Laurel & Hardy: The Essential Collection Not complete, owing to pesky rights issues, but an overflowing cornucopia of fine messes, starring some of the precious few performers to successfully bridge the silent and sound eras. Comprising more than 50 films spread over 10 discs in new transfers that enthusiasts say best all previous editions, it's an embarrassment of riches. You'll have to hunt for commentary tracks by Dick Van Dyke and Jerry Lewis as well as L&H historians, but there's plenty of motivation to browse around.
Friday Night Lights After the wife and I finished The Wire earlier this year — don't judge — I asked my virtual friends what series we should watch next. I knew the result almost as soon as I posted the question, and sure enough, FNL was the hands-down winner. (Then we went ahead and watched The Good Wife, just for kicks.) Although it hasn't quite scaled The Wire's august heights, there's no recent show that's prompted such uniform praise, from gridiron fans as well as those who can't tell a flea flicker from a punt return. Universal's slim set, about the size of a good Russian novel, goes soup to nuts on the TV series expansion of Buzz Bissinger's nonfiction book. Lord knows pre-professional football could use all the good press it can get.
The Complete Jean Vigo/The Three Colors Trilogy As always, I could fill this column top to bottom solely with offerings from the Criterion collection, but let's zero in on two especially epochal releases. The first collects the slim but essential body of work left by Jean Vigo, an anarchic poet who died at the age of 29. The 44-minute Zéro de conduite is his masterwork, a portrait of a boys'-school revolt that becomes a protest against sense itself, but the feature-length L'Atalante is nearly its equal. The story of a tattooed barge captain's first days afloat with his new wife is a light-fingered precursor to Eraserhead, with newlywed anxieties represented by multiplying cats rather than slimy freak-babies. Meanwhile, Krzysztof Kieslowski's crowning achievement hardly lacks for good press, but Criterion's typically flawless editions of Blue, White and Red make you ache anew for an artist of Kieslowski's ambition and moral insight.
Treasures 5: The West The success of the National Film Preservation Foundation's Treasures series is one of few signs that humanity isn't sliding into the abyss. The typically overstuffed fifth installment focuses on images of the American West, ranging from documentaries to Tom Mix shorts, all drawn from the four decades before World War II. Although it's creaky in places, Thomas Ince's Last of the Line (Pride of Race) takes a surprisingly pro-Indian stance on westward expansion, even if it does cast the distinctly non-native Sessue Hayakawa as its tribal lead. As always, the NFPF's presentation is impeccable, drawn from carefully preserved prints and including new musical scores, commentaries and written essays that make for hours of engrossing study.
Landmarks of Early Soviet Film Flicker Alley's four-disc collection does for the USSR what Treasures does for the U.S., presenting the long-overdue debuts of movies by Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, among many others. Turksib and Salt for Svanetia were key texts for British and American documentarians who preferred to tell stories in poetry rather than prose, while Esther Shub's The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty has a solid claim on creating the found-footage doc. They're works of astonishing beauty as well as profound historical import, and they've been out of circulation long enough to surprise all but the most devout cinephile.
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Of course, not every digital treat comes in a big package. Kino has begun upgrading its substantial catalog of classic film treasures to high definition one film at a time, which sometimes startling results. The Birth of a Nation will never look as if it’s fresh from the lab, but the new edition (which also includes a DVD version) positively glistens in spots — a special bonus since public screenings are hard to come by. They’re several discs into Buster Keaton’s back catalog, as well, with The General, Steamboat Bill Jr. and Our Hospitality joined most recently by the blissful madness of Seven Chances, in which Keaton flees a pack of would-be brides with the headlong velocity of a runaway locomotive. Perhaps the most delightful gem is a long-overdue edition of William Wellman’s Nothing Sacred, a screwball precursor to Ace in the Hole filmed in an early version of Technicolor. It’s an odd-looking film, grainy and gauzy and super-saturated, but that hardly dulls the razor-sharp dialogue that flies between Frederic March and Carole Lombard.
Warner Bros. is taking its sweet time upgrading its flagship titles, but they’ve finally worked their way around to Citizen Kane and Meet Me in St. Louis, with results as dazzling as one might hope. (Now, Singin’ in the Rain, please.) MGM’s high-def upgrade to West Side Story should be cause for celebration, but the transfer is marred by a bizarre fade to black in Saul Bass’ landmark credit sequence, which the studio has declined to account for despite an online backlash.They’ve promised to replace the discs at an unspecified future date, but their lackadaisical response merit holding off on the purchase for now.
And speaking of classics, Disney’s stream of animated gems continues at its steady trickle, with this year seeing swoony new versions of Bambi, Dumbo, The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast (the latter two are available in 3D editions as well, for the half-dozen or so viewers so equipped at home). The studio’s exasperating habit of taking titles in and out of print means that the classic Winnie-the-Pooh shorts will set you back upward of $50 online, but the new Winnie the Pooh stands shoulder to shoulder with its predecessors, and represents a triumphant revival for Disney’s hand-drawn animation division.
