From Those Were the Days:

1937 - Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy started their own radio show on NBC -- only months after they had debuted on Rudy Vallee’s radio program. W.C. Fields, Don Ameche and Dorothy Lamour were a few of the stars that helped Bergen and the little blockhead, McCarthy, jump to the top of radio’s hit parade.
9:01:50 PM    comment []  trackback []  

“There ain’t no Sanity Clause…”

I might as well come clean and admit it—I’m a DVD-phile. As I type this, I am just about to run out of shelf space to accompany the multitude of DVDs that I have collected since obtaining a player in 1999, and though I can always get more shelves I often wonder what the point of that is—I’m just going to fill those up again as well. I’m capacity-driven.

About 90% of my collection is devoted to classic films, and if I have a pet peeve about these kinds of movies in the DVD format, it’s that the companies that release these films don’t assign the same amount of attention to them as they would do with a release of a recent film. I mean, most of these new DVDs usually are released in “special edition” or “director’s cut” DVDs that contain extra discs of special features or footage not seen in theaters! (I’ve never been able to grasp the concept of a “director’s cut,” anyway—what the hell did I pay seven bucks to see in the first place, a rough draft?)

Now, I understand to a certain extent why many classic films on DVD don’t contain a lot of extras; any surviving outtakes or footage probably got melted down for the nitrate content, and most of the people who could offer any kind of commentary have no doubt shuffled off this mortal coil ages ago. An exception to this is Criterion, a company that is truly the gold standard for classic films on DVD; they have some truly amazing discs in their library—The Third Man, Sullivan’s Travels, and Pickup on South Street, just to name a few. Criterion DVDs are often packed to the rafters with nifty bonuses, expert commentaries, documentaries, deleted footage, etc. (To illustrate, the Sullivan’s Travels DVD contains outtakes of director Preston Sturges singing and reading poetry, plus the American Masters documentary Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer among its many goodies.)

The purpose of this post is to add another studio to this short list of those companies who are willing to go the extra mile when it involves releasing the classic movies on DVD: Warner Home Video. Take, for example, their recent release of the 1948 Humphrey Bogart classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Along with this newly restored version of this wonderful film, you get a newsreel, a comedy short (the 1948 Joe McDoakes comedy So You Want to Be a Detective), two Bugs Bunny cartoons—including one of my all-time favorites, 8 Ball Bunny (1950) (“Pardon me, but could you help a fellow American who’s down on his luck?”), documentaries on both the film and director John Huston’s career, and the Lux Radio Theater radio version of the film (from April 18, 1949). That’s the great thing about Warner Home Video; they have all these great shorts in their film libraries and it’s nice to see them get a showcase on DVD. It’s a shame that someone like, say, Columbia Pictures couldn’t follow Warner’s lead and sneak in a cartoon or a comedy short before the main feature in some of their classic releases. (Columbia did produce other comedy shorts besides The Three Stooges, you know.)

Okay, what started me off on this rant is the fact that I just received in yesterday’s mail one of the best box sets I’ve ever invested in; The Marx Brothers Collection, a five disc set containing seven classic comedy features: A Night at the Opera (1935), A Day at the Races (1937), Room Service (1938), At the Circus (1939), Go West (1940), The Big Store (1941) and A Night in Casablanca (1946). With the exception of Room and Casablanca, all of these films were made during Groucho, Chico and Harpo’s stint at MGM, and only Opera, Races and Casablanca are sold outside the set—to get the other four films you have to buy the whole enchilada. Now, I know my fellow Marxists are often critical of the MGM product (which admittedly pales to their Paramount work), but I personally feel that the only really weak film in this bunch is The Big Store; I think Room Service, Go West, and A Night in Casablanca are vastly underrated, and as for At the Circus, well, at least Groucho sings “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady.”

Here’s what so wonderful about this set, though—you get two great documentaries, Remarxs on Marx and On Your Marx, Get Set, Go; commentary from comedy film historian Leonard Maltin and Marx expert Glenn Mitchell; a fistful of vintage short subjects, among them the Oscar-winning How to Sleep (1935) and the Oscar-nominated A Night at the Movies (1937, both with the immortal Robert Benchley); cartoons, including the Bugs Bunny classic Acrobatty Bunny (1946); outtakes, audio rarities and more. I picked it up from Amazon.com for 41 bucks and change, and if you stop and think how much you’d pay for these movies separately on VHS—without the extras—it’s a genuine steal...steal, that is. The cardinal rule in my Holy Book of the DVD is, “Everybody loves a bonus,” and I doff my cap to Warner for adhering to this commandment.
9:00:45 PM    comment []  trackback []