Noble, self-sacrificing schoolteachers have been a movie staple in films for decades. In the 1930s we had Goodbye, Mr. Chips; in the 1940s, Cheers for Miss Bishop; in the 1950s, Blackboard Jungle and Good Morning, Miss Dove! and in the 1960s, To Sir, With Love.

While two major films of the late 1960s, Rachel, Rachel and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, gave us imperfect teachers as protagonists, the saintly teachers were soon back in such films as Stand and Deliver; Dead Poets Society and Mr. Holland’s Opus. Only recently, as with Half Nelson, have we seen an increase in films that take teachers off their pedestals and show them as often-flawed human beings. Such is the case with The Class, the 2008 Cannes Film Festival winner and Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film.

Teacher Francois Begaudeau often exacerbates problems in his French grammar class by engaging in arguments with his students that explode into near violence. Filmed over the course of a year at an actual high school, the cast is comprised mainly of non-actors in the roles of the students and teachers. Director Laurent Cantet co-wrote the screenplay with Begaudeau based on Begaudeau’s book about his experiences as a teacher.

Although the situations in the thought-provoking film relate to a specific classroom, the problems are universal in scope and apply to workplaces, as well as classrooms, everywhere.

The Class is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. Both contain the original French version with English subtitles and a poorly dubbed English version.

Rene Clement was one of the great French directors of the post-World War II era. Two of his most acclaimed works, 1952’s Forbidden Games and 1960’s Purple Noon, have long been available on DVD. 1956’s Gervaise, which won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film of 1957, has finally been released by Criterion as part of their Essential Art House Collection.

The fifth film version of Emile Zola’s L’Assomoir, it has long been considered the closest to capturing the essence of Zola’s writing as any film taken from his works.

Maria Schell, named Best Actress at the 1956 Venice Film Festival, provides a performance of enormous warmth and depth as the independent young woman who realizes her dream of owning her own laundry shop at a terrible cost to herself and her loved ones. Schell, who had been in films since childhood and a major star in Europe since the 1940s, became an international star with this one leading to starring roles in such Hollywood classics as The Brothers Karamazov; The Hanging Tree and Cimarron.

Schell’s character’s daughter would grow up to be the title prostitute in Zola’s most celebrated novel, Nana. Clement gives an indication of what will become of her with the film’s famed closing shot in which the young child entices the neighborhood boys by skipping down the street with a ribbon in her hair.

Maria’s brother, Oscar winning actor Maximilian Schell, made a highly controversial documentary about Schell’s life shortly before her death from dementia in 2005 called My Sister Maria, which is also available on DVD.

Another newly-released film as part of Criterion’s Essential Art House Collection is Marcel Carne’s Le Jour Se Leve from 1939. Banned by the Vichy government for being too pessimistic, then almost destroyed by RKO when they remade it eight years later, this famous film was released in the U.S. in 1940 as Daybreak. It opens with a man who has been shot tumbling down the stairs dead. The focus then shifts to Jean Gabin as the man who has shot him. We see in flashbacks what has led to the killing.

The remake, long available on DVD, is called The Long Night and stars Henry Fonda, Barbara Bel Geddes and Vincent Price under Anatole Litvak’s direction. An interesting film in its own right, it lacks the poetry of Carne’s version.

Yet another overdue release from Criterion’s Essential Art House Collection is Litvak’s 1936 film Mayerling about the tragic romance of the heir to the Austrian throne and his young mistress, played by Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux eighteen years before their equally-famous starring roles in The Earrings of Madame de… It’s a sumptuous treat from beginning to end and much more memorable than the nicely photographed, but dully executed 1968 remake with Omar Sharif and Catherine Deneuve.

The last time Noel Coward’s play Easy Virtue was filmed was in 1928 when it was directed by Alfred Hitchcock as a heavy drama. This time around, Stephan Elliott, the director of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,has put the emphasis in his Easy Virtue clearly on comedy.

Jessica Biel, singing, dancing and tossing off bon mots with the best of them makes an engaging heroine, ably supported by Ben Barnes as her young husband, Kristin Scott Thomas as her snooty mother-in-law and Colin Firth as her full-of-surprise father-in-law. Barnes (the title character in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian) and Firth, who became fast friends on the set, are currently co-starring in the latest big screen version of Dorian Gray.

The Elliot version of Easy Virtue is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. The Hitchcock version is available on standard DVD only.

The last of John Ford’s classic westerns to make it to DVD, 1950’s Wagon Master was one of his personal favorites. A tribute to the pioneer spirit, the film was made without major stars but with Ford’s stock company of character actors including Ben Johnson, Ward Bond, Harry Carey Jr., Russell Simpson, Jane Darwell and Hank Worden. Carey, who is still going strong at 88, provides commentary along with director-historian Peter Bogdanovich. Excerpts from Bogdanovich’s 1966 audio interview with Ford are also included.

Veteran TV director Joseph Sargent’s 2002 miniseries Salem Witch Trials has also been released. Though not as well remembered as either 1937’s Maid of Salem or 1995’s The Crucible which cover the same ground, it is a frightening, sobering account of a dark page in the history of what would become America.

It’s 1691, 71 years after the Puritans came to Massachusetts and a group of young girls begin acting strangely, soon blaming their afflictions on “witches”. Conveniently those accused are the political enemies of the town leader and the new minister. Before the tyranny is put to a stop, twenty innocent victims will be killed – seventeen women and three men.

Kirstie Alley, Henry Czerny and Jay O. Sanders have the principal roles, but veteran players Rebecca De Mornay, Shirley MacLaine, Peter Ustinov and Alan Bates steal the show.

Salem Witch Trials is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

MacLaine also stars in another TV venture now available on DVD, 2001’s These Old Broads in which MacLaine, Debbie Reynolds and Joan Collins play reunited co-stars who can’t stand one another. Elizabeth Taylor plays their agent. Reynolds’ daughter, Carrie Fisher, wrote most of the dialogue.

There are some bright lines but most of it is pure hokum. Once you get past the shock of seeing Reynolds and Taylor together almost half a century after Liz stole Eddie (Fisher) from Debbie, there isn’t much left. Of course, it helps to remember that Taylor also stole Cleopatra from Collins, Reynolds stole The Unsinkable Molly Brown from MacLaine and MacLaine played a caricature of Reynolds in Postcards From the Edge, so seeing any combination of these players together is worthy of a raised eyebrow or two, but that’s about it.

The latest of Disney’s “classics” to be re-issued are Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Pete’s Dragon. I highlighted “classics” because although the former may be one, the latter clearly is not.

Released in 1971, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, with a clever score by the Sherman Brothers (Mary Poppins; The Happiest Millionaire), is directed by Mary Poppins’ Robert Stevenson, and, like Mary Poppins, is a delightful mixture of live-action and animation.

Angela Lansbury is marvelous in a rare on-screen leading role as an apprentice witch and Mary Poppins’ David Tomlinsonis a great deal of fun as the Professor of Magic she corresponds with. The colorful supporting cast includes such reliable character actors as Roddy McDowall, Sam Jaffe, John Ericson, Tessie O’Shea, Reginald Owen, Cyril Delevanti and Hank Worden.

It’s hard to believe that only four years later the Disney Studios would have deteriorated to such an extent as to put out something as bad as Pete’s Dragon. The film opens with credits over an ugly matte painting of what is supposed to be a depressed New England town. The narrative begins with the protagonist, a marginally talented child actor by the name of Sean Marshall, going through the woods with a big green dragon that only he can see while being pursued by his evil adopted hillbilly family. The family, led by a ghastly made up Shelley Winters, sings an awful song and is thrown one by one into the mud by a whip of the dragon’s tail. The boy then goes to another town where the invisible dragon destroys property and is seen by old drunk Mickey Rooney. Helen Reddy then enters the film as Rooney’s daughter. Though she possesses a nice voice and is quite charming, she is no Julie Andrews.

The farthest I’ve ever gotten into the film is the point where Jim Dale and Red Buttons show up looking like another couple of crazies. If it gets better after that, I don’t know, nor do I care.

-Peter J. Patrick (September 15, 2009)