Russell, Jane

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Anita Loos's old story from the 1920s about a pair of single women in search of husbands gets a makeover in Howard Hawks's 1953 musical, starring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe as friends who go to Paris looking for mates. The film is charged by Hawks's stylish snap, a famous set piece or two (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 film may largely be a fluff project best remembered as a showcase for its leading actresses, but then Monroe and Russell rarely got such extended opportunities to prove that they were more than cinematic icons. --Tom Keogh

These glamorous showgirls have everything a girl could want - except engagement rings! In a quest for true love, Lorelei (Marilyn Monroe) and her gold digger pal Dorothy (Jane Russell) set sail on a luxury-liner bound for France. But the pair hits rocky waters when a manipulative detective, an over-aged, over sexed millionaire (Charles Coburn) and the entire men's Olympic team try to put an anchor in their marriage-minded mischief. It's a wild and joyously funny ride across the Atlantic as our bathing beauties plan and plot a way to land their men.

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

Frank Sinatra - The Early Years Collection (It Happened in Brooklyn / Step Lively / The Kissing Bandit / Double Dynamite / Higher and Higher)

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

The young, skinny Frank Sinatra was a big-band singer and the heartthrob of the bobby-soxers when he launched his movie career--a moment in time memorably captured by Frank Sinatra: The Early Years Collection. Five movies take the gangly kid from Hoboken through his hesitant first forays into the Hollywood game; everything here is in the minor-but-tuneful category, before he re-launched his career with From Here to Eternity. It's a fun set for Sinatra fans, not so essential for the casual viewer (and no extra features for vintage-movie mavens). Frankie's first feature, in 1943, was Higher and Higher, in which he plays--hmm--a young singer named Frank Sinatra. All right, it's not much of a stretch, but the kid fits quite comfortably into a madcap ensemble that includes Jack Haley, Mary Wickes, Dooley Wilson, and a youthful (practically unformed) Mel Torme. This is the kind of wacky universe in which a scullery maid has a French accent (it's Michele Morgan) and a British nobleman has a Danish accent (it's piano comedian Victor Borge). The film is completely insane, but fun. Step Lively (1944) has the same director, Tim Whelan, and a similarly over-heated farce in play: a theatrical producer (obnoxious George Murphy) tries to whip together a show while dodging hotel managers (Adolphe Menjou, deadpan Walter Slezak). Frankie's in there as a playwright who also sings. It's a version of the Broadway play that also served the Marx Brothers in Room Service, but the whole thing is really too labored to pay off. It Happened in Brooklyn (1947) doesn't offer much in the way of substance (Sinatra is a WWII vet returning to his beloved, but now less friendly, Brooklyn), but at least Frank is teamed with Jimmy Durante. Oh, and Kathryn Grayson and Gloria Grahame are in there too, even if the real love match is Sinatra and Durante singing together. Tunes are by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, including "Time After Time."

1948's The Kissing Bandit became for Sinatra what The Silver Chalice would be for Paul Newman: a source of self-mockery in later years. A truly bizarre concoction about the son of a Zorro-like bandit settling in Boston, the film has one specialty number featuring Cyd Charisse, Ann Miller, and Ricardo Montalban, and a lot of filler. Sinatra's career was sliding by the time Double Dynamite (1951) was released, and the movie did little to help. Frankie's a poor bank clerk who scores on a horse-racing bet but can't prove he didn't actually rob the bank. It isn't great, although Groucho Marx at least has one of his better solo roles, while Jane Russell is stuck in a dizzy-dame part (rather than her preferred sassy mode). For Sinatra, career resurgence would have to wait a while--this box set gives you the superstar-in-waiting. --Robert Horton

Robert Mitchum - The Signature Collection (Angel Face / Macao / The Sundowners / Home from the Hill / The Good Guys and the Bad Guys / The Yakuza)

This collection of Robert Mitchum movies includes the following titles: ANGEL FACE THE GOOD GUYS & THE BAD GUYS HOME FROM THE HILL MACAO THE SUNDOWNERS and THE YAKUZA. Please see individual titles for synopsis information.Featuring:ANGEL FACEMACAOTHE GOOD GUYS AND THE BAD GUYSHOME FROM THE HILLTHE SUNDOWNERSTHE YAKUZAFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 085391113492 Manufacturer No: 111349

Big bad Bob Mitchum: Seriously, is there anybody you'd rather watch in a movie? Mitchum had the cool looks, a dancer's sense of balance, and a thoroughly modern amusement about his own stardom. Somehow he made you invest in a movie, while simultaneously communicating his own smirky suspicions that the whole thing was a joke. Mitchum gets boxed in Robert Mitchum: The Signature Collection, a six-disc batch of random but rewarding Mitchum vehicles. Highlights are two noirish outings, and two prestigious auteur pictures that allowed Mitchum to play outside his usual job description. The one authentic noir is Otto Preminger's Angel Face (1952), with Mitchum as an incredibly passive hero bewitched by Jean Simmons' spoiled rich girl. True to its title, the film is utterly deadpan in tracking the downfall of Mitchum's easily-seduced male.

The quasi-noir is Macao (1952), a compulsively enjoyable piece of nonsense produced by the ever-meddling Howard Hughes. It's credited to director Josef von Sternberg, but it was largely reshot by Nicholas Ray (according to a Mitchum-Russell interview included on the disc, Mitchum wrote some of the new scenes). Doesn't matter; the combo of Mitchum and Jane Russell (re-teamed from the even kookier His Kind of Woman) is enough to carry this slice of backlot exotica. Both actors look skeptical about the material and amused by each other, and Russell gets to sing "One for My Baby."

Home from the Hill (1959) is an underappreciated change of pace for both Mitchum and director Vincente Minnelli. Mitchum, all authority as the super-manly patriarch of an East Texas family, supplies the brawn; Minnelli brings the same sensitivity to the emotional effects of color and movement that he brought to his musicals. Biggest surprise here is that two young-cub Georges, Peppard and Hamilton, are both very good in the male-ingénue roles. Another long film, Fred Zinnemann's The Sundowners (1960), is a gentle and wise account of a nomadic family of sheep-herders in Australia. Mitchum and Deborah Kerr bring a beautiful sense of mature romance to their relationship, and Zinnemann catches the beauty of the country. Plus, you learn how to shear a sheep.

The clinker in the set is Burt Kennedy's The Good Guys and the Bad Guys, a 1969 Western that can't decide whether it's sending up High Noon or playing it straight. Mitchum's the aging Marshall eased out of his job, George Kennedy is the equally aging varmint whose gang (led by whippersnapper David Carradine) plans a train robbery. One can imagine John Wayne as the Marshall and Mitchum as the rogue, but the movie would still fall flat. Finally, The Yakuza (1975) finds Mitchum in his weathered seventies form, and easily the best thing about Sydney Pollack's stately film. The Paul Schrader-Robert Towne script heads to Japan for some cultural lessons and much finger-severing. All in all, the set shows the range of a perpetually underestimated actor who never stopped being cool. --Robert Horton

The Paleface

Bob Hope brings his own brand of laughing gas to the Wild West as a would-be "painless" dentist lassoed into marrying Jane Russell. She's a shapely outlaw turned undercover agent on the trail of some varmints selling guns to a hostile Indian tribe, and he's her unwitting cover. Hope cowers and cracks self-effacing jokes while bodies fall around him ("Brave men run in my family," he quips, then runs), but he's even funnier swaggering and sneering like a kid playing cowboy in a flamboyant costume apparently stolen from the Oklahoma! road show. The Paleface is one of his best films, and the unflappable Russell is a great match. Theme song "Buttons and Bows" (which Hope delivers with a clowning mock twang) won an Oscar^®, and the 1948 film spawned a sequel (Son of Paleface, costarring Roy Rogers and Trigger) and a remake (The Shakiest Gun in the West with Don Knotts). --Sean Axmaker

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Anita Loos's old story from the 1920s about a pair of single women in search of husbands gets a makeover in Howard Hawks's 1953 musical, starring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe as friends who go to Paris looking for mates. The film is charged by Hawks's stylish snap, a famous set piece or two (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 film may largely be a fluff project best remembered as a showcase for its leading actresses, but then Monroe and Russell rarely got such extended opportunities to prove that they were more than cinematic icons. --Tom Keogh

These glamorous showgirls have everything a girl could want - except engagement rings! In a quest for true love, Lorelei (Marilyn Monroe) and her gold digger pal Dorothy (Jane Russell) set sail on a luxury-liner bound for France. But the pair hits rocky

Son of Paleface

Four years after his hit comedy The Paleface Bob Hope returned to the screen as Junior Potter son of Painless Peter Potter the hapless hero of the first film. The Harvard-bred Junior heads out west to claim his father's inheritance. Returning for the sequel but in a different role is Jane Russell (The Outlaw) as an outlaw named Mike who continually has to save our hapless hero. Also starring in the sequel is the King of the Cowboys himself Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger who portray themselves. Hope teams with the pair to help get to the sequel is the Oscar-winning song "Buttons and Bows." Co-writer and director Frank Tashlin a former cartoonist and screenwriter of the first Paleface also worked with Hope on The Private Navy of Sgt O'Farrell and wrote and directed several Jerry Lewis films such as Cinderfella and The Geisha Boy.System Requirements:Starring: Bob Hope Jane Russell Roy Rogers Iron Eyes Cody and Trigger. Running Time: (approx.) 95 mins/color. Copyright: l952 Columbia Pictures Television.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: NR UPC: 090096098296 Manufacturer No: 60982-9

Bob Hope returned to the wild West in Son of Paleface, mining the rootin' shootin' genre for gag after gag. Hope plays Junior Potter--another variation on his lascivious, cowardly, yet somehow endearing persona--a college boy who's come to California seeking his father's hidden gold. What he finds is an empty treasure chest, a pile of unpaid bills, vengeful Indians, buxom Jane Russell (as a saloon girl by day, wily bandit by night), and singing cowboy Roy Rogers. It's prime silliness, an ancestor to movies like Airplane! that never let a moment go by without an absurd joke. Russell sashays about in spectacular form-fitting outfits, Rogers yodels a few tunes, and Hope snivels and wheedles his way out of endless scrapes. Good-natured slapstick (though its depiction of Native Americans will raise the hackles on politically correct viewers). --Bret Fetzer

Outlaw, The

A fast-paced, entertaining lark of a film, The Outlaw is known today mostly for the buoyant performance of Jane Russell, whose career was engineered by the film's director, Howard Hughes, otherwise infamous for his reclusive millionaire ways. But more than that, the film boasts a set of finely tuned performances in the retelling of the story of Billy the Kid (Jack Beutel), whose burgeoning friendship with Doc Holliday (Walter Huston) arouses an intense hatred in Sheriff Pat Garrett (Thomas Mitchell, arguably the greatest character actor who ever lived). As Rio, Doc Holliday's girl, Jane Russell creates an irrepressible presence that lends an ample foundation to the story when her affections for Billy cleave his relationship with Doc. There are enough psychosexual rumblings to go around that the pace never sags. --Jim Gay

The tale begins with law-enforcer Pat Garrett's ruse to trap and cage legendary outlaw Billy the Kid. But Billy is wise to the lawman's scheme and lies low at pal Doc Holliday's ranch. Trouble soon begins to brew, however, when The Kid falls for Doc's lover Rio. Although Billy is responsible for the death of Rio's brother, she returns the desperado's affection, and the two marry on the sly. But the betrothed couple has a volatile relationship, and as the trio runs from Garrett and his gang of lawmen, the group quarrels amongst themselvesmaking it difficult to escape.

Marilyn Monroe - The Diamond Collection (Bus Stop / How to Marry a Millionaire / There's No Business Like Show Business / Gentlemen Prefer Blondes / The Seven Year Itch / The Final Days)

The Diamond Collection consists of five Marilyn Monroe films plus the documentary The Final Days. Bus Stop (1956) stars Monroe as a singer who finds herself trapped at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere during a blizzard. How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) was built around a trio of female stars, Monroe, Lauren Bacall, and Betty Grable, who play friends who come up with a plan to find and marry rich men. Monroe plays an ambitious showgirl in 1954's There's No Business Like Show Business, which brings together two giants of Broadway, Ethel Merman and Irving Berlin, to celebrate the glories that were vaudeville. 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 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.

Marilyn in her billowy white skirt and the scene that made her a legend. Co-starring Tom Ewell. "There's No Business Like Show Business" (1954, 117 min.) - A glamorous tale about the trials and tribulations of a veteran vaudeville family. Co-starring Ethel Merman and Donald O'Connor. "How to Marry a Millionaire" (1953, 95 min.) - Discover Marilyn's phenomenal comic talent as she leads an outrageous man-hunting scheme in this classic comedy. Co-starring Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall. "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1953, 91 min.) - Marilyn is sensational, performing the timeless hit "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend." Co-starring Jane Russell. Also includes the acclaimed documentary "Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days," available only in this box set, plus forty minutes of exclusive, never-before-seen footage from Marilyn's never-completed final film, "Something's Got to Give."

Classic Western Collection