Litvak, Anatole

Tyrone Power Matinee Idol Collection (Cafe Metropole/Girls Dormitory/Johnny Apollo/Daytime Wife/Luck of the Irish/Ill Never Forget You/That Wonderful Urge/Love Is News/This Above All/Second Honeymoon)

A new collection of 10 features new to DVD starring Fox's biggest heart-throb Tyrone Power.This FIVE disc collection of NEW TO DVD double-features and new VAM about Hollywood s most handsome leading man.Includes:Disc 1:CAFE METROPOLE '37GIRLS DORMITORY '36Disc 2:JOHNNY APOLLO '40DAYTIME WIFE '39Disc 3:LUCK OF THE IRISH '48I'LL NEVER FORGET YOU '51Disc 4:THAT WONDERFUL URGE '48LOVE IS NEWS '37Disc 5:THIS ABOVE ALL '42SECOND HONEYMOON '37Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA/CLASSICS UPC: 024543523444 Manufacturer No: 2252344

Decision Before Dawn

WWII is entering its last phase: Germany is in ruins but does not yield. The US army lacks crucial knowledge about the German units operating on the opposite side of the Rhine and decides to send two German prisoners to gather information. The scheme is risky: the Gestapo retains a terribly efficient network to identify and capture spies and deserters. Moreover it is not clear that "Tiger" who does not mind any dirty work as long as the price is right and war-weary "Happy" who might be easily betrayed by his feelings are dependable agents. After Tiger and another American agent are successfully infiltrated Happy is parachuted in Bavaria. His duty: find out the whereabouts of a powerful German armored unit moving towards the western front.System Requirements:Running Time: 119 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 024543238812 Manufacturer No: 2233881

Rooting for a German soldier was a daring choice for a movie made in 1951, but Decision Before Dawn justifies the risk; this is a crackling good war movie. In late 1944, the Allies are pushing through Europe but need intelligence behind German lines. Two Americans (Richard Basehart, Gary Merrill) recruit German POWs and enlist them to spy on their former Fatherland. We follow the adventures of one such agent, arrestingly played by the young Oskar Werner, who parachutes into Bavaria and gathers information. (Oddly, the film abandons Basehart and another recruit, marvelously played by Hans Christian Blech, who have also gone under cover.) The well-deployed suspense is accompanied by a constant examination of what it means to be German, and what loyalty to one's country really entails--dutiful devotion or skeptical rebellion? This question doesn't go deep (there's a sense that the movie is a make-nice effort toward a new economic ally), but the film is on solid ground whenever the clockwork suspense takes over. Hildegarde Knef (here billed under her Hollywood spelling, Neff) turns up as a conflicted fraulein. Director Anatole Litvak, shooting on location, gets some amazing shots of bombed-out buildings and ruined towns; in that sense, the film is almost like a documentary record of the postwar landscape. Decision Before Dawn was nominated for the best picture Oscar, but became a lesser-known film in the decades that followed. It deserves a higher profile. --Robert Horton

Sorry, Wrong Number

Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster star in Sorry, Wrong Number, an odd telephonic thriller that starts off with a bang. Stanwyck, playing a shrill invalid, is at home alone and phoning around to find her husband. Thanks to a crossed wire, she overhears a murder plot, but she can barely get anyone to pay attention to her, let alone believe her. The rest of the film is played out in telephone conversations and flashbacks as our increasingly frightened heroine tries to find her husband and unravel the murder. Stanwyck, as always, gives a terrific performance, managing to make her character both unlikeable and compelling at the same time. Lancaster, as her kept husband, is handsome, virile, and trapped all at once. The plot, expanded to a film from a tight, dark little radio play, wanders at times but gathers itself back together for a corker of an ending. --Ali Davis

Anastasia

Ingrid Bergman gives one of her memorable, haunting, and haunted performances as an amnesiac chosen by a White Russian general (Yul Brynner) in 1928 to play the part of Anastasia, the long-rumored but missing survivor of the Bolsheviks' murderous attack on the czar's family. The twist is that Bergman's mystery woman seems to know more about the lost Anastasia than she is told. Based on the play by Marcelle Maurette and Guy Bolton, this film--directed by Anatole Litvak (Out of the Fog)--really does get under one's skin, not least of all because of its intriguing story but even more because of the strong chemistry between Bergman and Brynner. --Tom Keogh

An expatriate White Russian general sets in motion a grand hoax after he meets a destitute woman on the banks of the Seine River in Paris. He is amazed at her resemblance to Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas of Russia, rumored to have somehow survived the Bolsheviks' execution of the Romanoff family in 1918. He trains her to impersonate the missing princess but soon begins to feel she may be the real Anastasia. Ultimately, the truth can only be decided by one person Anastasia's grandmother, the Dowager Empress.

Heroes of War Collection - Frontline Combat (Halls of Montezuma, Decision Before Dawn, D-Day the Sixth of June, Guadalcanal Diary)

D-Day: The 6th of June'Twas the night before D-Day. One ship carrying Special Force Six leaves ahead of the main invasion on a dangerous mission. On board are British Colonel Wynter and American Captain Parker who each in flashback reminisce about their separate involvements with beauteous Valerie Russell. Will the coming battle (confined to the film's last fifteen minutes) determine which one comes home to her?Decision Before DawnWWII is entering its last phase: Germany is in ruins but does not yield. The US army lacks crucial knowledge about the German units operating on the opposite side of the Rhine and decides to send two German prisoners to gather information. The scheme is risky: the Gestapo retains a terribly efficient network to identify and capture spies and deserters. Moreover it is not clear that "Tiger" who does not mind any dirty work as long as the price is right and war-weary "Happy" who might be easily betrayed by his feelings are dependable agents. After Tiger and another American agent are successfully infiltrated Happy is parachuted in Bavaria. His duty: find out the whereabouts of a powerful German armored unit moving towards the western front. Guadalcanal DiaryConcentrating on the personal lives of those involved a war correspondent takes us through the preparations landing and initial campaign on Guadalcanal during WWII.Halls of MontezumaThe marines attack a strongly held enemy island in the Pacific. We follow them from the beach to a Japanese rocket site through enemy infested jungle as their ex-school teacher leader is transformed into a battle veteran and his squad becomes a tight fighting unit.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/MILITARY & WAR Rating: Unknown UPC: 024543243397 Manufacturer No: 2234341

The Snake Pit

Virginia Cunningham (de havilland) appeared to have had an idyllic life - a nice home, a loving husband and prospects for a sriting career. But, something just wasn't right. Confusion, doubts about her husband's love, even violent outbursts led Virginia to be confined in a mental institution. She is put through a series of brutal treatments, including being forced into close quarters with patients whose disorders far exceed her own. The belief - the shock of the experience will return her to sanity.

Warner Gangsters Collection, Vol. 2 (Bullets or Ballots / City for Conquest / Each Dawn I Die / G Men / San Quentin / A Slight Case of Murder)

Packin' A Punch...and Packin' Heat! On the heels of the success of the Warner Bros. Gangster Collection the Warner Bros. Tough Guys Collection delivers six all new to DVD Classics featuring Hollywood's greatest Academy-Award winning Tough guys - James Cagney Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson.Running Time: 519 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/CRIME UPC: 883929005628 Manufacturer No: 1000036234

Say "Warner Bros. in the '30s" and you're talking, first and foremost, about the tough, gritty, urban, street-smart movies that help define that American decade for us. Which means you're talking about James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart: unpretty but charismatic guys with lived-in faces, and bodies that always seemed cocked, ready to spring. When one of them entered a room, he owned it, no matter how many people were there already. Their most celebrated habitat was the gangster picture. The genre didn't originate with them, but they, more than anybody else, defined it, gave it a face and a silhouette and a heartbeat.

The films in this set were produced half a decade and more after Little Caesar and The Public Enemy made stars of Robinson and Cagney, respectively, and after repeal had begun to lend Prohibition the patina of nostalgia. The studio's gangster franchise was evolving, and so were the careers of its top stars. When it came to toughness, the boys could still dish it out, and take it, too. But increasingly they were doing it on the other side of the law-and-order divide.

Cagney was first to reform. In 1935's "G" Men he plays a lawyer put through college by the avuncular neighborhood crimelord. After a law-school pal turned F.B.I. agent is murdered, Cagney abandons his (resolutely legit) one-man practice and joins the Bureau. The film memorializes several big moments in F.B.I. legend, but what's grabbiest is the personal drama growing out of Cagney's lingering underworld friendships. William Keighley directs the murders and shootouts with jolting ferocity, Barton MacLane and Edward Pawley supply flavorful villainy, and there are times when Sol Polito's cinematography literally glows (all these films have been restored, but "G" Men looks especially terrific). One gripe: The movie should have been presented without the F.B.I.-classroom intro tacked on for 1949 reissue (which belongs under "Special Features").

In Each Dawn I Die (also Keighley, 1939), Cagney teams with George Raft making his Warners debut. It's mostly a prison picture, with muckraking reporter Cagney behind bars after being framed by crooked politicos. Career felon Raft has little sympathy for him till Cagney proves to be a stand-up guy, whereupon the two bond in mutual loathing of sadistic guards, rat-fink convicts, and the endlessly malleable system. The movie boasts one indelible scene (involving a movie screening for the cons), some evocative prison workhouse detailing, and a fine Cagney performance as always. But it's undone by a script cluttered with melodrama and contrivance.

Bullets or Ballots (Keighley yet again, 1936) is much more satisfying. Again we get two icons for the price of one, with Robinson as a tough but square-shooting police detective and Bogart as the ambitious number-two man to a big-time racketeer. Bogart's effectively the co-star, albeit fourth-billed behind Robinson, Joan Blondell, and Barton MacLane. But it's Eddie G.'s movie, and he walks the line beautifully as an honest cop who, unjustly jettisoned from the force, signs on with the mobster he's long pursued. Despite a rhetorical reference to "ballots" as the public's means of combatting crime, it's bullets that get the job done. Bullets and fists: the movie makes clear that Robinson has beaten confessions out of people plenty of times, just as it has no illusions about the empty symbolism of crime commissions and grand juries.

The only other Bogart vehicle in the set is San Quentin (Lloyd Bacon, 1937), a scrap-work effort below the standards of everybody involved. Bogart's a small-time crook whose arrest at a nightclub occasions a meet-cute for his big sister Ann Sheridan and Army training officer Pat O'Brien--who's on his way to become yard captain at the penitentiary where Bogart will be interred! O'Brien tries to reform the lad, but with corrupt/sadistic guard Barton MacLane on one side and sociopathic con Joe Sawyer on the other, Bogart never has a chance. Neither does the viewer.

Lloyd Bacon, normally one of Warners' zippiest directors, is back on his game with A Slight Case of Murder (1938), a delicious gangster comedy. Robinson plays beer baron Remy Marco, who craves respectability as a legitimate businessman once beer is legal again. Problem is, nobody has ever had the heart to tell him his product tastes like varnish, and soon the bank is out to foreclose on his brewery. At which point Remy learns that his summer home upstate is full of fresh gangland corpses.... Based on a play by Damon Runyon and Howard Lindsay, the picture gives a trio of glorious goons--Allen Jenkins, Edward Brophy, and Harold Huber--a rare chance to shine as Marco's house staff.

City for Conquest (1940) ought to be the showpiece here. It's the longest and most ambitious entry, with prestige-picture scale and production values (including Polito and James Wong Howe as cameramen) and a cast including Cagney, Ann Sheridan, Arthur Kennedy, Frank McHugh, Donald Crisp, Anthony Quinn, Jerome Cowan, and--in his first of only two film performances--future directorial giant Elia Kazan. Working-stiff Cagney loves his gifted musician brother (Kennedy) and childhood sweetheart (Sheridan), a dancer with her own aspirations for the limelight; he becomes a boxer in order to pay for the brother's musical education. Triumph and tragedy ensue. The film's avowed aim, and Kennedy's, is to create an urban symphony of New York and the many little people striving against all odds to rise; there's even a one-man Greek chorus--Frank Craven, the Stage Manager of the recent Our Town--to hammer the theme periodically. But over the previous decade Warners' honest, hard-charging, small-scale movies had collectively achieved that "symphony," without the pompous flourishes Anatole Litvak's direction brings to the project. Here's hoping DVD showcases more of them. --Richard T. Jameson

City for Conquest

Ex-Golden Gloves fighter Danny Kenny has it all worked out. He'll turn pro to bankroll his brother's dream of writing a symphonic paean to the teeming city where they both live: New York. But life pulls the sidewalk out from under Danny when he's blinded during a brutal 15-round welterweight title bout. James Cagney plays Danny in this heart-tugging melodrama co-starring Ann Sheridan Anthony Quinn film-debuting Arthur Kennedy and in a rare acting turn before becoming a director Elia Kazan. Among familiar studio players there's an unbilled one: a vivid backlot and rear-screen Manhattan. "Sometimes we wonder" The New York Times' Bosley Crowther wrote "whether it wasn't really the Warner brothers who got New York from the Indians so diligent and devoted have they been in feeling the great city's pulse."Running Time: 104 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 012569791770 Manufacturer No: 79177

Film Noir - The Dark Side of Hollywood (Sudden Fear / The Long Night / Hangmen Also Die / Railroaded / Behind Locked Doors)

The Night of the Generals [Region 2]

Spain released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada. Languages: o Arabic (subtitles) o Danish (subtitles) o Dutch (subtitles) o English (subtitles) o Finnish (subtitles) o French (subtitles) o German (subtitles) o Hindi (subtitles) o Italian (subtitles) o Norwegian (subtitles) o Spanish (subtitles) o Swedish (subtitles) o Turkish (subtitles) o English (Mono) o French (Mono) o German (Mono) o Italian (Mono) o Spanish (Mono) Synopsis: Military Intelligence officer Major Grau (Omar Sharif) investigates the brutal murder of a Warsaw prostitute in this mystery set during World War II. Grau's only clue is that the murderer was wearing the uniform of a Nazi general. The three suspects include Gabler (Charles Gray), who fears his harridan wife more than anything, the icy General Tanz (Peter O'Toole), and the scheming, resourceful General Kahlenberge (Donald Pleasence). Grau is suspicious when he is taken off the case, but he does his own investigating when the suspects are gathered in Paris two years later. He enlists the help of Inspector Morand (Philippe Noiret), a resistance sympathizer with whom Grau forms an alliance. A side plot involving an affair with the general's daughter is thrown in for distaff interest. The fine cast assembled overcomes any temporary lulls in the screenplay. Special Features: o Interactive Menu o Scene Access

Long (148 minutes) military mystery set among the high command of Nazi Germany in occupied Poland and elsewhere in the Third Reich. A prostitute in wartime Warsaw has been brutally murdered and a German military investigator narrows his field of suspects to three German generals. But the war--and the sense of preening Prussian arrogance--interferes with his investigation, even as he begins to home in on the killer. Moodily sinister atmosphere and a strong cast (Peter O'Toole, Tom Courtenay, Omar Sharif, Christopher Plummer) can't overcome a plodding pace and a tendency to digress. --Marshall Fine