Boxed Set-O-Rama!!!

Most collectors of DVDs have learned by now that boxed sets are the way to go. For example, The Rock Hudson & Doris Day Romance Collection contains three films: Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers. You also get a bonus Doris Day CD. A little online research (courtesy dvdaf.com) tell us that the set can be purchased for $23.02 at buy.com (all prices mentioned herein exclude shipping). At DeepDiscountDVD.com, each film goes for $9.43, totaling $28.29. And you don't get the bonus CD. Usually, the more films in a collection, the better the deal. I use this example because it only contains three movies and I just got it for Christmas (thanks Mom!).

Some great sets are scheduled for the future so, in the interest of saving money and collecting neat little cardboard cases, here are some highlights:

The Signature Collection: Robert Mitchum (Warner Home Video, 1/23/07)
Angel Face (1952, Otto Preminger)
The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (1969, Burt Kennedy)
Home from the Hill (1960, Vincente Minnelli)
Macao (1952, Josef von Sternberg)
The Sundowners (Fred Zinnemann, 1960)
The Yakuza (1975, Sydney Pollack)

Angel Face! Finally!

Monsters and Madmen (Criterion, 1/30/07)
The Atomic Submarine (1959, Spencer Gordon Bennett)
Corridors of Blood (1958, Robert Day)
First Man Into Space (1959, Day)
Grip of the Strangler (1958, Day)

Alfred Hitchcock: 3-Disc Collector's Edition (Lionsgate, 2/6/07)
The Manxman (1929)
Murder! (1930)
Rich and Strange (1932)
The Ring (1927)
The Skin Game (1931)

These films have all been hanging around the grey market for years. Hopefully, this will be an official release with halfway decent prints.

Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist (Criterion, 2/13/07)

Body and Soul (1925, Oscar Micheaux)
Borderline (1930, Kenneth MacPherson)
The Emperor Jones (1933, Dudley Murphy)
Jericho (1937, Thornton Freeland)
Native Land (1942, Leo Hurwitz & Paul Strand)
The Proud Valley (1940, Pen Tennyson)
Sanders of the River (1935, Zoltan Korda)

Marquee Musicals: The Alice Faye Collection (20th Century Fox, 2/20/07)
The Gang's All Here (1943, Busby Berkeley)
Lillian Russell (1940, Irving Cummings)
On the Avenue (1937, Roy Del Ruth)
That Night in Rio (1941, Cummings)

Here's hoping that Marquee Musicals will be a new series in the same vein as the indispensible Fox Film Noir collection.

Hemingway Classics Collection (20th Century Fox, 3/6/07)
A Farewell to Arms (1957, Charles Vidor)
Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962, Martin Ritt)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952, Henry King)
The Sun Also Rises (1957, King)
Under My Skin (1950, Jean Negulesco)

Literary Classics Collection (Warner Home Video, 3/6/07)
Billy Budd (1962, Peter Ustinov)
Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951, Raoul Walsh)
Madame Bovary (1949, Minnelli)
The Prisoner of Zenda (1937, John Cromwell)
The Prisoner of Zenda (1952, Richard Thorpe)
The Three Musketeers (1948, George Sidney)

I'm happy to see both Prisoner of Zendas get released (get it?) - and they will be available separately as a twofer. The remake is good, but the original is great.

W.C. Fields Comedy Collection, Volume 2 (Universal, 3/20/07)
Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935, Clyde Bruckman)
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941, Edward F. Kline)
The Old Fashioned Way (1934, William Beaudine)
Poppy (1936, A. Edward Sutherland)
You're Telling Me! (1934, Erle C. Kenton)

The Signature Collection: Errol Flynn, Vol. 2 (Warner Home Video, 3/27/07)
Adventures of Don Juan (1948, Vincent Sherman)
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936, Michael Curtiz)
The Dawn Patrol (1938, Edmund Goulding)
Dive Bomber (1941, Curtiz)
Gentleman Jim (1942, Raoul Walsh)

The first Flynn Signature Collection (Captain Blood, Dodge City, The Private Lives of Elizabeth & Essex, The Sea Hawk, They Died with Their Boots On, The Adventures of Errol Flynn) is a real treat and I am very much looking forward to the second. Once this collection is released, Four's a Crowd will remain the only collaboration of the eight features Flynn made with Olivia de Havilland not available on DVD.

The Doris Day Collection, Vol. 2 (Warner Home Video, 4/10/07)
By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953, David Butler)
I'll See You in My Dreams (1951, Michael Curtiz)
Lucky Me (1954, Jack Donohue)
My Dream is Yours (1949, Curtiz; animated sequence by Friz Freleng)
On Moonlight Bay (1951, Roy Del Ruth)
Romance on the High Seas (1948, Curtiz)

In her film debut, the funny Romance on the High Seas, Day plays a gum-smacking, sassy young chick - decidedly not the type she would come to embrace in later years. My Dream Is Yours contains a mixed animation/live-action sequence with Day and Jack Carson - dressed as bunnies - singing a kid to sleep...to the tune of Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody."

No, really.