Winner of the Best Documentary Feature award at the 72^nd Academy Awards ceremony, One Day in September is the riveting and entirely true story of the hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympics in which Palestinian terrorists, calling themselves Black September, snuck into an athletes’ dormitory and took nearly a dozen Israeli athletes and coaches hostage. After a 21-hour standoff, the situation detonated into bloodshed and tragedy. Seen today, the standoff and its botched handling by the West German authorities was the touchstone for current security levels at high-profile events. Director Kevin Macdonald counts Errol Morris among his influences, and the film has the same kind of breathless propulsiveness as many of Morris’ best films. Hampered by an apparent lack of footage documenting the climactic airport shootout, the film actually gains impact from Macdonald’s solution, although the period tunes (including the rare authorized use of a Led Zeppelin song) are jarring in the context of the tragedy, to say the least. Nevertheless, as a stand-alone experience or in concert with Simon Reeves’ recent book of the same title, One Day in September is strong stuff. The Columbia TriStar Home Video VHS edition is priced to rent, and the letterboxed DVD is said to include production notes, a theatrical trailer and talent files. 

Superfluous sequel to the superfluous 1996 remake of the 1961 animated film, plus it has the distinction of being possibly the worst-plotted big-budget commercial film to come out in years: the filmmakers have just a couple of ideas to sustain things for over an hour and a half, and they just keep throwing those ideas at us, again and again, while we in the audience recall wistfully the enjoyment that once could be had by watching a story unfold in a film. Actually, two of the ideas in the film aren't bad ones: Cruella De Vil (played by Glenn Close, also in the 1996 film) undergoes behavioral modification while in prison and emerges not only with an aversion to fur but as an animal advocate. And one of the puppies from the previous film, Dipstick, has sired a litter of his own which includes Oddball, a dalmatian without spots. However, the film isn't really about the dogs, it's about the outrageously caricatured Cruella, who very quickly  re-develops her maniacal pursuit of a puppy-skin coat. And she's less a creation of Glenn Close's acting abilities than those of her costumer (the excellent Anthony Powell) and hair stylist -- Close’s involvement seems almost coincidental, although, if she really wants to look like this in a movie, who are we to stop her? She also suffers one of the biggest travesties of a comeuppance -- for a performer, at any rate -- since Marlon Brando was sent skidding at high speed on his backside down a muddy hill in Bedtime Story. This is also your chance to see Ioan Gruffudd, cable TV’s Horatio Hornblower, engaged, in his very first scene, in a tug-of-war battle with a dog, both participants holding onto their end of the rope with their teeth. And there's more!: Gérard Depardieu (yes, that Gérard Depardieu) appears as a couturier named Jean-Pierre le Pelt who, in his first scene, appears on a fashion runway wearing an outfit with a codpiece shaped like a leopard's head. Since none of the dogs speak -- again -- the anthropomorphic yakking is provided by a parrot who speaks fluent English and thinks it's a dog. After a while, one yearns for a hungry cat to turn up, just to shut it up. Walt Disney Home Video’s DVD is so burdened with bells and whistles that it more than earns the title of one featurette: “Puppy Action Overload.” 

Clint Eastwood as the leader of a group of aging former NASA astronauts who gets the chance to reassemble the old team again and take the ride into space that was denied them decades ago. Eastwood, who has not been afraid to take a chance with new material in the past, gives this a good try but seems to have lost his way with the movie. The other former astronauts are played by Donald Sutherland and James Garner, who seem barely used in the film, and Tommy Lee Jones, who lays the Texas-boy mannerisms on a little too thickly. Marcia Gay Harden, ostensibly playing one of the main roles, seems barely in the film at all. And by the time the action moves into outer space, the movie has lost the chance to gain momentum. Not really a bad film, but one that goes out of your head rather quickly after seeing it. Warner’s DVD includes four production featurettes focusing on location filming, special effects, that Jay Leno sequence and the work of editor Joel Cox (who won an Oscar for Eastwood’s crowning achievment, Unforgiven). 

In contemporary Queens, newly-released ex-con Leo (Mark Wahlberg) just wants to go straight and get a good job, but is sucked into the corrupt world of the New York City transit system and its ultra-competitive contractors by cold-eyed pal Willy (Joaquin Phoenix) -- with dire results. Nothing less than a cross between a 1930s Warner Bros. social melodrama and Sidney Lumet’s massively influential 1981 real-life police thriller Prince of the City, director and co-scenarist James Gray’s second feature (following 1994’s Little Odessa) is admirably restrained and subtly textured, casting the broodingly intense Wahlberg as a cross between Paul Muni and Prince’s brave straight-arrow cop Danny Ciello (played by Treat Williams). Many interpreted the stately pace and downbeat performances as drawbacks, but in fact the film builds a palpable spell of doom and foreboding that lingers long after the lights come up. The stellar supporting cast includes Ellen Burstyn, James Caan, Faye Dunaway, Steve Lawrence (yes, the singer -- sans Eydie Gorme) and Charlize Theron. The Miramax Home Entertainment VHS is priced to rent, and the DVD features a commentary track by Gray, original concept art and a behind-the-scenes production featurette. 

Beyond the A List

Intrepid third-generation medical student Paula (Franka Potente, star of Run Lola Run and Blow) discovers a secret cabal of medicos who perform autopsies on patients still alive in this sleek, diamond-hard German thriller. As with most movies of this type there are plot holes you can drive a truck through, but the novelty of a German-language genre film, combined with Potente’s appeal and Peter von Haller’s eye-catching cinematography, provide enough entertainment to propel one through the absurd bits (and it’s sure better than such lame American studio fare as The Skulls). Anatomy represents a decided change of pace for Austrian-born director Stefan Ruzowitzky, whose previous film The Inheritors (1998) showcased his eye for fluid composition but didn’t hint at his relish for genre. The first fruits of Columbia Pictures’ German branch, Anatomy actually had a brief commercial run in New York -- via a dubbed print. Luckily, the distributors’ handsome DVD edition is subtitle optional, and supplements the feature with Ruzowitzky’s commentary track, storyboard comparisons, deleted scenes, a music video, a production featurette and peek at the stylishly bizarre makeup effects. Both dubbed and subtitled VHS versions are priced to rent. 

Roscoe Conkling “Fatty” Arbuckle was a portly and promising physical comedian from Kansas who moved from vaudeville to silent films in 1908 and never looked back. By 1917 the incredibly agile and baby-faced performer was so popular he could create his own production company, Comique. Over the next three years, Arbuckle and his troupe -- including the young an still-unknown Buster Keaton -- produced a number of dazzlingly inventive and howlingly funny comedy shorts, 10 of which are collected on two discs by Kino on Video (each volume is sold separately). While the quality of each varies, the impact does not: possessed of an astonishing talent for timing and tricks (watch him roll a cigarette or flip a butcher knife), Arbuckle was rightly assessed as the second most popular comedian of the period -- behind, of course, Charlie Chaplin. So why haven’t you heard of “Fatty” Arbuckle? In 1921 his career was ruined by a scandal involving the bizarre and grisly death of a young woman after a night of celebration (there’s a so-so 1975 dramatic version inspired by the events, entitled The Wild Party). After two hung juries Arbuckle was acquited of manslaughter, although the damage had been done and today his abbreviated career stands as the pivotal event in the formation of the Hays Code to battle the perceived amoral bent of Hollywood -- a body that would later morph into the Motion Picture Association of America. Each of these shorts has been digitally remastered, with evocative color tinting, restored intertitles and a new score created specifically for the releases by the Alloy Orchestra. This is funny, eye-opening stuff.

When Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg had the bright idea to recast “Candide” as a satire of pornography story structure, a film was sure to follow. One of the biggest commercial flops of the 1960s, screenwriter Buck Henry’s adaptation of the book has been out of circulation for a good two decades (Henry himself co-scripted and can be seen in Warren Beatty’s upcoming Town & Country -- and in an odd, wordless cameo as a mental patient here). Seen today, Candy is an uneven treasure trove of moviemaking do’s and don’t’s. Unknown Ewe Aulin is comely yet breathily annoying in the lead, but that’s more than made up for with the cavalcade of male stars who fall under her spell (representing various professions and temperaments), a virile roster that includes Richard Burton (as floridly dissolute poet McPhisto), Marlon Brando (as a “reformed mystic” in the movie’s weirdest and best sustained bit), James Coburn, John Huston, Walter Matthau (as the spiritual descendant of General Jack D. Ripper in the Southern-scripted Dr. Strangelove), Sugar Ray Robinson, John Astin (remember “The Addams Family”?), Ringo Starr as Emmanuel the Hispanic gardener (dig that Liverpudlian/Spanish accent) and French singer Charles Aznavour as The Hunchback. The monologues can become tiring, but each actor seems in a kind of masculine prime (particularly Brando), which gives director Christian Marquand’s film an air of revelation to those who know of it only vaguely or not at all. Dave Grusin’s psychedelic score is a pure hoot, and the unflaggingly imaginative art direction of Dean Tavoularis (who went on to do Oscar-winning work on Francis Ford Coppla’s Godfather Part II) and Giuseppe Rotunno’s photography are very evocative of the period. The Byrds perform the title song, with scattered tunes from Steppenwolf. Anchor Bay’s pristine DVD has no extras but comes packaged in a bright red slipcase and has some pretty groovy menus. 

In The Color of Pomegranates, the life of Armenian national poet Sayat Nova is traced via colorful tableaux. The Legend of Suram Fortress fashions an ancient Georgian legend into a proudly nationalistic affirmation of warrior resolve and sacrifice. Ashik Kerib reimagines Lermentov’s wandering minstrel story as an experimental and lushly romantic ode to traditional art and music. Georgian filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov ran afoul of Soviet censors throughout his career (his florid style and folk celebrations were labeled “decadent”), yet managed to conceive some of the most ravishing and unique films ever made. Mentored by film theoretician Lev Kuleshov and influenced by Ukranian filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko (Earth, available on tape from Kino on Video), his films were praised around the world even as he served four years for hard labor and was denied domestic access to foreigners. Under mid-1980s glasnost he was able to resume filmmaking but died of lung cancer in 1990. As they’ve done with selected other DVD pressings (Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice, Guy Maddin’s Careful) Kino has bundled The Color of Pomegranates with a documentary on the director’s work, esteemed film critic Ron Holloway’s enlightening 57-minute 1994 German-American co-production Paradjanov: A Requiem. Also featured on the disc is an early Paradjanov short, Hagop Hovnatanian. Both discs are technically solid if unspectacular, a symptom far more indicative of poor original print quality than distributor disinterest. In fact, Paradjanov is an important enough component in the development of Cold War-era individualism in Russian cinema that he’s been taught in film classes for over 30 years; thus, these discs are a key addition to the history-minded film fan’s collection. 

In an atmospheric wartime London beset by the blackout, a Danish sea captain (Conrad Veidt) and his mysterious passenger (Valerie Hobson) match wits with a nest of Nazi spies operating out of a Soho basement. The second collaboration between British director Michael Powell and Hungarian-born scenarist Emeric Pressburger (following 1939’s similar-in-tone The Spy in Black, also starring Veidt and Hobson), Contraband reveals itself after some 60 years of obscurity (it was given a perfunctory U.S. release under the title Blackout) to be a sparkling Hitchockian thriller in the 39 Steps mold. Veidt glowers his way mischievously through the role, and Hobson’s slinky insouciance matches him note for note. Following Criterion’s recent DVD release of I Know Where I’m Going!, Black Narcissus and Peeping Tom, Contraband is essential viewing for those intrigued and beguiled by the most unique and rewarding collaboration of Powell and Pressburger. Kino on Video’s fine transfer to DVD highlights the expressionistic photography of the legendary Freddie (“F.A.”) Young (see Lawrence of Arabia, below) and the atmospheric settings of Alfred Junge, who went on to design both I Know Where I’m Going! and the essential Black Narcissus.

“Madadayo” apparently means “not yet!” in Japanese, and is the response retired German teacher Hyakken Uchida (Tatsuo Matsumura) gives to the students and family who throw him a once-a-year-birthday party, at which they ask, in unison, “Mahda-kai?” (“are you ready?”). To emphasize his vow to keep living his rewarding life, he quaffs a large glass of beer as his respectful and adoring students cheer. Unavailable for years in the United States, Akira Kurosawa’s final film exhibits none of the epic sweep for which he is known (The Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, Ran), focusing instead on the ordered satisfaction of a life lived well. That the multi-decade timeframe of the film includes the messy post-World War II rubble of Tokyo seems only fitting, as the counterpoint of order and chaos is never far from the surface. Bereft of booklet, chapter headings or extras, Winstar’s simple and dignified DVD pressing of Madadayo -- which is based on a true story -- needs none of those things, as the deliberate, sentimental and placid film itself provides its own rewards -- in stark counterpoint to much noisier movies which deliver far less satisfaction. 

Referring to a 1930s experiment in three-strip color that set the pace for the move away from black and white filmmaking in Hollywood, one critic called Michelangelo Antonioni’s rarely-seen 1980 experimental melodrama The Mystery of Oberwald “the Becky Sharp of cinema’s long-promised and long-deferred electronic era.” In the years since, that brave new world of tape has arrived with a vengeance, and very little of it resembles the experiments in color and saturation found in Antonioni’s turgid adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s historical romance “The Eagle Has Two Heads.” But that’s not to say this long-unavailable work is without merit: first of all, along with the director’s subsequent film Identification of a Woman (also recently released by Facets), The Mystery of Oberwald has remained out of reach for the home video collector since it’s production (that’s not the same as being available in poor prints, which is sadly the fate of many of Antonioni’s most pivotal work, including the trilogy of L’avventura, La notte and L’eclisse). Secondly, Antonioni himself wrote of “finally using color as a narrative, poetic means” -- and of his disdain for the material. Thus, the statically rendered story of a 19^th century queen (Antonioni regular Monica Vitti) who falls in love with her assassin serves principally as a canvas for the director’s experiments with color manipulation. And although he himself thought the results “banal,” fans of the director’s rigorously intellectual work will rejoice at the availability of The Mystery of Oberwald and the serious approach to pushing the technical bounds of cinema it represents.

In 1930s America, young phenom Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) rocks the baseball world by materializing seemingly from nowhere to lead the no-account New York Knights to victory. Just in time for baseball season, Barry Levinson’s 1984 critical and box office hit The Natural has been given a dazzling digital makeover by Columbia TriStar Home Video that enhances Caleb Deschanel’s luminous photography and one of Randy Newman’s best-ever scores. Although the film itself still plays long and fragmentary, the pristine transfer elevates what’s good about the movie beyond these concerns. The uniformly excellent supporting cast includes Robert Duvall, Glenn Close, Kim Basinger, Wilford Brimley, Barbara Hershey, Robert Prosky, Richard Farnsworth and an uncredited Darren McGavin. The DVD package includes a choice of no less than seven languages for the subtitle tracks, the usual collection of trailers, talent files and production notes, and, most appealing for fans of the sport, an exclusive documentary featuring Cal Ripken Jr. Play ball. 

To attempt to understand the cinema of French phenom Leos Carax, start with his name: born Alexander Oscar Dupont in 1961, his nom de film is an anagram of his first two names, Alex and Oscar. A gesture both mischievous and mystifying, it perhaps sums up the visually arresting yet dramatically obscure nature of his four feature films to date (the third, 1991’s Lovers on the Bridge, was released in the United States by Miramax after a multi-year delay). His debut film, Boy Meets Girl, is an arrogantly affectionate black and white tribute to the French new wave, with Denis Lavant (in his first of three films with Carax) playing an aspiring filmmaker opposite Mirielle Perrier’s Jean Seberg-ish lovelorn waif and a post-modern musical approach. Working again with Lavant and cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier (who went on to shoot both Good Will Hunting and Nurse Betty), Mauvais Sang switches to vivid primary colors and tarts a young Juliette Binoche up to look like Jean-Luc Godard’s muse Anna Karina. There’s nobody named Pola in Pola X; the title comes from the first letters of the novel on which it is based, Herman Melville’s disasterous 1852 work “Pierre, ou les Ambiguities” (the X apparently refers to the 10^th draft of the screenplay, which was the one shot). Guillaume Depardieu -- Gérard’s son -- stands in for Lavant as an aspiring writer and self-centered aristocrat driven to flamboyant distraction by a number of women. As is usual in a Carax film, there are striking sequences (a nighttime confessional during a trek through the woods, Catherine Deneuve astride a motorcycle), but the overall effect is of a beautiful confusion -- a phrase that might well serve as title of his sure-to-be baffling critical biography. Winstar’s DVDs of the titles (available separately) offer no accompanying booklet but include various interviews with the director as well as the usual raft of interactive menus and filmographies; the latter two titles sport brief outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage among their extras (the VHS tape editions are priced to rent).

After pioneering the process and intellectual ramifications of film editing via such landmarks as Battleship Potemkin and Strike, Russian director Sergei Eisenstein struck out for Hollywood in hopes of expanding his work. Unable to interest any of the studios in collaborative projects, the director ended up in Mexico, where he and collaborators/traveling companions Grigory Alexandrov (the producer) and photographer Eduard Tisse began working on a documentary about the land, people and customs of the country. The limited budget soon ran dry and the film was abandoned. In 1979, Alexandrov and Nikita Orlov were finally able to edit the film, using Eisenstein’s notes and storyboards as guideposts. The resulting 85-minute documentary offers tantalizing glimpses of the visual power and propulsive movement of the director’s best work, with Alexandrov’s Russian-language narration and historical photos and footage placing the events in historical context. The Kino on Video DVD (their VHS tape has been on the market for three years) includes Eisenstein’s first sound film, 1930’s “cinematographic study” (read: experimental short) Romance Sentimentale, as well as a 20-minute fragment from the trio’s 1929 health-themed work Misery and Fortune of Woman, as well as a clippings file of texts pertaining to the main feature (the accompanying single sheet insert has an anonymous essay on the supplemental material). Alongside The Criterion Collection’s upcoming 3-disc Eisenstein set (featuring restored copies of Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible Parts 1&2), Qué Viva México! signals a renewal of interest in one of the founding fathers of cinema.  

The actor Ron Vawter is probably best remembered to movie fans as FBI agent Paul Krendler in Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning The Silence of the Lambs (it’s the same character bravely played by Ray Liotta in Hannibal). Shortly after appearing in Demme’s Philadelphia, Vawter -- who died in 1994 -- performed the well-received one-man show Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, in which he played both Joe McCarthy prosecutor Cohn and defiantly gay avant-garde film icon Smith -- wildly different men who had one thing in common: they both died of AIDS (Vawter himself was infected with the disease at the time of his death). What’s Underground About Marshmallows? is a fleshed-out version of the Smith segment of the play, taped in late 1993 -- the actor’s final performance. Both films are co-produced by James Schamus, co-writer and producer of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And both films were directed by Jill Godmilow, an American independent filmmaker of uncommon vision and endurance, who has been making uncompromising features and documentaries lodged at the junction of sexual politics and the creative process for more than 30 years. Other titles in Facets Video’s exclusive, tape-only release of Godmilow’s work include the Chicago Serbian community documentary The Popovich Brothers of South Chicago (1978), the Solidarity movement docudrama Far from Poland (1984), and the provocative drama Waiting for the Moon (1986), in which Gertrude Stein (Linda Bassett) and Alice B. Toklas (Linda Hunt) lead an all-star group of expatriates in Paris between the world wars. Valuable as much for their sociological inquiries as for their visually inventive styles, these films label Jill Godmilow a key player in the development of independent cinema over the last three decades.

On his deathbed in 1922, Marcel Proust (Marcello Mazzarella) recalls the period of his life before and during the first world war in the drawing rooms and social engagement circuit of Paris. This impeccably measured film version of the final volume in Proust’s massive “Remembrance of Things Past” has a cast that will appear all-star to anyone with an interest in contemporary European cinema: Catherine Deneuve is Odette de Crecy, Emmanuelle Béart is Gilberte, Vincent Perez is Morel, John Malkovich is Baron de Charlus, Pascall Greggory is Saint-Loup, Marie-France Pisier is Madame Verdurin, Christian Vadim is Bloch, Arielle Dombasle is Madame de Farcy, Chiara Matroianni is Albertine, and Patrice Chereau is heard as Proust’s voice. Heretofore known as a prolific maker of low-budget international art films, Chilean-born Raul Ruiz has been slowly and cannily moving into another arena altogether: his 1992 Dark at Noon and 1995 Three Lives and Only One Death competed at the Cannes festival, and the 1997 drama Genealogies of a Crime won the Silver Bear at the 1997 Berlin festival (he’s got a new film in competition at the upcoming 2001 Cannes event). All these films have in common an intriguing fluidity of time, suggesting that Ruiz, as most artists eventually do, is now less intimidated by the passage of time than intrigued by it. Kino on Video’s fine letterboxed DVD edition features a four-page booklet in which J. Hoberman’s respectful and adoring “Village Voice” review is reprinted in its entirety, speaking for a critical community that welcomed Time Regained as a respectful yet daring approach to Proust’s writing. 

In 1934, Adolph Hitler hired a young actress, dancer and aspiring filmmaker named Leni Riefenstahl to make a film about the National Socialist German Workers Party rally in Nuremberg, Germany. The resulting film, Triumph of the Will, has polarized audiences ever since. At once an exhilaratingly supple technical tour-de-force of technique and a frightening and distasteful display of nationalistic megalomania, the movie unfortunately documents Hitler at the beginning of the doomed 12-year Reich that would result in the most despicable acts of the 20^th century. Although the original negative of the film was apparently destroyed during the waning days of the war and subsequent prints have suffered from poor quality and truncated subtitles, good prints do exist, and the tiny genre distributor Synapse Films has procured one from legendary restorer Robert A. Harris for this sharp transfer. Crisper than other copies in circulation, the print used displays many of the same blemishes but restores the minute-plus overture and sports subtitles so detailed and complete you may find yourself freezing the image to catch up. A commentary track by Virginia-based scholar and historian Dr. Anthony R. Santoro provides a wealth of information on Hitler’s inner circle and the politics of the Nazi machine, but very little on Riefenstahl herself (there’s not even a photo of her on the packaging or enclosed four-page brochure). Thus, the Kino on Video pressing of Ray Muller’s 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl is recommended as a companion piece to this eternally controversial work.

Just as John Boorman’s Hope and Glory recast the World War II bombing of London as a children’s wonderland of new and exciting experiences amid death and destruction, debuting filmmaker Ziad Doueiri’s West Beirut follows the adventures of three young people during Lebanon’s civil war in the mid-1970s. Centered on genial delinquet Tarek and his pal Chamas -- Muslims both -- the merry band grows to include vivacious May, a Christian. Lebanon-born Doueiri has worked as an assistant and second-unit cinematographer for Quentin Tarantino, which helps explain his nervous, fluid style -- aided by a score from ex-Police man Stewart Copeland -- and the lean propulsiveness of his autobiographical narrative (“the happy memories have cancelled the bad ones,” he has said). “Since when has the West understood the East?” someone asks in West Beirut. The triumph of the film is Doueiri’s ability to bridge the two worlds through the universality of adolescent emotion and experiences. New Yorker Video’s VHS-only release is priced to rent and worth seeking out at better video retailers.

On the bleak plains of Greenland, young Norwegian writer Henrik Larsen (Gard B. Eidsvold) goes toe-to-toe with vulgar sailor Randbaek (Stelan Skarsgård) during a fur trapping expedition. Zero Kelvin is a moody, enigmatic existential thriller from Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland, who understands the suffocating loneliness and rage of men cooped up together for too long. And for fans of the chameleon-like Skarsgård, the film offers yet another facet of his tremendously diverse skills: Randbaek is nothing short of a stringy-haired lunatic, but as he’s done in so many films over the last few years, the actor imbues the trapper with a chaotic, even touching dignity. Kino on Video’s DVD pressing and VHS version are letterboxed. Watch for Molland and Skarsgard’s follow-up collaboration, the emotional family drama/road movie Aberdeen, coming soon to an art-house theater near you.

---

Box Set Corner:

An occasional exploration of video and DVD’s higher end

---

Lawrence of Arabia UK, 1962, Released 4.3.01 review by Eddie Cockrell

FULL REVIEW BUY VIDEO

In 1989, the restoration wizardry of Robert A. Harris (see Triumph of the Will, above) brought Lawrence of Arabia, director David Lean’s breathtaking, literate telling of British officer T. E. Lawrence’s work in the World War I-era Middle East, to a new generation of moviegoers and sparked the current trend of skillfully refurbishing pivotal works for big-screen exhibition. On the heels of their well-received Bridge on the River Kwai, Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment delivers a two-disc set of Lean’s multi-Oscared epic that will satisfy those new to the DVD realm but falls short of telling the film’s true and tortured production history -- or even delivering a commentary track. Worse, Harris not only wasn’t involved in this project, but isn’t even referenced for his late 1980s labors. On the plus side (and these are big plusses indeed), F.A. “Freddie” Young’s cinematography and Maurice Jarre’s music are given the best possible showcase (dig that overture, entr’acte and exit music). In a word, the movie looks gorgeous. And while many of the extras -- all on disc two -- seem distracted or even frivolous (what’s the point of Steven Spielberg popping up to reminisce about the film?), the discs’ DVD-ROM features offer a wealth of production stills and information -- but be warned: inserting either disc into your PC summons up the dreaded PC Friendly software, and they won’t play without installing it on your system (as good as the software may or may not be, consumers should retain the choice of using it or ignoring it). The accompanying 12-page booklet includes two essays originally found in the 1962 first-run brochure, and the handful of production documentaries include the featurette Wind, Sand and Star: The Making of a Classic. Other recent sword’n’sandal epics for those thematically inclined include Ben-Hur (1959), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), Cleopatra (1963) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) -- all released, no doubt, in no small part to capitalize on the success of the most recent Best Picture Oscar winner, the similarly majestic but digitally tricked-out Gladiator. But accept no substitutes: despite the sins of omission, Lawrence of Arabia remains among the most beautiful and stirring of epics, and this two-disc set does the film itself proud. 

---

Don't have a DVD player? 
Click on the button below to buy one:

Buy at Amazon.com

---

Didn't find what you are looking for? Look in the back issues of the store or in the extensive catalog of Amazon.COM by entering your search in the text box below:

Search: Books Popular Music Classical Music Video Toys Electronics Enter keywords...