Pangborn, Franklin

Now, Voyager (Keepcase)

A tender love story a taut psychological drama an inspiring tale of physical and spiritual transformation. Now Voyager is all three as well as a Bette Davis career milestone resulting in her sixth Best Actress Oscar nomination. She magically plays Charlotte Vale a spinster who defies her domineering mother (fellow Oscar nominee Gladys Cooper) to discover love heartbreak and eventual contentment. More magic is generated by a top-notch ensemble Max Steiner?s Academy Award-winning score and an improvised moment by Paul Henreid that became an instant classic: he lights two cigarettes at once and hands one to Davis. For the ultimate in romantic melodrama it's Now Voyager now then and forever.Running Time: 117 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 012569675391

In this 1942 melodrama, founded on the novel by Olivia Higgins Prouty (who also wrote the novel on which Stella Dallas was based), Bette Davis stars as Charlotte Vale, a dowdy, repressed woman who, overwhelmed by her domineering mother, is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She finds help at a sanitarium from a kind psychiatrist (Claude Rains), who turns her into a beautiful, confident woman. As a new person, she takes a pleasure cruise, where she meets Jerry (Paul Henreid), an architect trapped in an unhappy marriage, saddled with a troubled daughter. The two fall in love, but, of course, the romance is doomed. Yet their paths cross on occasion, and, despite their feelings, Charlotte finds satisfaction in helping Jerry's depressed child. The film will seem familiar to new viewers--the campy style was the pattern for many tearjerkers to come, and its most famous line has been oft repeated ("Don't ask for the moon--we have the stars"). But the heartstrings are tugged, and as Paul Henreid chivalrously lights two cigarettes and hands one over to the doleful-eyed Davis, pull out the box of tissues--you're gonna need 'em. --Jenny Brown

Shirley Temple - America's Sweetheart Collection, Vol. 4 (Captain January / Just Around the Corner / Susannah of the Mounties)

Includes the following titles: Disk 1: CAPTAIN JANUARY Disk 2: JUST AROUND THE CORNER Disk 3: SUSANNAH OF THE MOUNTIES

Hemo the Magnificent / Unchained Goddess

W.C. Fields Comedy Collection (The Bank Dick / My Little Chickadee / You Can't Cheat an Honest Man / It's a Gift / International House)

For anyone who loves classic comedy, the W.C. Fields Comedy Collection is absolutely essential. Film for film, this may be the best DVD showcase ever devoted to a single comedian, including all five of Fields's acknowledged classics in a sturdy, beautifully designed library-quality slipcase. One could easily lament the relative lack of bonus features (it would have been nice to have some vintage Fields radio shows and newsreel footage), but the inclusion of A&E's 1994 Biography documentary W.C. Fields: Behind the Laughter is sufficiently informative about Fields's life, career, irascible personality, and tragic alcoholism. That's all that's really needed when the films themselves are so timelessly entertaining, and they're all remarkably pristine in sound and image quality. The best way to appreciate Fields's evolving screen persona is to view these films in chronological order: In International House (1933), Fields was merely one of many Paramount stars of screen and radio (including Rudy Vallee, Burns & Allen, Bela Lugosi, Sterling Holloway, and manic bandleader Cab Calloway), but he handily steals the show, invading a Shanghai hotel in his airplane/helicopter and delivering the classic line (to Franklin Pangborn), "Don't let the posy fool ya!" It's one of Paramount's best all-star revues.

It's a Gift (1934) is a remake of Fields's 1926 silent It's the Old Army Game, and was the first sound feature devoted to Fields's inimitable talent. As beleaguered husband and would-be orange farmer, Fields revives vintage routines from Vaudeville and Broadway, and his first encounter with Baby LeRoy is comedy gold. You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939) features Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy and Fields's classic, still-hilarious ping-pong routine, while 1940's My Little Chickadee matches Fields (as "Guthbert J. Twillie") with Mae West, whose unforgettable on-screen banter with Fields shows no sign of their notorious off-screen animosity. In his raucous masterpiece The Bank Dick (also 1940), Fields is "Egbert Souse," lowly bank guard, unlikely hero, and manic driver in perhaps the greatest slapstick car-chase scene ever filmed. Despite the regrettable absence of Fields's final starring feature Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, this classy five-disc set is a veritable cornucopia of comedy, offering ample proof of Fields's comic genius through classic one-liners, physical routines, memorable costars, and perfect bits of business that never grow old. --Jeff Shannon

W.C. Fields is an American original, the curmudgeonly master of wit and good, mean fun. In this collection of madcap classics, the famously top-hatted Fields unleashes his unique comic zing, proving himself the king of the one-liner. This special DVD collection includes The Bank Dick, My Little Chickadee, You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, It's a Gift and International House. The W.C. Fields Comedy Collection is Fields at his finest, and a must-have for anyone who loves to laugh!

Marlene Dietrich - The Glamour Collection (Morocco/ Blonde Venus/ The Devil Is a Woman/ Flame of New Orleans/ Golden Earrings)

A queen of the silver screen Hollywood star Marlene Dietrich carved a place for herself in film history with her roles in the five films gathered here: MOROCCO BLONDE VENUS THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN FLAME OF NEW ORLEANS and GOLDEN EARRINGS. See individual descriptions for details.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 025192845529 Manufacturer No: 28455

Marlene Dietrich was one of the cinema's glorious creatures, an elegant arrangement of bone structure and silver light, blessed with a sly sense of humor. Marlene Dietrich: The Glamour Collection assembles five titles featuring la Dietrich at her best, with a special emphasis on one of the great Hollywood director-star collaborations.

Dietrich and director Josef von Sternberg met in Germany when he plucked her from obscurity for the starring role of The Blue Angel, after which she came to America and instant stardom. A string of films with Sternberg created her image as an exotic source of fascination, both ethereal and sexually knowing. Three of those outings are included in this package. Morocco, their first Hollywood movie together, is a delirious look at a cabaret singer taken with a Foreign Legion soldier (the young Gary Cooper). Dressed in masculine clothes for her act, Dietrich already displays a sexual confidence that fairly burns off the screen. Blonde Venus has a soap opera-ish plot about a woman's fall and rise, but Dietrich's commitment to the part is complete; plus, there's an outrageous faux-African number that begins with Dietrich dressed in a gorilla costume. Cary Grant looks on in astonishment.

The Devil Is a Woman is an unmitigated Sternberg-Dietrich masterpiece, and their final movie together. Here Marlene is a Spanish vixen making life exciting and miserable for Lionel Atwill (a lookalike stand-in for Josef von Sternberg himself). The film is an eye-popping light-painting draped with feathers, mesh, and confetti, all of which are in service to a fundamentally serious inquiry into the knotty business of men and women.

Putting three of the Paramount Dietrich-Sternberg films in this collection and leaving out the other three is either carelessness or marketing strategy. In any case, the other two movies in this package are not at the same level, but certainly good fun. The Flame of New Orleans, director Rene Clair's first Hollywood picture, is a gorgeously photographed comedy with a delightful role for its star. Dietrich is stuck choosing between aristocrat Roland Young and rough sailor Bruce Cabot. The look on her face as she listens to helpful advice about wedding-night conjugal realities from a matron is a riot of erotic mischief. Golden Earrings is a crazy story about Ray Milland getting stuck behind German lines in the early days of WWII, and being taken in by gypsy girl Dietrich. Even here, nearly 20 years after her first stardom, she's still Dietrich. The hair may be dyed black, but the cheekbones are unmistakable. --Robert Horton

Sullivan's Travels - Criterion Collection

Writer-director Preston Sturges's third feature, 1941's Sullivan's Travels, remains the antic auteur's most ambitious screen effort. Having added the producer's stripe to his duties, Sturges combines breezy romantic comedy, arch Hollywood satire, and social essay into a single, screwball story line.

The titular pilgrim is John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), an Ivy League grad who's enjoyed a meteoric rise as the director behind escapist movies like Ants in Your Pants of 1938, but is now determined to raise his sights toward more exalted, serious-minded cinematic art. His proposed breakthrough, portentously titled O Brother, Where Art Thou?, elicits a studio response closer to "Oh, brother," given the director's utter lack of first-hand experience on the wrong side of the tracks.

Instead of capitulating, Sullivan sets off disguised as a tramp, ready to meet life's crueler lessons face-to-face--albeit followed at a discreet distance by a motor home filled with studio handlers and reporters. His ludicrous odyssey may give the boy director no real insight, but it gives Sturges the chance to inject some reliably fine gags and a romantic subplot featuring the luminous Veronica Lake. It's at this juncture that Sturges the writer's darker objective throws a jolting shift in tone. Suffice it to say that just when a comic, upbeat denouement seems imminent, Sullivan travels instead from the sunlit California of the comedy's early reels toward a darker, relentlessly downbeat world influenced more by the social realism of the movies the hero desperately wants to make. By the final reel, Sturges has flirted with real tragedy, turning his conclusion into a meditation on his own seemingly carefree, dizzily comic art. --Sam Sutherland

This masterpiece by Preston Sturges is perhaps the finest movie-about-a-movie ever made. Hollywood director Joel McCrea, tired of churning out lightweight comedies, decides to make O Brother, Where Art Thou-a serious, socially responsible film about human suffering. After his producers point out that he knows nothing of hardship, he hits the road as a hobo. He finds the lovely Veronica Lake-and more trouble than he ever dreamed of.

My Man Godfrey - Criterion Collection

Director Gregory La Cava deftly balances satire, romance, and social comment in this 1936 classic, which echoes Frank Capra in its Depression-era subtext. The Bullocks are a well-heeled, harebrained Manhattan family genetically engineered for screwball collisions: father Alexander (Eugene Pallette, of the foghorn voice and thick-knit eyebrows) is the breadwinner at wit's end, thanks to his spoiled daughters, the sultry Cornelia (Gail Patrick) and the sweet but scatterbrained Irene (a luminous Carole Lombard), his dizzy and doting wife, Angelica (Alice Brady), and her "protégé," Italian freeloader Carlo (Mischa Auer). When Irene wins a society scavenger hunt (and atypically trumps her scheming sister) by producing a "lost man," a seeming tramp named Godfrey (William Powell), all their lives are transformed. With the always suave, effortlessly funny Powell in the title role, this mystery man provides the film's conscience and its model of decency; the giddy, passionate Lombard holds out its model for triumphant love. In a movie riddled with memorable comic highlights, the real miracle is the unapologetic romanticism that prevails. --Sam Sutherland

The definitive screwball comedy, My Man Godfrey follows the madcap antics of a wealthy and eccentric family when they hire a down-and-out "forgotten man" as their butler. My Man Godfrey features brilliant performances by Carole Lombard and William Powell, and was the first film to receive Academy Award® nominations in all four acting categories.

Imitation of Life (Two Movie Collection) 1934/1959

Imitation of Life (1959)
The last film in Hollywood of director Douglas Sirk (Written on the Wind), the 1959 Imitation of Life--an adaptation of Fannie Hurst's novel--is an endlessly fascinating film that speaks volumes about the American journey toward materialism and the racial tensions that are inseparable from it. Lana Turner plays a white single mother and aspiring actress who takes in a black housekeeper (Juanita Moore) and her daughter (played by an adolescent Susan Kohner), the latter so light-skinned she passes for white. As the years pass and success mounts for Turner, Moore also becomes more comfortable but her status as a domestic never changes. Meanwhile, Kohner's character, chafing against social constraints, rebels at every opportunity and throws a wrench into the perfect order Sirk chillingly captures through the precise, architectural design of his images. On one hand a '50s weepie and on the other a daring allegory, Imitation of Life is an unusual masterpiece. --Tom Keogh

Imitation of Life (1934)
In this Academy Award-nominated Best Picture, Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers are superb as two women with young daughters who build a fortune together. But success doesn't save them from sorrow with the passing years.

Delilah's light-skinned teenager rejects her mother and her race, while Bea must choose between the man she loves and the daughter who loves him, too. Now all of them will pay the price of love in this spellbinding classic.

Imitation of Life (1959)
Lana Turner heads the outstanding cast with Juanita Moore in the second screen version of this emotionally-charged story about two widows and their troubled daughters.

Lora's search for success causes her to neglect her daughter, while Annie's daughter rejects her culture by trying to pass for white. As the years pass, each of the four women realizes that she has been living out an emotionally fruitless existence.

Stage Door

Ginger Rogers and Ann Miller tap in time and rat-a-tat lines. Lucille Ball braves a date with an obnoxious lumber baron. Eve Arden can't recall Hamlet but one meets so many people in the big city. And Katharine Hepburn becomes Broadway's biggest star in a play wherein she notes "the calla lilies are in bloom again." Stars galore shine in this nominee for 4 Academy AwardsO* including Best Picture a fast witty story of aspiring actresses living at a theatrical boarding house. Based on an Edna Ferber/George S. Kaufman play the tale was considerably rewritten for film so much that Kaufman quipped it should be called Screen Door. What matters most to an acting hopeful is an open door. With humor and heart this excellent movie suggests some things matter more.Running Time: 92 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY UPC: 053939675528

This one's all about the ladies. In this absolutely terrific 1937 gem, a Manhattan boardinghouse for aspiring actresses houses an amazing roster of golden-era performers--some of whom, like their characters, were just breaking in. It's hard to say who's in best form here: Katharine Hepburn in blueblood mode, Ginger Rogers streetwise, Andrea Leeds suffering, Lucille Ball and Ann Miller impossibly young, and Eve Arden being, well, splendidly Eve Ardenish. The sassy comedy and sober life lessons are wonderfully mixed by the underrated director Gregory La Cava (My Man Godfrey), who captures the brashness of '30s female chatter in a much pleasanter way than the more famous The Women. Hepburn's sublime attempts to wrestle with the line about calla lilies being in bloom will make you smile long after the movie's over. --Robert Horton

The Palm Beach Story

Among the earliest writers to set his sights on the director's chair, Preston Sturges brought a frank, unsentimental view of the war between the sexes to his mid-'40s features that exemplify his style, as demonstrated in this prescient 1942 gem. Architect Tom Jeffers (Joel McCrea) and his wife, Gerry (Claudette Colbert), further refine the archetypal Sturges couple--the male embodying strength, idealism, and a certain naivete, the female ultimately stronger, smarter, and (as revealed early on in an astonishing speech by Colbert) clearer-eyed and more pragmatic about the subtext of sex. This giddy shaggy-dog story follows the couple's split, and Gerry's subsequent flight to Palm Beach. This head-snapping frolic is paced by double-entendres and lampooning looks at the very rich, with standout performances by the predatory Princess Centimillia (the delicious Mary Astor), who's more than ready to comfort Tom, and the wealthy, dim-witted John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee, staking out a new career, post-crooner, as comic foil), Gerry's new suitor. Even the predictable reunion of the star-crossed lovers is achieved with an antic surrealism. Sturges's strength in building strong character ensembles is matched by his affection for coupling screwball dialogue with physical slapstick, seldom to better effect than in the drunken target practice of the Ale and Quail Club, who make Colbert's train ride to Florida a different kind of shoot-'em-up. --Sam Sutherland