir is as much a state of mind as it is a means of shadowy photographic expression.
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Chicago

Street 7/6
Flicker Alley, Comedy, $39.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Phyllis Haver, Victor Varconi, Robert Edeson.
1927. Thought to be lost for so many years, the first screen version of Maurine Watkins’ play is more sober than that of its follow-ups, ultimately presenting a more jaded view of press fickleness.
Extras: A booklet contains three informative essays, enticing on-screen supplements and a half-hour featurette that explains the flapper phenomenon by interviewing women who offer first-hand remembrances. The standout bonus is the inclusion of an obscure but lively 63-minute “March of Time” documentary The Golden Twenties, which RKO distributed in 1950.
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It Came From Kuchar

IndiePix, Documentary, $24.95 DVD, NR.
2009. In the great scheme of (non-cineaste) things, we are talking about the fringe of the fringe here — back from the days before DVD democratized everything, and there was a certain quaint excitement and daring in watching underground movies (even by the most rigid underground standards) in some storefront or other makeshift venue. If you want to see who was capable of influencing John Waters in his formative years (and this is nothing to be high-hatted about), you need go no further than Bronx-bred twins George and Mike Kuchar. Jennifer M. Kroot’s documentary is a good introduction that doesn’t probe too deeply into a subculture.
Extras: There are 40 minutes of deleted scenes, the same length as the actual film. We see George making it to Telluride (earning a tribute, in fact), where he hob-knobs with Leonard Maltin, Todd Haynes and even Ken Burns.
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Two on a Guillotine

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Comedy, $24.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Connie Stevens, Dean Jones, Cesar Romero.
1965. For those who like horror movies where the principal characters take a break in the action to visit an amusement park and disco (showcased in Panavision, no less), this movie is for you. Artistically, the movie isn’t the stuff of shelf lives, except for in one regard: You sense pretty quickly that a superior cinematographer must have photographed it. And though one can argue that Guillotine’s puppy-loving (really … a roller coaster ride?) waters down the horror and inflates the 107-minute running time, it’s unexpected enough to get the movie out of the predictable ‘B’-movie rut in which director William Conrad (one and the same as the portly actor) was laboring in during this period.
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New on Disc: 'Leave It to Beaver,' 'The White Ribbon' and more …

Leave It to Beaver: The Complete Series

Street 6/29
Shout! Factory, Comedy, $199.99 37-DVD set, NR.
Stars Jerry Mathers, Barbara Billingsley, Hugh Beaumont, Tony Dow.
1957-63. The show was and is so well-written that it almost certainly helped thousands of youngsters to develop their senses of irony — the kind that comes from observing an adult world through youthful eyes.
Extras: A revealing bonus disc includes the original pilot, which had a few different actors in the cast. There also are several anecdotes spun in an outstanding talking-heads documentary in which enthusiastic participants Billingsley, Mathers and Dow make it obvious that they still like and see each other.
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The White Ribbon

Street 6/29
Sony Pictures, Drama, B.O. $2.2 million, $28.95 DVD, $38.96 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for some disturbing content involving violence and sexuality.
In German with English subtitles.
Stars Ulrich Tukur, Burghart Klaussner, Rainer Bock.
2009. The continually absorbing German film The White Ribbon won the Golden Palm at Cannes but may have been too grim (despite a Golden Globe win as well) for Oscar voters.
Extras: Though the Blu-ray contains a making-of featurette and a couple more on writer-director Michael Haneke, the standard DVD has no extras.
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Night Train to Munich

Street 6/29
Criterion, Drama, $29.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Margaret Lockwood, Rex Harrison, Paul von Henreid.
1940. No fans of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic train mystery The Lady Vanishes should deny themselves director Carol Reed’s unofficial follow-up.
Extras: Briskly compact at 95 minutes, it’s slighter than it’s made out to be in Criterion’s accompanying essay by critic/
historian Philip Kemp and video interview with critics Peter Evans and Bruce Babington.
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Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story

Street 6/29
Infinity, Documentary, $19.98 DVD, NR.
2010. Narrated by Patricia Clarkson and packed with voiceovers of germane writings by Federal Writer’s Project employees whose later fame eclipsed their years tiling in crummy makeshift WPA offices, the story is almost inevitably entertaining because it deals with attempts to bring order to a Depression-era endeavor.
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Fog Over Frisco

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, $14.95 Download, NR.
Stars Bette Davis, Donald Woods, Hugh Herbert, Lyle Talbot, Margaret Lindsay.
1934. Society types and the lowlifes they attract (the press included) are perpetually zipping around in this 68-minute stallion of a movie that serves as an example of how whodunits and screen melodramas in general should move.
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