Frank Sinatra - The Early Years Collection (It Happened in Brooklyn / Step Lively / The Kissing Bandit / Double Dynamite / Higher and Higher)
by Irving Cummings
from Warner Home Video
Includes Double Dynamite It Happened in Brooklyn Step Lively Higher and Higher and The Kissing Bandit.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY/CLASSICS Rating: NR UPC: 883929011520 Manufacturer No: 1000037360
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
by Tex Avery
from Turner Home Ent
Cary Grant stars as an advertising executive who dreams of getting out of the city and building a perfect home in the country, only to find the transition fraught with problems. (See the 1980s Tom Hanks comedy The Money Pit for an updated version of the same idea.) The big appeal here are the two leads, Grant and Myrna Loy, who were each in their early 40s and at the peak of their careers. Together with solid support from Melvyn Douglas and a screenplay that might have been tailor-made for their polished brand of comedy, the stars dominate this simple project. --Tom Keogh
Cary Grant is hilarious as a successful New York advertising executive who wants to escape the confines of his family's tiny midtown apartment. So he designs his dream home in the suburbs and discovers the project wasn't as easy as it seemed. The house gets larger. The bills get bigger. The problems just won't go away. Eventually, the whole affair becomes a nightmare-a very funny nightmare-that left audiences laughing in 1948 and will have you in stitches, too. This is the comedic masterpiece that inspired the popular 1987 movie "The Money Pit." It's an adventure in homeowning that strikes a familiar chord with everyone who's ever bought a house. Year: 1948 Director: H.C. Potter Starring: Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, Melvyn Douglas
Creature from the Black Lagoon - The Legacy Collection (Creature from the Black Lagoon / Revenge of the Creature / The Creature Walks Among Us)
by Jack Arnold
from Universal Studios
For the first time ever, the original Creature from the Black Lagoon film comes to DVD in this extraordinary Legacy Collection. Included in the collection is the original classic, starring Richard Carlson, and two timeless sequels, featuring such legendary actors as John Agar and Jeff Morrow. These are the landmark films that inspired an entire genre of movies and continue to be major influences on motion pictures to this day.
Can-Can
by Walter Lang
from 20th Century Fox
How to adapt a Broadway musical for the movies? Well, if you've got Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine signed up, you throw out most of the original and make up something new--which is how Cole Porter's Can-Can came to the screen. It had been a smash on Broadway, and on film Can-Can locked up the #2 box-office spot for 1960 (nestled between Ben-Hur and Psycho). From a modern standpoint, the movie's popularity can be attributed to the stars, the colorful widescreen production, the sexy subject matter, and of course the Porter songs. It can't really be explained any other way, because Can-Can isn't among the most engaging movie musicals; it has the stolid, proscenium-framed look of Fox's 1950s widescreen musicals, and the story is only mildly diverting. The saturated color makes 19th-century Montmarte come to life, and the can-can numbers (and the wonderfully daft Garden of Eden ballet) look appropriately splashy. For a bit of authentic Gallic je ne sais quoi, Maurice Chevalier and Louis Jourdan are imported from Gigi, a big hit two years earlier. MacLaine and Sinatra have their cozy chemistry ("Let's Do It" fares especially well with them), and the movie marks the film debut of the dimply dancer Juliet Prowse.
The DVD provides a gorgeous color presentation of the movie. A second disc has some OK featurettes, including a making-of documentary that includes the famous story of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev's visit to the set of Can-Can, at which he witnessed an ooh-la-la can-can number, after which he denounced the proceedings as an example of Western depravity. --Robert Horton
A 1890's Montmartre Dance Hall Owner Constantly Raided For Performing The Illegal Can-Can Has To Use Her Own Resources When An Elderly Judge Is Replaced By A Younger More Serious One. Based On Abe Burrow'S Play. Music By Cole Porter.
The Inspector General
by Henry Koster
from Alpha Video
Call Me Madam
by Walter Lang
from 20th Century Fox
A great star and a great composer can make a Broadway musical into a smash, as Ethel Merman and Irving Berlin proved with Call Me Madam. Not a bad place to start with a movie, either, and the 1953 film of the show has both Merman and Berlin represented in brassy fashion. Granted, Merman's platinum-throated talents were best suited to the stage, and the production overall has that dutiful, stodgy tone of so many Fox musicals. Extra points for the suavity of George Sanders (he's Merman's love interest in tiny Lichtenburg, where the lady has been appointed U.S. ambassador), and for the dancing of Vera-Ellen and Donald O'Connor. A year after crashing through the wall in Singin' in the Rain, O'Connor has a similar solo athletic workout to "What Chance Have I with Love." High point: Merman and O'Connor trading verses on "You're Just in Love," the best tune in a bouncy score. --Robert Horton
Phone Call from a Stranger
by Jean Negulesco
from 20th Century Fox
PHONE CALL FROM A STRANGER (1952) (DVD MOVIE)
Flying Tigers
by David Miller
from Lions Gate Home Entertainment
John Wayne plays the tough commander of Flying Tigers, the famous fighter squadron that fought to save China from the Japanese. Wayne finds he is fighting a war on two fronts: he's taking on the enemy with only a handful of inexperienced men and patched-up planes while keeping a cocky new pilot from stealing his girl. The story has little in common with real history, and lots of classic post-Pearl Harbor propaganda fills the script. Regardless, the movie is all Wayne's, and Wayne fans will enjoy seeing the prototype for what would become the Duke's trademark portrayal of the military fighting man.
Although the pressure of making life-and-death decisions in wartime may be more maturely explored in Twelve O'Clock High, Flying Tigers still has enough characterization and action to keep the viewer's attention (not to mention special effects by the pioneering Howard Lydecker). --Mark Savary
All That Heaven Allows - Criterion Collection
by Douglas Sirk
from Criterion
Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman were so successful in Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession that they reteamed for this, his first melodrama masterpiece. Young hunk Rock is a strapping son of mother nature, a gardener who woos middle-aged, middle class widow Wyman to the snooty disapproval of her conservative social circle and embarrassment of her self-centered children. Wyman discovers a new life with his open-armed friends and back-to-nature lifestyle, but struggles with life-changing decisions in the face of social pressure and vicious gossip. Living the Henry Thoreau dream, Rock inhabits his personal Walden in a rustic country cabin by a bubbling brook, a dream house lit by a giant picture window overlooking an idyllic countryside where deer pose just outside the window. Wyman's elegant but sterile suburban home transforms into a tomb when she sacrifices her love for the "good name" of her children, and the lonely widow sees her future in the pale, colorless reflection of her TV screen. But don't despair just yet: Sirk's heroines are dynamic and resourceful and no Sirk melodrama ends without a heart-tugging, over-the-top twist. German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who championed Sirk as a master and a mentor, remade the film as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul decades later. --Sean Axmaker
Jane Wyman is a repressed wealthy widow and Rock Hudson is the hunky Thoreau-following gardener who loves her in Douglas Sirk's heartbreakingly beautiful indictment of 1950s small-town America. Sirk utilizes expressionist colors, reflective surfaces, and frames-within-frames to convey the loneliness and isolation of a matriarch trapped by the snobbery of her children and the gossip of her social-climbing country club chums. Criterion is proud to present this subversive Hollywood tearjerker in a new Special Edition.
Girls Girls Girls (1962)
by Norman Taurog
from Paramount
Hawaii seems like an afterthought in Elvis's second island outing. Half the musical numbers take place on boats (including the seasick-making title tune) and half in a Trader Vic's-style nightclub, so there's little good use of the exotic locale. There's little use of that lovable dish Stella Stevens, either, who's relegated to "other woman" duty as Elvis courts bland Laurel Goodwin. Goodwin's a rich girl going incognito, while E.P. is a penniless fisherman who dreams of owning his own boat. You finish the plot. The King is in good voice here, although the songs are fairly weak, with some curious flings at calypso and flamenco mixed in. He comes to shoulder-shaking life for "Return to Sender," a sizzling number that shows how his entire being could be possessed by a musical moment. This movie doesn't have enough of those to boost it into the upper tier of Elvis pictures. --Robert Horton
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