A Year of Memorable DVD Box Sets

2008 has been memorable for home video collectors. The incredibly rapid acceptance of the Blu-ray disc format, after the competing HD DVD format was abandoned last spring, has resulted in an explosion of new titles and lower prices, making Blu-ray the format of choice for virtually anyone with a 1080p high-definition TV set.

Standard DVD releases have also been outstanding over the past year, with an amazingly large number of relatively obscure and/or niche market titles being made available, especially classic, foreign, and independent films.

Whether this will carry over into the Blu-ray format at the same rate remains to be seen, but for the past few years, most of the standard DVD releases of older movies have been encoded from high-definition masters that make them appear nearly as sharp as a Blu-ray version on an upscale DVD player.

The collection of the year for film buffs and historians goes, hands down, to 20th Century Fox Home Video’s lovingly produced box set called “Murnau, Borzage, and Fox,” a worthy followup to last year’s wonderful “Ford at Fox” box set.

The oversized 12-disc set has two features by famed German director F. W. Murnau (his Oscar-winning “Sunrise” and his even better but little-seen “City Girl”), and ten by the underrated American master of romantic drama Frank Borzage, including the Oscar-winning “Seventh Heaven” and “Bad Girl.”

There is also a thorough documentary on the two filmmakers and their time at the William Fox studio in the late 1920s and early 1930s, plus alternate versions of two of the features. Picture quality varies from very good to superb, depending upon the condition of the surviving films. Filling up the box are two handsomely produced coffee-table softcover books.

Fox has been extremely generous with well-produced collector sets lately, finally catching up to Warner Brothers after years of neglecting the older titles in their vaults. “The Charlie Chan Collection Volume 5” brings all the remaining films in the series produced at the Fox studio to DVD, and the “Alice Faye Collection Volume 2” supplements last year’s set of musicals featuring one of their top stars of the late 1930s and the 1940s. Picture quality is excellent on all of them.

They’ve also released several collections of often obscure, but interesting, Westerns from the 1940s and 1950s.

In October, Genius Entertainment released “The Little Rascals Complete Collection,” which actually is not every film in the 20-year series but does have seven discs containing all 80 of the sound “Our Gang” comedy shorts produced by Hal Roach before MGM took over the series for its remaining years. There’s an eighth bonus disc with three of Roach’s silent “Our Gang” shorts, documentaries, and interviews with former “Our Gang” stars. Picture quality is good to excellent on most titles, although about a dozen are only fair to good, having been taken from 16mm film copies instead of the 35mm original material.

Last spring Criterion released a triple feature of three key early works by famed Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. The set “Silent Ozu: Three Family Comedies” is a rare and wonderful look at middle class
domestic life in early 1930s Japan. Picture quality is good but a bit soft, and the films are a must-see for anyone interested in international cinema.

The filmmaking style is also a fascinating curiosity, since Japan did not convert to “talkies” as early as the U.S. and Europe, yet in the early 1930s Ozu created silent films that resemble Italian neorealist films of 20 years later and French new wave films of 30 years later!

Kino Video has released numerous worthwhile box sets and double features. In their “Slapstick Symposium” series, they offer a gorgeous hi-def transfer (though on standard DVD) of the rarest two
surviving features by baby-faced silent screen comedian Harry Langdon: “Three’s A Crowd” and “The Chaser.”

This joins their previous triple-feature disc of his most famous features, “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,” “The Strong Man,” and “Long Pants,” representing the peculiar comic at the peak of his career. Add in last December’s multi-disc, “Lost & Found: The Langdon Collection,” of shorts from Flicker Alley and you have a comprehensive look at Langdon’s development and decline.

Also from Kino last spring was a double-disc pairing of three remastered “Films of Morris Engel,” a photographer turned independent filmmaker in the 1950s. His low-budget films “Little Fugitive,” “Lovers and Lollipops,” and “Weddings and Babies” are realistic and enjoyable location-shot slices of life, the first two featuring endearingly natural child actors. The set also includes two documentaries by Engel’s wife and collaborator Ruth Orkin.

Kino has had a definitive set of films by pioneer director D.W. Griffith out for some time, but this November they released “D.W. Griffith Masterworks Volume 2.” This box set rounds out a survey of his
career with one of his earliest features, the 1914 Poe-inspired murder thriller “The Avenging Conscience,” his epic melodrama “Way Down East” (1920), a W. C. Fields circus comedy “Sally of the Sawdust” (1925), and his only two sound features “Abraham Lincoln” (1930) and “The Struggle” (1931).

In addition there is an authoritative video biography produced by Kevin Brownlow, “D. W. Griffith: Father of Film.”

Warner Brothers has long been one of the best studios for releasing its classics on DVD, and this year came out with a great 3-disc set of Oscar-winning and Oscar-nominated cartoons in addition to the 4-disc volume 6 in its “Looney Tunes Golden Collection.” They assembled a fine group of six features in their “Gangsters Collection Volume 3,” and some lesser but entertaining musicals in the “Busby Berkeley Collection Volume 2.”

Warner is slowly getting into Blu-ray classics with this month’s release of a huge collector’s box devoted to the film “Casablanca,” with a simultaneous release on standard DVD. A year ago this month, they brought Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi noir thriller “Blade Runner” to Blu-ray in a 5-disc collector’s set that included four different cuts of the film plus a disc of extras.

Blu-ray box sets of note this year include Disney’s reduced-price repackaging of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” trilogy, MGM/UA’s James Bond collections, volumes 1 and 2 (featuring six key titles), and what may be the Blu-ray set of the year, Paramount’s beautiful-looking “Godfather” trilogy plus a disc of hi-def extras.

Questions and comments: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)