Jones, Carolyn

How the West Was Won (Ultimate Collector's Edition)

The first feature film to be photographed and projected in the panoramic three-camera Cinerama process, this epic Western is almost as expansive as the West itself, chronicling a pioneering family's triumphs and tragedies in numerous episodes spanning three generations and a half century of westward movement. Divided into five segments directed by veteran Hollywood filmmakers Henry Hathaway, George Marshall, and the legendary John Ford (and including uncredited sequences directed by Richard Thorpe), the film was one of the most ambitious ever made by the venerable MGM studio. Its stellar cast reads like a virtual who's who of Hollywood's biggest stars. Debbie Reynolds plays a sturdy survivor of many pioneering dangers, and the eventual widow of a gambler (Gregory Peck), who is later reunited with her nephew (George Peppard), a Civil War veteran and cavalryman who heads for San Francisco as the transcontinental railroad is being built. Many more characters and stories are woven throughout this epic film, which is dramatically uneven but totally engrossing with its stunning vistas and countless outdoor locations in Illinois, Kentucky, South Dakota, Monument Valley in Arizona, California, Colorado, and elsewhere. --Jeff Shannon

With courage sinew and conflict: that?s how the West was won. With three directors five interlocked stories some of movie history?s most legendary action scenes and a constellation of acting talent: that?s how How the West Was Won was filmed. Henry Fonda Gregory Peck Debbie Reynolds James Stewart and John Wayne are among the big names in this big saga following a family?s move West through generations ? marked by the spectacles of a heart-pounding raging river ride a thunderous buffalo stampede and a bracing runaway train shootout. Via technological advances this panoramic winner of three Academy Awards can now be seen with a resplendent restored clarity eliminating its original ?three- panel join lines? and in roof-raising Dolby 5.1 audio. Westward ho!Explore a new home entertainment frontier with a classic movie adventure in a stunning new version never before possible!Includes 2-Disc Special Edition DVD: The Winner of 3 Academy Awards Digitally Remastered from Restored Picture Elements in New Dolby 5.1 Audio With 3-Panel Cinerama ?Join Lines? of Previous Theatrical/Video Versions Removed Via Pioneering TechnologyPlus 4+ Hours of Special Features Including New Star/Historian Commentary The Making of How the West Was Won Featurette and the Acclaimed Bonus Movie Cinerama Adventure Nostalgically Chronicling the History of How the West Was Won?s Unique Filmmaking ProcessBonus Collectibles Inside: ? 36-Page Cinerama Souvenir Book Reproduction ? 10 Color Production Photo Cards ? 10 Black-and-White Rare Behind-the-Scenes Photo Cards ? 24-Page Reproduction of the Original General Release Pressbook ? Mail-in Offer for a FREE** Poster(**Limited time offer. Not included with Club skus)Running Time: 162 min.System Requirements:Running Time: 162 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: WESTERN/CLASSICS Rating: G UPC: 883929026487 Manufacturer No: 1000039866

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Something's wrong in the town of Santa Mira, California. At first, Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) is unconcerned when the townsfolk accuse their loved ones of acting like emotionless imposters. But soon the evidence is overwhelming--Santa Mira has been invaded by alien "pods" that are capable of replicating humans and taking possession of their identities. It's up to McCarthy to spread the word of warning, battling the alien invasion at the risk of his own life. Considered one of the best science fiction films of the 1950s and '60s, this classic paranoid thriller was widely interpreted as a criticism of the McCarthy era (that's Senator Joseph, not actor Kevin), which was characterized by anticommunist witch-hunts and fear of the dreaded blacklist. Some hailed it as an attack on the oppressive power of government as Big Brother. However viewers interpret it, this original 1956 version of Invaders of the Body Snatchers (based on Jack Finney's serialized novel The Body Snatchers) remains a milestone movie in its genre, directed by Don Siegel with an inventive intensity that continues to pack an entertaining wallop. Look closely and you'll find future director Sam Peckinpah (an uncredited cowriter of this film) making a cameo appearance as a meter reader! The DVD release includes an interview with Kevin McCarthy, and for the first time on home video the film is presented in its original 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio. --Jeff Shannon

How the West Was Won (Two-Disc Special Edition)

The first feature film to be photographed and projected in the panoramic three-camera Cinerama process, this epic Western is almost as expansive as the West itself, chronicling a pioneering family's triumphs and tragedies in numerous episodes spanning three generations and a half century of westward movement. Divided into five segments directed by veteran Hollywood filmmakers Henry Hathaway, George Marshall, and the legendary John Ford (and including uncredited sequences directed by Richard Thorpe), the film was one of the most ambitious ever made by the venerable MGM studio. Its stellar cast reads like a virtual who's who of Hollywood's biggest stars. Debbie Reynolds plays a sturdy survivor of many pioneering dangers, and the eventual widow of a gambler (Gregory Peck), who is later reunited with her nephew (George Peppard), a Civil War veteran and cavalryman who heads for San Francisco as the transcontinental railroad is being built. Many more characters and stories are woven throughout this epic film, which is dramatically uneven but totally engrossing with its stunning vistas and countless outdoor locations in Illinois, Kentucky, South Dakota, Monument Valley in Arizona, California, Colorado, and elsewhere. --Jeff Shannon

With courage sinew and conflict: that?s how the West was won. With three directors five interlocked stories some of movie history?s most legendary action scenes and a constellation of acting talent: that?s how How the West Was Won was filmed. Henry Fonda Gregory Peck Debbie Reynolds James Stewart and John Wayne are among the big names in this big saga following a family?s move West through generations ? marked by the spectacles of a heart-pounding raging river ride a thunderous buffalo stampede and a bracing runaway train shootout. Via technological advances this panoramic winner of three Academy Awards can now be seen with a resplendent restored clarity eliminating its original ?three- panel join lines? and in roof-raising Dolby 5.1 audio. Westward ho!System Requirements:Running Time: 162 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: WESTERN/CLASSICS Rating: G UPC: 012569799714 Manufacturer No: 1000019114

The Seven Year Itch

A married man, left alone during a hot summer, fantasizes madly about the impossibly gorgeous woman living in the upstairs apartment. When the woman is Marilyn Monroe, such fantasies are the stuff of epics, and The Seven Year Itch is a memorable laugh machine. Tom Ewell, repeating his role from George Axelrod's Broadway hit, plays the itchy protagonist, whose vivid imagination gets the better of him. When Monroe finally comes downstairs and becomes friends (confiding, among other things, that she keeps her undies in the icebox in this hot weather), imagination meets reality in a merciless attack on the male libido. Ewell's crack timing is matched by Monroe's zesty comic flair, and the scene in which her white dress is blown skyward by a passing subway train has entered the encyclopedia of great movie images. Director Billy Wilder adapted the play with Axelrod; if the film is not one of Wilder's signature works (Some Like It Hot and The Apartment would soon follow), it is nevertheless a smoothly crafted comedy. --Robert Horton

It's a steamy summer in New York City and this scandalous, sexy comedy heats things up even more! A married man (Tom Ewell), whose wife and son are away for the summer, has his fidelity put to the test when a seductive starlet (Marilyn Monroe) moves in upstairs. Keeping his marriage vows in the face of her flirtations proves tough when challenged by the notorious "seven year itch." Faced with this provocative problem, he's victim to an outrageous mating dance filled with hilarious comedy!

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Dr. Ben McKenna his wife Jo and their son Hank are on a touring holiday of Africa when they meet the mysterious Louis Bernard on a bus. The next day Bernard is murdered in the local marketplace but before he dies he manages to reveal details of an assassination about to take place in London. Fearing that their plot will be revealed the assassins kidnap Hank in order to keep the McKenna's silent. Ben and Jo go to London and take matters into their own hands.System Requirements:Bonus Features: The Making of The Man Who Knew Too Much Production Photographs Trailers Production Notes Running Time: 120 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/THRILLERS Rating: PG UPC: 025192830723 Manufacturer No: 28307

Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 remake of his own 1934 spy thriller is an exciting event in its own right, with several justifiably famous sequences. James Stewart and Doris Day play American tourists who discover more than they wanted to know about an assassination plot. When their son is kidnapped to keep them quiet, they are caught between concern for him and the terrible secret they hold. When asked about the difference between this version of the story and the one he made 22 years earlier, Hitchcock always said the first was the work of a talented amateur while the second was the act of a seasoned professional. Indeed, several extraordinary moments in this update represent consummate filmmaking, particularly a relentlessly exciting Albert Hall scene, with a blaring symphony, an assassin's gun, and Doris Day's scream. Along with Hitchcock's other films from the mid-1950s to 1960 (including Vertigo, Rear Window, and Psycho), The Man Who Knew Too Much is the work of a master in his prime. --Tom Keogh

House of Wax

House of Wax brought Vincent Price into the horror genre, where he fit as snugly as a scalpel in a mad scientist's hand. A remake of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum, this entertaining Gothic shocker casts Price as a sculptor of wax figures; his unwilling victims--er, "models"--lend their bodies to his lifelike depictions of Marie Antoinette and Joan of Arc. The film was one of the top 10 moneymakers of its year, thanks in part to the 3-D gimmick, which explains why so many things are aimed at the camera (why else would the paddleball man be there?). Footnote to history: director Andre De Toth was blind in one eye, and thus could not see in three dimensions.

Not at all a musty relic of the early-sound era, the original Mystery of the Wax Museum (shot in a soft, trial version of Technicolor) is saucy, pre-Code fun. As corpses disappear from the morgue, Lionel Atwill's wax museum adds to its displays. Coincidence, or the work of the hideously deformed fiend stalking the Manhattan night? Most of the snappy dialogue comes courtesy of reporter Glenda Farrell, a vintage wisecracking dame. --Robert Horton

Museum fire turns handsome man into human monster who steals bodies from morgue to create lifelike images in wax.

Marilyn Monroe Special Anniversary Collection (The Seven Year Itch / Gentlemen Prefer Blondes / Niagara / River of No Return / Let's Make Love / Marilyn - The Final Days)

The Marilyn Monroe Special Anniversary Collection consists of five Marilyn Monroe films plus the documentary The Final Days. Howard Hawks's 1953 musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes stars Monroe and Jane Russell as friends who go to Paris looking for mates. The film is charged by Hawks's stylish snap, a famous set piece or two (including Monroe descending that staircase while singing "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend"), Russell's wit, and songs by Leo Robin and Jule Styne. The Seven Year Itch (1955) is a memorable laugh machine. As a married man left alone during a hot summer, Tom Ewell shows off crack timing matched by Monroe's zesty comic flair, and the scene in which her white dress is blown skyward by a passing subway train has entered the encyclopedia of great movie images. In Niagara, Monroe is a full-fledged sex goddess, a scheming wife tormenting husband Joseph Cotten in their cabin by the falls. This Technicolor slice of pseudo-Hitchcock is a fun location picture with a genuinely exciting climax. Otto Preminger's River of No Return has Monroe livened up by the presence of costar Robert Mitchum, in a strong outdoorsy Western that catches the two stars in appealing form. By the time of 1960's Let's Make Love, Monroe looks tired. This backstage musical is more interesting as a time capsule than as a romance, although one number shines: "My Heart Belongs to Daddy."

In The Final Days, producer-director Patty Ivins chronicles Monroe's final, aborted feature film, Something's Got to Give, which was ultimately shut down after the star was dismissed from the production. Beyond Monroe's fragile emotional and physical health, this well-crafted profile examines the financial crisis facing her studio as well as the mounting frustration of meticulous director George Cukor and his cast, including costar Dean Martin, as Monroe's absences drove the shoot over budget. The documentary concludes with a 40-minute reconstruction of footage completed for the feature, which would subsequently be reshot as a vehicle for Doris Day and James Garner, Move Over, Darling.

Collection Includes the following Titles:

**SEVEN YEAR ITCH **GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES **NIAGARA **RIVER OF NO RETURN **LET'S MAKE LOVE **MARILYN: THE FINAL DAYS

King Creole

Before his handlers convinced him to settle for the safety of a screen franchise, the young Elvis Presley harbored riskier dreams as an actor, not just a star. This 1958 drama, his fourth feature outing, hints at the underlying seriousness of that goal. Presley plays Danny Fisher, a New Orleans teenager struggling to graduate from high school while working in a sleazy French Quarter club to support his family. He's also characterized as a troubled youth with a dangerous temper and feelings of shame and resentment toward his meek, unemployed father (Dean Jagger). When Danny's gift for singing provides him with a potential career break (and the requisite excuse for Elvis's production numbers), his involvement with a ruthless gangster (Walter Matthau) and his sultry, alcoholic moll (Carolyn Jones) soon threatens both his future and his family.

That story line, with Danny torn between a budding romance with a good waitress (Dolores Hart) and the bad moll, Ronnie (Jones), proves as effective as it is predictable, hardly surprising given its source in an early Harold Robbins bestseller. But King Creole also boasts an impressive production pedigree (including the team behind no less a classic than Casablanca, producer Hal Wallis and director Michael Curtiz), and the supporting cast helps elicit one of Presley's most emotional performances. Jones in particular rises above her role's inherent clichés, her self-loathing and sexuality both palpable. Presley, still a few years away from the more sanitized image that would be integral to those franchise features, is young enough to be a credible teen, but more crucially he makes his rage and yearning largely convincing.

Ironically, the dramatic sparks prove all the more welcome in light of the largely forgettable music, which variously plunders Chicago blues ("Trouble," a knock-off of "Hoochie Coochie Man") and unconvincingly crosses Presley's Memphis rock with Crescent City jazz ("Dixieland Rock"), all to far less effect than Presley's two preceding movies, Jailhouse Rock and Loving You. --Sam Sutherland

Danny Fisher, a teenager with a criminal record becomes a pop singer in New Orleans but is pursued by the local crime boss.
Genre: Musicals
Rating: PG
Release Date: 14-AUG-2007
Media Type: DVD

Lights! Camera! Elvis! Collection (Blue Hawaii / Easy Come, Easy Go / Fun in Acapulco / G.I. Blues / Girls! Girls! Girls! / King Creole / Roustabout / Paradise Hawaiian Style)

This kingly collection features eight classic Elvis Presley films: KING CREOLE G.I. BLUES BLUE HAWAII ROUSTABOUT GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! FUN IN ACAPULCO PARADISE HAWAIIAN STYLE and EASY COME EASY GO.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 097361231549 Manufacturer No: 123154

Marjorie Morningstar

Natalie Wood and Gene Kelly make a cute (if not exactly convincing) couple in this Hollywood soap-opera version of Herman Wouk's coming-of-age romance. French/Russian Natalie Wood is decidedly non-ethnic as Marjorie Morgenstern, the starry-eyed Jewish college girl who falls in love with summer resort small-timer Gene Kelly (who never quite sells himself as a show-biz dreamer with limited talent). A stolid mix of modern, clear-eyed romance and old-fashioned melodrama, it nonetheless manages to slip in some frank (for 1958) discussions of sex and the single girl and sketch out an intriguing portrait of Jewish life in New York's upper crust between the romantic complications. Everett Sloane and Claire Trevor are excellent as Marjorie's success-obsessed parents, pre-Adam 12 Martin (Marty) Milner offers his boy-next-door charm as the former flunky turned Broadway success, and Ed Wynn is delightful as her eccentric uncle. --Sean Axmaker