Wycherly, Margaret

Sergeant York (Two-Disc Special Edition)

Story of World War I hero who captured German position single-handedly. Film also portrays York's earlier life in the mountains of Tennessee.Running Time: 134 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 012569793750 Manufacturer No: 79375

Gary Cooper plays Alvin York, the real-life country lad and sharpshooter drafted to fight during World War I but blocked from killing by his pacifist sentiments. Howard Hawks makes a rousing, heroic film out of the tale, and Cooper gives one of his best performances (for which he won an Oscar). The 1941 feature seems as much a valentine to wartime America (and a not-so-subtle piece of propaganda) as anything, with Hawks capturing splendidly shot scenes of life in York's home state of Tennessee, which in turn provide a striking contrast to the battlefield. A key scene in the film, in which York is presented with an argument in favor of killing in war, is still thought provoking. --Tom Keogh

Random Harvest

Paula Smith (Greer Garson) is the secretary of industrialist Charles Rainier (Ronald Colman). She's also his wife which Charles does not know. Shell-shocked during World War I he doesn't recall his days as her husband John Smith. Advised not to endanger Charles' fragile mental state Paula cannot openly reveal her identity. She must find other ways to help him remember their life together. From the novel by James Hilton (Goodbye Mr. Chips Lost Horizon) comes one of the great sentimental romance movies. Garson's Paula alongside her same-year triumph as Mrs. Miniver established her persona as the strong self-sacrificing wife. Random Harvest gathered seven Academy AwardO nominations* (including Best Picture and Colman as Best Actor) and also reaped a box-office harvest as the year's #4 hit.Running Time: 126 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 012569525122

The ultimate tearjerker, this 1942 romance classic directed by Mervyn LeRoy (based on a novel by James Hilton) stars Ronald Colman as a British army officer suffering from amnesia after World War I. After falling in love with and marrying a dance-hall singer (Greer Garson), Colman's happy character begins a career as a writer and doesn't seem to mind that he doesn't remember who he is. A car accident changes all that, however, causing the hero's memory to return and making him forget all about his lovely cottage and bride. LeRoy modulates the obvious suspense element in the story (for example, is Colman going to remember Greer or not?) extremely well, building ever-so-deliciously slowly toward a huge payoff. This is one of the great date movies of all time. --Tom Keogh

The Yearling

Child actor Claude Jarman Jr. won a Special Oscar for his lead performance as the boy hero of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' novel, which concerns a lad's love of a fawn in the post-Civil War era. Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman are memorable as his parents, their emotions divided in the aftermath of so much tragedy and their lives affected by the boy's passion for his yearling. Clarence Brown (National Velvet) directed this 1946 heartbreaker, which will not leave a dry eye in the room. A handsome, leisurely drama at more than two hours, shorter versions simply don't cut it. --Tom Keogh

Life abounds in the 1870s Florida scrubland that's home to young Jody Baxter. There are bears to hunt, cash crops to plant, evenings of storytelling with Pa and Ma... and there are timeless lessons of love and letting go that Jody learns from Flag, the orphaned pet fawn that follows him around with devotion.

White Heat

In his last role as a heartless gangster, James Cagney embarks on the prison break of a lifetime in this chilling tale that features one of the most riveting finales in movie history.

The Loves of Carmen

Hangmen Also Die

Because it's been little seen, and because people tend to shrug off contemporaneous World War II films as "propaganda," Hangmen Also Die has never received its due. It's a brilliant, riveting movie, made in response to the atrocities committed against the Czech people following the assassination of Reichsprotektor Heydrich, Hitler's personal "hangman." Under Fritz Lang's ferociously stylized direction, the duel of wits between the Nazi occupiers and the Prague underground--"a ghost army sworn to haunt them till their blood runs cold"--becomes the stuff of legend: virtually another installment of Die Nibelungen, and a dynamic variation on the urban phantasmagoria of the Mabuse films and Spione and M.

There is propaganda--but when the blood-curdling rhetoric comes from Bertolt Brecht, no less, in his only movie script for an American producer, who's to complain? Lang was Brecht's full collaborator, however, and the narrative is a steel trap closing on everyone. Every act of charity may potentially doom an entire family, and the resistance fighters--especially Brian Donlevy's doctor-assassin--agonize over their culpability in jeopardizing hundreds of innocents taken hostage in reprisal for Heydrich's shooting. The moral-ethical duality extends to the casting, and our response to it. Apart from Walter Brennan, astonishingly "Brechtian" as a Czech professor of history, the "good guys" are ho-hum Central Casting types while the Nazis--evil incarnate--are juicily portrayed by a passel of German-Jewish émigrés (Alexander Granach, Reinhold Schünzel, Ludwig Donath, et al.), all savoring the opportunity to skewer their own oppressors and to act up a German Expressionist storm in their Hollywood exile. Superbly photographed by James Wong Howe. --Richard T. Jameson

Midnight

Forever Amber

Call It Murder

Collector's Choice Double Feature: Humphrey Bogart