Several long requested classic films are now available on DVD.

Dalton Trumbo wrote his acclaimed anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun, about a victim of World War I – the war to end all wars – in 1938. It was published on the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. It won a National Book Award the same year as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. It took less than a year for John Ford to make The Grapes of Wrath into an enduring screen masterpiece. It took Johnny Got His Gun another thirty-one years to make it to the big screen.

In the meantime Trumbo had become Hollywood’s highest paid screenwriter (A Guy Named Joe, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo) before becoming the most famous of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, going to jail and continuing to write screenplays fronted by others (Gun Crazy, Roman Holiday) and emerging from the blacklist with screenplays once again under his own name (Spartacus, Exodus).

Trumbo wrote the screenplay for Johnny Got His Gun in 1963 with the legendary Luis Bunuel scheduled to direct, but the project fell through. Finally in 1971, with Bunuel out of the picture, Trumbo got to direct it himself with Timothy Bottoms as the soldier/narrator with no arms, no legs, no mouth and no eyes. It was filmed in the town where Trumbo grew up, in the bakery in which he worked for ten years, even in the house and the very bed in which his father (Jason Robards) died. Marsha Hunt plays his mother, Diane Varsi is his nurse and Donald Sutherland appears as Jesus.

The film is as powerful as the novel, but the switch between black-and-white for the hospital scenes and color for the flashbacks is a bit disconcerting. Still, it’s a film that demands being seen.

Available for some time in Regions 2 (Europe) and 4 (Australia), the film has been released in Region 1 (U.S., Canada) with extras not available with the Region 2 release. They include a 2006 documentary on Trumbo’s life, a new interview with Bottoms, the 1940 radio play starring James Cagney and more.

We go from one legend to another.

As Trumbo’s career was winding down, Peter Bogdanovich’s was just starting up.

The husband-and-wife writing team of Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers wrote, and Shyer directed 1984’s Irreconcilable Differences loosely based on Bogdanovich’s marriage to writer Polly Platt and his relationship with Sharon Stone.

Ostensibly a film about a nine-year-old girl, played by Drew Barrymore, who divorces her parents, that aspect of the film is merely a framing device. While Barrymore, an excellent child actress, has a few good scenes, the bulk of the film plays out in the ten year marriage of her parents played by Ryan O’Neal and Shelley Long. O’Neal, who starred in Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon does a hilarious spot-on take of the director and Sharon Stone, in her first major role, is a hoot as his one-time muse, Cybill Shepherd.

The DVD is part of Lionsgate’s new “lost” film collection.

Before there was the movie, there was the TV miniseries.

The current film State of Play is based on a 2003 British TV miniseries, also called State of Play, which is now available on DVD.

A tense, exciting thriller about the murder of a British M.P.’s research assistant, the miniseries is also about the inner workings of a team of investigative newspaper reporters and corruption in high places. Bill Nighy won a BAFTA for his droll interpretation of the newspaper’s editor while David Morrisey as the M.P. had to settle for a nomination. John Simm, James McAvoy and Kelly Macdonald as the reporters and Polly Walker as Morriseey’s wife also provide compelling performances. Director David Yates (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) keeps up the tension for the nearly six hours’ playing time.

A remake that was better than the original.

Long one of the most requested titles not on DVD in Region 1, Mike Newell’s 1992 version of Enchanted April is one of those rare remakes that is actually an improvement over its previous incarnation, Harry Beaumont’s 1935 version which starred Ann Harding and Frank Morgan. Josie Lawrence and Alfred Molina have those roles here, but they are but a small part of a remarkable ensemble that includes Miranda Richardson, Polly Walker, Jim Broadbent and Joan Plowright, in a lovely Oscar-nominated performance, about four British ladies who pool their resources to spend a brief holiday in Italy.

The Miramax DVD release is, alas, bare bones.

Sir Alexander Korda remembered.

Criterion’s Alexander Korda’s Private Lives is part of their Eclipse series in which they release bare bones versions of classic films as opposed to those with all the bells and whistles that normally accompany Criterion releases.

Included in this set are four films produced and directed by the British master about the private lives of famous people.

Perhaps the most famous of the films is 1933’s The Private Life of Henry VIII for which Charles Laughton won an Oscar and remained the definitive interpreter of the character for the rest of his life.

Laughton’s performance is the centerpiece of the film. Looking like he stepped out of a painting of the king, Laughton seems to be having the time of his life gluttonously eating chicken with his fingers and throwing the bones on the floor to say nothing of his discarding one wife after another.

The film wastes no time on first wife Catherine of Aragon who is out of the picture as the film begins with second wife Anne Boleyn (Merle Oberon) awaiting the axe. Love of his life Jane Seymour (Wendy Barrie), badly matched Anne of Cleves (a delightful Elsa Lanchester), treacherous Katherine Howard (Binnie Barnes) and last wife Katherine Parr (Everley Gregg) follow in quick succession. Robert Donat co-stars as Thomas Culpepper who went to his death with his cousin Katherine (Howard).

Almost entirely eclipsed by Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress later in 1934, that same year’s The Rise of Catherine the Great is a straightforward, albeit historically inaccurate, account of the marriage of Catherine and Grand Duke Peter, played by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as an eccentric, rather than the raving lunatic he was in real life, vividly played by Sam Jaffe in von Sternberg’s film.

As Catherine, Elisabeth Bergner, in her English-language debut, is merely adequate, hardly as memorable as Marlene Dietrich in the von Sternberg. The only one of the three principals who manages to compare favorably to her counterpart is Flora Robson as Dowager Empress Elizabeth. She is every bit as unforgettable as Louise Dresser in the competing production.

Though Catherine the Great is officially credited to Paul Czinner, Bergner’s husband, it was an open secret that Korda helmed much of the film.

Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s swan song, The Private Life of Don Juan, is a leisurely-paced film about the last days of the famed lover, now mostly forgotten by a new generation, as was the star. The 1934 film co-stars Merle Oberon, Benita Hume and Binnie Barnes.

Charles Laughton continued his remarkable gallery of fine 1930s performances with Korda’s 1936 production of Rembrandt. Before that memorable characterization there were Nero in The Sign of the Cross, Henry VIII of course, Edward Moulton Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Marmaduke Ruggles in Ruggles of Red Gap, Inspector Javert in Les Miserables and Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty. Later there would be the title role in the unfinished I, Claudius and Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, to round out the decade. They were all vivid and unforgettable portraits, and his magnificent portrayal of the sad life of the legendary Dutch artist was one of his very best.

Gertrude Lawrence makes a rare screen appearance as the housekeeper with whom he has an affair after the death of his wife and Laughton’s real-life wife, Elsa Lanchester, plays his later common law wife. Lanchester’s heartbreaking performance is every bit as brilliant as Laughton’s.

-Peter J. Patrick (May 12, 2009)