The DVD Report #88

It’s time to look back at the best DVD releases of 2008, which I cite as follows:

Murnau, Borzage and Fox
How the West Was Won (Blu-ray)
Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection
The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration (Blu-ray)
Fanny
The Third Man (Blu-ray)
Quo Vadis
Becket (Blu-ray)
The Lubitsch Musicals
Persepolis (Blu-ray)

The big news of the year was the settling of the high definition format wars in which Sony’s Blu-ray won out over Samsung’s HD-DVD, and DVD distributors began to not only release all new high definition DVDs on Blu-ray but to reissue those titles previously released in HD on Blu-ray as well.

The best release of the year, however, is the standard DVD release of Murnau, Borzage and Fox which I reviewed in depth just a couple of weeks ago. The humongous collection features the extant Fox films of F.W. Murnau, Sunrise and City Girl , as well as most of the early Fox films of Frank Borzage including 7th Heaven and Street Angel as well as a recreation through story boards and stills of Murnau’s lost film 4 Devils and a recreation of Borzage’s lost feature The River . In many ways this set is even more valuable than Fox’s mammoth Ford at Fox a year ago. Many of the Ford films had had previous DVD releases and almost all of them were released separately at the same time as the box set. Of the films in the Murnau, Borzage collection, only Sunrise has been previously released and there are no plans to release the other films separately at this time.

Long available in various hard-on-the-eyes home video versions, Warner Bros. knocked themselves out with an eye-popping How the West Was Won presented seamlessly in two versions, including a “smilebox” version which recreates the original Cinerama presentation as closely as possible. Presented with the left and right sides of the image in full screen with the center image compressed this version forces you to focus on the action at the center while using your peripheral vision to take in the action on the sides. The second version is the standard widescreen version we’ve seen before but with the telltale lines between the three sections removed. This second version is available in standard DVD but only the Blu-ray version contains the “smilebox” presentation.

Fox’s Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection is the definitive collection of films he made in the period from 1927-1947. Included are re-issues of such long out-of-print tiles as Rebecca , Spellbound and Notorious as well as such earlier films as The Lodger , Sabotage and Young and Innocent , which have been rescued from public domain hell. Also included in the nicely packaged set are extensive notes on each film. It doesn’t get much better than once again seeing Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier in Rebecca , Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck in Spellbound and Bergman and Cary Grant in Notorious , films thatnot only represent the best of Hitchcock but the best of filmmaking in general. Also noteworthy are Universal’s newly released special editions of three of its Hitchcock titles, Rear Window , Vertigo and Psycho .

The title of The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration is a bit of a misnomer. Director Francis Ford Coppola acted as an advisor to the actual restoration of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II , the first two films in the trilogy, as did cinematographer Gordon Willis, though neither of them did the actual work. The third film, The Godfather Part III , also included here,did not require restoration. But I quibble. The films restored to their original vibrancy look spectacular, especially on Blu-ray. We can follow once again the life story of Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino, across the span of the character’s life and the decades of the filmmaking process which lasted from 1971 to 1990. Marlon Brando, James Caan, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, John Cazale and Talia Shire also star.

Long sought on DVD by lovers of classic films, rights issues were finally resolved and Joshua Logan’s Fanny was at long last released in a two-disc special edition. Based on Pagnol’s 1930s trilogy of Marius , Fanny and Cesar and Harold Rome’s 1950s musical, the 1961 film version keeps Rome’s glorious score but jettisons his equally splendid lyrics. No matter, though, as the actors make up for it in spoken dialogue that remains as fresh and charming as it was then. Leslie Caron is at her loveliest as the waterfront girl left pregnant by her young lover and forced through circumstance to marry his father’s friend. Horst Buchholz as the boy, Charles Boyer as his father, and Maurice Chevalier as his accommodating friend are all splendid as is the magnificent cinematography and Rome’s score, the soundtrack of which makes up the second disc.

Criterion, long the crème de la crème of standard DVD, has entered the Blu-ray market in a big way with its release of Carol Reed’s The Third Man , which continually tops the polls of best British films and consistently shows in the top ranks of American films as it was an American-British co-production. It stands the test of time as the best cold war thriller of them all and the performances of Joseph Cotton, Orson Welles and Alida Valli still sizzle. The film’s breathtaking cinematography and zither-influenced score looked and sounded great on Criterion’s standard DVD release but look and sound even sharper on Blu-ray. Also among Criterion’s initial Blu-ray releases are The Man Who Fell to Earth , Chungking Express , Bottle Rocket and The Last Emperor .

Taking ten years for MGM to get around to filming it, Quo Vadis has taken Warner Bros., who now owns the rights, just as long to restore it and release it on standard DVD. The film that started the long run of biblical films that lasted throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s looks and sounds great on standard DVD with Robert Taylor as the Centurion, Deborah Kerr as the Christian, and Peter Ustinov as Nero who fiddles while Rome burns. My one quibble is that the film was simultaneously prepared for Blu-ray but the Blu-ray disc will not be released until later this year, a serious case of Warner Bros. double dipping (i.e. hoping consumers will buy both). They are pulling the same stunt with Gigi , already out on Blu-ray in Japan.

A religious epic of another kind, the thinking man’s Becket with Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole directed by Peter Glenville at the height of their careers, also took a long time to come to DVD but a short while to come to Blu-ray where it looks and sounds even more stunning than on the long-awaited standard disc. Unlike Quo Vadis , however, this one-two punch was not calculated, it just happened that way. The film beautifully chronicles the relationship of England’s Henry II and his carousing friend, Thomas Becket, whom he makes Bishop of Canterbury in the expectation that Becket will cater to his whims. Unexpectedly, Becket develops a conscience that forms the crux of the drama, one of the best of the 1960s. John Gielgud, Donald Moffit, Pamela Brown and Martita Hunt co-star.

Criterion’s Eclipse Series 8 – Lubitsch Musicals packaged together the missing-on-DVD early Lubitsch musicalsthat once again reminded us of the sophistication of the director most people know for his later comedies Trouble in Paradise , Ninotchka , The Shop Around the Corner , To Be or Not to Be , and Heaven Can Wait . The same effervescent spirit that pervaded those films is there in abundance in the early screen musicals included here: Love Me Tonight , Monte Carlo , The Smiling Lieutenant , and One Hour With You , all but one starring Maurice Chevalier. Other compilations of note included Columbia’s marvelous The Budd Boetticher Collection and Fox’s last two installments of its Charlie Chan collections, Charlie Chan Collection, Volume 4 and Charlie Chan Collection, Volume 5 .

Animation took a big step forward with the Blu-ray release of the French film Persepolis about the true-life story of an Iranian girl who lived through the hell of the Shah’s rule and the even more oppressive regime of the Ayatollahs. It was a one-of-a-kind masterpiece beautifully rendered in high definition black-and-white and color. It is presented in both the original French version with subtitles and the dubbed U.S. version. Chiarra Mastroianni and her mother Catherine Deneuve voice both versions with Sean Penn and Gena Rowlands joining them on the dubbed version. The only other animated release of particular note this year was the Pixar film WALL-E , which humorously portrays the humans of 700 years in the future as childlike, lazy, fat slobs.

Honorable mentions for the year go to The Dark Knight , Iron Man , Helboy II: The Golden Army, Forgetting Sarah Marshall , and Across the Universe for looking and sounding so great on Blu-ray; and There Will Be Blood
d , No Country for Old Men, Into the Wild, Gone Baby Gone , and Atonement for being the best of 2007’s films released on DVD in 2008.