NY Times Highlights Top DVD Releases of 06

From Film to Fetish Object: The Year’s Noteworthy DVDs

By Dave Kehr, New York Times, December 22, 2006

DVDs are more than just plastic discs with movies tucked inside. At their best these strangely compelling objects owe their appeal to a combination of elements, one that might begin with a movie but also includes the extras: the packaging, the program notes, the menu design, the commentary tracks and a wide range of supplementary material, from deleted scenes to entire features. Aligning all these things requires genuine editorial skill, just as getting what are often dirty, faded old prints to look and sound sharp and new again demands technical ability and artistic judgment.

This list of 10 of the year’s most notable DVD releases is meant to acknowledge the contributions of those frequently anonymous technicians and designers who create these alluring fetish objects. And rather than simply concede the field to the Criterion Collection and Warner Home Video, which lead the pack in presentation and breadth of selection, I’ve tried to spread things out among several companies striving for quality, whether linked to major studios or operated as labors of love out of basements and back rooms.

Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales
Criterion, the company that introduced directors’ commentaries and supplementary material in the laser disc days, is still on top of the heap. And its commitment to the highest standards in visual quality, value-added supplements and scholarship has seldom been more strongly represented than by this boxed-set edition of six Rohmer films (including My Night at Maud’s and Claire’s Knee), which represent one of the signal accomplishments of the French New Wave. Mr. Rohmer supervised the transfers, which for the two early, short films came from delicate 16-millimeter prints, and also subjected himself to a rare on-camera interview with his former star and producer Barbet Schroeder. A handful of other early Rohmer shorts, including the sublime Nadja in Paris, are included, as well as On Pascal, a sample of the educational films he has never stopped making for French television. One stand-alone book includes the short stories, written by Mr. Rohmer long before they were filmed, on which the Moral Tales are based; another contains essays by prominent critics, including Kent Jones and Molly Haskell. Fully the equivalent of an academic edition of a great author’s work, with some of the cinema’s most deliciously erotic moments thrown in at no extra charge. (Criterion, $99.95)

John Wayne-John Ford Film Collection
Bringing together eight of the Ford-Wayne films now controlled by Time Warner, this terrific set chronicles one of the most fruitful (and neurotically complex) director-star collaborations in American film. The big dog is The Searchers, the 1956 film publicly dismissed by Ford (along with many critics of the time) as “a potboiler” that has slowly assumed its rightful position as a legitimate contender for the Great American Movie, plunging straight to the heart of this country’s great crimes and great glories. The collection includes a remastered edition of Stagecoach, the 1939 film that put Wayne on the road to stardom after a decade in B westerns, and the DVD premieres of The Long Voyage Home (1940), The Wings of Eagles (1957) [ed. note: The Wings of Eagles is strictly for completionists.] and Fort Apache (1948), the first of Ford’s “cavalry trilogy.” They Were Expendable, the hauntingly muffled, melancholic film that Ford made upon his return from his service in World War II, speaks directly to Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima. (Warner Home Video, $79.98)

Phantom
The independent company Flicker Alley has released only three DVDs in its short history, each a dedicated attempt to recapture the exquisite visual quality of silent cinema. Most scholars would place Phantom (1922) — the tale of a failed poet (Alfred Abel) obsessed with an unattainable upper-class woman — among the secondary works of its director, F. W. Murnau. But the Flicker Alley presentation, based on one of the restorations of German silents sponsored by the F. W. Murnau Foundation, which have produced mixed results, is glowingly alive. Care was taken with the transfer to video, and the tasteful color tinting for once does not overpower the tonal range of the black-and-white images. (Flicker Alley, $29.98)

Wanda
It isn’t only silent films that need restoration and revival. Barbara Loden’s groundbreaking independent film was made in 1970 and has been practically impossible to see since; the fledgling distributor Parlour Pictures has discovered an excellent copy of this astonishing work, about a desperate woman from the Appalachian coal country (played by Ms. Loden) who gets mixed up with a petty crook, and reassembled it into the great achievement in American neorealism that it is. Ms. Loden, who died of cancer in 1980, never made another film, but Wanda secures her place in the pantheon. (Parlour Pictures, $24.95)

The Valerio Zurlini Box Set: The Early Masterpieces
What you always hope for when you slip in an unknown DVD: the revelation of a major filmmaker you have barely heard of. This two-feature set from the Italian-American company NoShame includes two films by Mr. Zurlini: Violent Summer, a 1959 romantic drama set during the last days of Fascism that clearly influenced Bernardo Bertolucci’s Conformist, and the glowing Girl With a Suitcase (1961), starring the 23-year-old Claudia Cardinale as a failed cabaret singer who reluctantly falls under the protection of a naïve teenage boy from a wealthy family. Copious supplementary material helps to fill in the portrait of this unjustly neglected filmmaker, as does NoShame’s other Zurlini release this year, the mournful epic Desert of the Tartars (1976). (NoShame, $29.95)

Lubitsch in Berlin
More restorations from Germany’s busy Murnau Foundation, these early features — The Oyster Princess and I Don’t Want to Be a Man (on one disc); Sumurun, Anna Boleyn and The Wildcat — by the future master of sophisticated Hollywood comedy aren’t in quite as good shape as Phantom, but they offer an engaging portrait of an artist in development. From the broadly satirical comedy of The Oyster Princess (1919) to the historical drama of Anna Boleyn (1920), Ernst Lubitsch can be seen refining his technique, continually paring away the inessential and overstated, moving toward the mastery of saying so much with so little that characterized his American-made masterpieces like Trouble in Paradise (1932). (Kino, $29.95 each disc)

Reds
Paramount, which sold most of its rich pre-1948 holdings to MCA-Universal for a mess of pottage, probably has the thinnest library of the major studios. And to judge from the no-frills DVDs it has been publishing, the video division does not have the backing of Paramount’s corporate masters. But when the opportunity is there, as it was with Warren Beatty’s tragicomic epic of early-20th-century radical politics, Paramount can rise to the occasion: this two-disc set offers magnificent color and an immaculate image, as well as a lengthy documentary directed by Laurent Bouzereau that covers every aspect of the film’s making. With this release, 1900, The Conformist and the first volume of the Martin and Lewis Collection, Paramount is finally stepping up to the plate; here’s hoping it finds marketers who are better able to exploit its still quite compelling library of 1950s and ’60s features, which includes long unseen work by Frank Tashlin, Leo McCarey, Anthony Mann, Phil Karlson, Blake Edwards, Otto Preminger and Howard Hawks. (Paramount Home Video, $19.99)

Mr. Moto Collection, Vol. 1
Fox’s DVD division has been moving up fast in the last few years, and when it puts time and money into a project, as it did with this set and its excellent film noir series, the results are spectacular. Unlike the movies in Fox’s Charlie Chan series, now in its second volume of superlative restorations, the Moto films were not whodunits but highly entertaining exotic espionage adventures set in a studio-constructed Far East, starring Peter Lorre (with fake eyelids and buck teeth) as a mysterious international operator of Japanese origin. Fox is to be thanked for sinking so much effort into the digital restoration of these relatively obscure films, and helping to revive both the reputation of the series and the standing of its principal director, Norman Foster. (Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, $59.98)

Cary Grant: Screen Legend Collection
With the Universal library and the pre-1948 Paramount titles, Universal Home Video has the richest unexploited film holdings in Hollywood. It’s unfortunate that so many of its movies have fallen out of distribution, making it impossible to see (legally at least) masterpieces like Frank Borzage’s Little Man, What Now? and Josef von Sternberg’s An American Tragedy, not to mention hundreds of unknown, unexplored films, among which would certainly be items of tremendous interest if anyone were allowed to get to them. But with the “Franchise Collection” series, Universal has found an economic and appealing way of slipping some of its lesser-known titles into the marketplace. I pick the Cary Grant collection just as an example. Here, spread out on three discs, are five films, including the pre-Code comedies Thirty Day Princess and Kiss and Make-Up (both 1934), that could never have stood on their own, but together make a must-have set. [Ed. note: The collection also includes Wings in the Dark (1935), Big Brown Eyes (1936) and Wedding Present (1936)] Other collections have been devoted to John Wayne, Rock Hudson, Bing Crosby, Mae West, Carole Lombard and Cecil B. DeMille (as well as, inexplicably, Ma and Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule); I hope they keep it up forever. (Universal Home Video, $29.98)

Beyond the Rocks
Sheer altruism on the part of Milestone Film and Video, one of the finest of the boutique labels. This 1922 feature, the only film to pair two of the silent era’s biggest stars, Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, was rescued from the chaos of a private collection by the Nederlands Filmmuseum and restored to excellent shape. Milestone has packaged it with a second feature, the 1919 Delicious Little Devil; an 85-minute radio interview with Swanson recorded in 1955; documentaries about the rediscovery and reconstruction of Beyond the Rocks; and your choice of two orchestral scores. It hardly matters that the movie, the work of the perennially dull Sam Wood, isn’t a masterpiece. [This is true. I saw the Beyond the Rocks at the Music Box Theatre here in Chicago earlier this year and I...um...fell asleep.] This significant bit of film history, which otherwise would have been seen by only a handful of academics and museumgoers [yo!], is now available to an audience far beyond the big cities where such things usually play. And that may be the ultimate justification for the DVD format: spreading the word beyond the happy few who live within subway [or walking] distance of the Museum of Modern Art [or the Music Box]. (Milestone, $29.95)

Milestone isn’t the only boutique doing terrific work: I wish I had room to more thoroughly plug Koch Lorber Films, Synapse Films, Mondo Macabro, IFC Films, First Run Features, Facets, VCI Entertainment, Other Cinema, Palm Pictures, Alpha Video and Dark Sky Films, among others. How will video on demand alter this idyllic landscape? By the end of next year we should start to know.