Hurst, David

Hello, Dolly! Widescreen Edition

They just don't make musicals like this any more. There are some who would be grateful for that--the plot is but a flimsy excuse to string together song and dance numbers. Some of us, however, love big, splashy, overdone musical scenes, of which there are many. Glittering stage numbers showcase a commanding Barbra Streisand as Dolly Levy, a New York matchmaker who can find a mate for anyone. Anyone but herself, that is. Determined to marry wealthy Walter Matthau, she lures him out of Yonkers and sets about wooing him.

Don't worry about the lack of a solid story or Gene Kelly's pedestrian direction. Watch instead for the musical numbers and the lavish costumes. Listen to Jerry Herman's score, and dance around the living room when a sequined Streisand arrives in a club as Louis Armstrong strikes up the title tune for her benefit. (Just pull the shades first.) Based on Thornton Wilder's play The Matchmaker, Hello, Dolly! won Academy Awards for best sound, art direction, and musical score. --Rochelle O'Gorman

Barbara Streisand is a knockout as Dolly Levi, the woman "who arranges things like furniture and daffodils and lives." And Hello Dolly, is the blockbuster musical you'll want to see her in again and again. The famed plot concerns Dolly, a young widow and professional matchmaker who sets her sights, and whatever else she can muster, on conquering tight-fisted Yonkers merchant, Horace Vandergeider, beautifully played by Walter Matthau. How she does it has to be the grandest, singingest, dancingest, marchingest flag-wavingest musical there ever was.

Kelly's Heroes

This tongue-in-cheek 1970 variation on The Dirty Dozen looks less fresh than it did in the year of its release, but it still has some enjoyable moments. Clint Eastwood stars along with Donald Sutherland, Harry Dean Stanton, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, Carroll O'Connor, and Gavin MacLeod in the story of American soldiers who try to steal gold behind enemy lines in World War II. Sutherland's hippie G.I. doesn't have the sardonic and timely appeal he did during the Vietnam War, but the film's irreverence and several of the performances are worth a visit. --Tom Keogh

A group of soldiers set out to rob a bank and almost win World War II.
Genre: Feature Film-Action/Adventure
Rating: PG
Release Date: 8-FEB-2005
Media Type: DVD

The Boys From Brazil

Alive and hiding in South America the fiendish Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele (Geregory Peck) gathers a group of former colleagues for a horrifying project - he wants to clone Hitler. Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg) gets wind of the project and informs fames Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier) but before he can relay the the evidence Kohler is killed. Mengele continues his murderous plot creating 94 young Hitlers and killing their fathers to simulate the madman s own boyhood. As Mengele moves closer to producing global terror Lieberman alone must discover the terrifying extent of his plan and stop it.System Requirements:Starring: Gregory Peck Laurence Olivier James Mason and Lilli Palmer. Directed By: Franklin J. Schaffner Running Time: 127 Mins. Color This film is presented in "Widescreen" format. Copyright 1999 Artisan Home Entertainment Inc.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: R UPC: 012236607489 Manufacturer No: 60748

Gregory Peck hams it up big time in this 1978 thriller based on Ira Levin's bestselling novel. Peck plays an old German Nazi behind a mysterious series of murders, the investigation of which leads to an astonishing plot to create the Fourth Reich. Laurence Olivier is equally outrageous as a Nazi hunter who stumbles onto the scheme. Director Franklin Schaffner (Planet of the Apes) doesn't make any bones about the preposterousness of the story or of his legendary stars' performances, and a viewer is advised not to push too deeply into this tall tale for cautionary meaning. The film is a bit bloody--particularly unnerving in a climactic scene involving some attack dogs under the command of a young but familiar-looking monster. --Tom Keogh

Paradise Lost (Broadway Theater Archive)

Clifford Odets' portrait of the Depression, Paradise Lost, was premiered by the Group Theatre in a ground-breaking 1935 Broadway production directed by Harold Clurman and starring Luther and Stella Adler, Yiddish theatre legend Morris Carnovsky, Elia Kazan and Sanford Meisner, among others. It became one of the Group's most controversial plays and remains Odets' favorite. Set in 1932, Paradise Lost unfolds in the modest two-family home of Leo and Clara Gordon as misfortune strikes them and the people running with them. Less concerned with plot so much as characterization, it conveys what one critic calls Odets' "rich, compassionate, angry feelings for people." "It is my hope," wrote Odets, "that when people see [it], they're going to be glad they're alive. And I hope that after they've seen it, they'll turn to strangers sitting next to them and say 'hello.'" "A moving evocation of an apparently lost genre." --The Christian Science Monitor. With Bernadette Peters, Eli Wallach, Fred Gwynne, and Jo Van Fleet.

Skokie

A dramatization of the controversial trial concerning the right for Neo-Nazis to march in the predominately Jewish community of Skokie.System Requirements:Running Time - 121 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: PG-13 UPC: 692865416333 Manufacturer No: E-50133

Skokie

My Son The Vampire

The legendary Bela Lugosi as "the Vampire" teams up with Britain's much-loved "Mother Riley" in this hilarious comedy adventure. The Vampire plans to control the world with the help of his robot, which accidentally gets shipped to Mother Riley. Through radar control, he contacts the robot and orders it to come to him, bringing along Mother Riley! But his life is turned upside down when he holds this most meddling of mothers captive. "My Son the Vampire" is the last of the Mother Riley film series (1937-1952), lighthearted, immensely popular British comedies that featured the slapstick antics of Arthur Lucan as an Irish scullery maid who gets herself into all sorts of tough spots.

The Boys from Brazil [Region 2]

Gregory Peck hams it up big time in this 1978 thriller based on Ira Levin's bestselling novel. Peck plays an old German Nazi behind a mysterious series of murders, the investigation of which leads to an astonishing plot to create the Fourth Reich. Laurence Olivier is equally outrageous as a Nazi hunter who stumbles onto the scheme. Director Franklin Schaffner (Planet of the Apes) doesn't make any bones about the preposterousness of the story or of his legendary stars' performances, and a viewer is advised not to push too deeply into this tall tale for cautionary meaning. The film is a bit bloody--particularly unnerving in a climactic scene involving some attack dogs under the command of a young but familiar-looking monster. --Tom Keogh

Hello, Dolly! [Region 2]

They just don't make musicals like this any more. There are some who would be grateful for that--the plot is but a flimsy excuse to string together song and dance numbers. Some of us, however, love big, splashy, overdone musical scenes, of which there are many. Glittering stage numbers showcase a commanding Barbra Streisand as Dolly Levy, a New York matchmaker who can find a mate for anyone. Anyone but herself, that is. Determined to marry wealthy Walter Matthau, she lures him out of Yonkers and sets about wooing him.

Don't worry about the lack of a solid story or Gene Kelly's pedestrian direction. Watch instead for the musical numbers and the lavish costumes. Listen to Jerry Herman's score, and dance around the living room when a sequined Streisand arrives in a club as Louis Armstrong strikes up the title tune for her benefit. (Just pull the shades first.) Based on Thornton Wilder's play The Matchmaker, Hello, Dolly! won Academy Awards for best sound, art direction, and musical score. --Rochelle O'Gorman

One Good Turn [Region 2]