The Screengrab : gene kelly

Betsy Blair, 1923 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The actress Betsy Blair, who died last week, at 85, in London, where she had lived for many years, is best remembered for her performance in the female lead in Marty (1955), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. In fact, her Hollywood career had started cracking apart before she even got that role. A dancer and model when she was in her teens, Blair met Gene Kelly when he was working as a choreographer of the Billy Rose show Diamond Horseshoe and hired her for the chorus. In 1941, when she was 17, they married. That same year, she made her "straight" acting debut as the female lead in William Saroyan's The Beautiful People. She broke into movies in 1947 and had parts in such films as A Double Life and Another Part of the Forest. Unfortunately, the HUAC era of the blacklist was starting up, and Blair, who had been in a Marxist study group run by the actor Lloyd Gough, was politically vulnerable. (She later said that she had tried to join the Communist party but had been refused admission because her marriage to a relatively apolitical movie star would make her membership problematic.) The studio almost got cold feet about hiring her for Marty, but Kelly himself settled that one by telling the bosses that if she didn't get the job, he feared that he'd be too distraught to show up for work on his own big production, It's Always Fair Weather.

Despite the acclaim she won for Marty, its release signaled the end of her upward climb in Hollywood. That same year, she played Bianca in a British TV production of Othello, and most of her work for the next several years would be in overseas productions. She appeared in the 1956 French film Rencontre à Paris, the 1956 Calle Mayor, directed by Juan Antonio Bardem, Michelangelo Antonioni's 1957 Il Grido, the 1960 Irish film Lies My Father Told Me, and British TV productions of Come Back, Little Sheba, Summer and Smoke, Death of a Salesman, and The Wings of the Dove. She returned to America for the 1988 Costa-Gavras film Betrayed, as well as a guest appearance on thirtysomething and the 1994 TV miniseries Scarlett, based on Alexandra Ripley's sequel to Gone with the Wind. In 1957, she divorced Kelly, who she would describe 45 years later as "“This perfect husband, father, friend, protector, provider, hard worker," adding "I loved and admired him as a brilliant actor and dancer as well as a good, good man!" In 1963, she married the director Karel Reisz (Who'll Stop the Rain, Sweet Dreams); they would remain together until his death in 2002. The nest year, she published The Memory of All That: Love and Politics in New York, Hollywood, and Paris, a searching, honest book that was to become one of the most praised of show business memoirs. She is survived by her daughter, Kerry Kelly Novick, as well as eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

In Search of a Midnight Reality Check: New Year's Eve at the Movies

Phil Nugent — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Hey, happy New Year, everybody, but Josh Rosenblatt ain't having it. Rosenblatt has noticed that our attitudes towards important events in our lives tend to be colored by a template for how those events should look based on similar events they've seen in movies. "Even at my father's memorial service, I couldn't help thinking about Vito Corleone's funeral scene in The Godfather, wondering how ours looked by comparison. (Not too badly, as it turns out. A little light on gangsters and a little heavy on rabbis, but otherwise a perfect, totally depressing scene.)" And as he sees it, New Year's Eve is "when Hollywood really cranks up the fantasy quotient and goes out of its way to create the most unreasonable expectations for what a quality holiday experience – and, by extension, what a quality life – should be. New Year's movies play almost like advertisements: You too can fall madly in love with the perfect girl and commemorate the occasion with a 20-minute dance number set to a Gershwin score, like Gene Kelly in An American in Paris! You too can be blessed with economic and creative freedom at the stroke of midnight, like Tim Robbins in The Hudsucker Proxy! You too can find yourself in the middle of the perfect, fleeting romantic moment just by posting a request on the Internet, like Scoot McNairy in In Search of a Midnight Kiss! It's fantasy after fantasy, cultivating in our minds the most absurd notions of what is and isn't possible, of what we should and shouldn't expect from ourselves, on this one arbitrary night of the year."

Rosenblatt breaks "the most pernicious, ridiculous, self-defeating myths in our collective unconscious" associated with New Year's Eve down into a handful of categories. There's "the Myth of the 11th-Hour Conversion", as typified by the scene in When Harry Met Sally where Billy Crystal hies off to tell Meg Ryan that she's the one for him before the year ends, thus promoting "the happy delusion that love conquers all – space, time, disagreement, detachment, disaffection, disillusionment, late-Eighties hairdos, even karaoke – and that the love realized just as one year is turning into another is a love that will last forever. But in reality, what this movie shows us is that loneliness on New Year's Eve makes people do things they probably shouldn't." There's also "the Myth of Secular Redemption." Consider About a Boy, in which Hugh Grant lets Rachel Weisz think he's actually the father of his young chum Marcus so that she'll mistake him for a man of substance. "When Rachel finds out the truth, she dumps him, of course, precipitating an existential collapse that leads Will to the realization that without people to love, life is a spiritual vacuum. The Myth of Secular Redemption assures us that no one is beyond saving – that even the worst among us are capable of great acts of decency, especially when they fall in love on New Year's Eve. What a delightful moral for such a deviant movie to end with. Problem is, that isn't really the moral of the movie. The practiced cynical eye can see what the sad message of About a Boy really is: Lying is the perfect way to start a relationship.

Finally, there's the Myth of the Better You, as seen in The Apartment, in which Shirley MacLaine, the girl who's been screwing Jack Lemmon's mean, powerful prick of a boss (Fred MacMurray) who's been using Lemmon's apartment as his adulterous love nest, finds out, on New Year's Eve, that Lemmon has told MacMurray to take a flying leap and quit his job. She rushes to Lemmon's side, "and they play a game of bridge. Beautiful, right? The perfect New Year's movie? Love triumphs over cynicism; the nice guy gets the girl; our heroes become the most decent versions of themselves? Well, the sad truth about The Apartment is enough to make a grown film critic cry, so jaded is it in its view of human nature: She's going to cheat on him. No doubt about it. 'Shut up, and deal,' will soon sound like a thousand daggers" in Lemmon's heart. "Here's the thing," Rosenblatt writes. "Hollywood consistently paints New Year's Eve as a night of redemption, hope, and possibility, when in reality it's almost invariably a night of dashed expectations, disappointment, and anxiety." Believe me, I'm convinced. Now I just wish I could turn this guy loose on Forrest Gump.

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

DEATHTRAP (1982)

One set, five characters, a couple of twists and a few good, juicy murders: that’s the formula for success in Ira Levin’s puzzle box of a murder mystery about a struggling veteran playwright desperate for a hit. Add a nervous spouse with a weak heart, a gay lover, a weird psychic, a cagey agent and a wall full of handcuffs, pistols and crossbows and you’ve got one of the few stage plays with the power to make audiences scream and jump like a creature double-feature. The movie version wisely sticks to the basics, letting the cat-and-mouse triple-double-cross plotting speak for itself while sticking mostly to the confined but never claustrophobic Long Island home of the plotting protagonist (Michael Caine at his very Michael Caine-iest, having a helluva time). And though certain naysayers here at the Screengrab may say nay, I also give kudos to Christopher Reeve’s performance in the film, which tweaks his goody-two-shoes Superman image while letting him exercise the underutilized mischievous side of his (admittedly limited) range. Meanwhile, Dyan Cannon gives good scream as the wife, and if all that doesn’t win you over, the movie has at least one immortal line, delivered by a snarky critic (Joel Siegel) after Caine’s playwright Sidney Bruhl premieres a hackneyed whodunit nowhere near as clever as Deathtrap: “I'll tell you who done it. Sidney Bruhl done it. And he done it in public."

THE RULING CLASS (1972)

Adapted for the screen by Peter Barnes from his own deeply subversive play, The Ruling Class was sort of a last gasp for the British “Angry Young Man” movement. But its demise was also its salvation: the play – and the subsequent and very successful film – kept in place the elements of class warfare, generational conflict and family drama and turned them on their heads. It replaced rage with whimsy, a tone of rebellion with a sense of absurdity, and an overall tone of Pythonesque lunacy that proved the movement wasn’t entirely devoid of humor. The story of an upper-class family of British aristocrats forced by fortune into restoring as its head a deranged son who thinks he’s the second coming of Christ (played with delightfully silky craziness by Peter O’Toole, in one of his greatest roles), The Ruling Class is, even today, as vicious as it is hilarious. It expands on the play by adding a few memorable characters and trading up in the players (most especially Nigel Green as McKyle, “the Electric Christ”, and the unforgettable Alastair Sim as the bewildered Bishop Bertie Lampton) as well as taking the sets out-of-doors, but what made the stage version so great was its devastatingly funny and fiendish dialogue. Barnes and director Peter Medak are wise enough not to change a bit of that.

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (2007)

Tim Burton’s first full-blown attempt at a musical is so successful, it’s a wonder that he never tried it before. Without sacrificing the elements that have made him famous – the gloomy atmospherics, the high gothic sensibilities, the manic pace, the deft blend of dark humor and absurd violence – his big-screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s notorious musical gives him the perfect format. Why? Because musicals are infinitely forgiving of the qualities that, in many of Burton’s other films, can rightly be considered weaknesses: his overblown dialogue, his clumsy grasp of the dynamics of storytelling, his slight characterization, and his love of style over emotional substance. Everything really comes together for him here, and the result is one of the most enjoyable musicals in decades. Dismissals of the lead actors (Johnny Depp as the vengeance-addled Victorian hairstylist and Burton’s wife, Helena Bonham Carter, as the vendor of unhygienic meat pies) as unable to sing at the level expected from a big-screen musical somewhat miss the point: Sweeney Todd is a fiendishly difficult production, its songs and structure much more akin to an opera than a musical comedy, and it contains precious few toe-tappers, so putting the words in the mouths of those not well-suited to the old school of musicals doesn’t sink it one bit.

INHERIT THE WIND (1960)

Almost fifty years down the road, there are a lot of problems with the Stanley Kramer adaptation of the then-controversial play (by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, no relation) about the Scopes Monkey Trial. It’s excessively stagey; Kramer doesn’t bother to open up the set very much, and too many scenes are given no chance to work in the very different medium of film. The casting is problematic; Spencer Tracy and Frederic March are terrific in the lead roles (as stand-ins for Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, respectively), and there are some good supporting jobs, especially by Elliott Reed as the county prosecutor, but Dick York and Donna Anderson as the romantic leads are flat as pancakes, and Gene Kelly playing a thinly-veiled H.L. Mencken is one of the biggest botch-jobs in casting history. It’s unfair, imbalanced, and historically inaccurate. And in a certain sense, it’s simply not as relevant as it once was; Inherit the Wind isn’t about what it’s about, but rather a Cold War narrative about the long-faded dangers of McCarthyism. But there are still some gorgeous speeches in this moldy oldie, and since America is, astonishingly, still debating the rightness of teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools some eighty-odd years after the Scopes Trial, it maintains a relevance its authors couldn’t possibly have anticipated.

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)

While many directors attempt to open up adaptations of stage plays for the big screen by taking the action up and out, Mike Nichols helps make Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a masterpiece by doing the opposite. Although he does take us outside once or twice, what makes the film so visually arresting is his camera’s perfect pace with the legendary dialogue: instead of going out, it circles endlessly in and around, like a shark. It darts in and out of scenes, whirls around like the heads of the characters after a stinging rejoinder, and creeps in for powerful closeups that reveal faces as ugly as the words they’re speaking. Who exactly gets credit for the screenplay has been the subject of endless disputes, arguments and lawsuits, but really, it’s as simple as going to the source; almost all of the hypnotic dialogue that takes place between timid, repressed college professor Richard Burton and his domineering, disapproving wife Elizabeth Taylor is present in Edward Albee’s original stage play. Not for nothing is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a sort of literary shorthand for viciously feuding married couples: as Burton and Taylor go for each other’s throats, the camera matches them slash for slash, portraying a couple so sick of each other – but so used to each other – that the object of their hatred fills their eyes and becomes all that they can see.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

The Top 20 Movies About Movies (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

Long before Robert Altman gave three quarters of the Screen Actors Guild an opportunity to parody and celebrate themselves in The Player, Billy Wilder managed to corral a Golden Age Who’s Who (including Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Buster Keaton, Hedda Hopper and Cecil B. DeMille, playing funhouse mirror versions of themselves) for a project which, even had it failed, would still have been a worthwhile snapshot of an epochal changing of the guard at the crossroads of Old Hollywood and the dawn of the modern era. But, of course, Sunset Boulevard didn’t fail: this classic dance of death between Swanson’s desperate, deluded has-been and William Holden’s bitterly conflicted never-was received critical hosannas, eleven Academy Award nominations and three wins, a fairly secure spot on the AFI list of the greatest American movies and a mediocre musical adaptation (a sure sign of massive cultural penetration). Box office-wise, the movie failed to click with the hix in the stix upon its initial release, possibly contributing to the movie industry’s ongoing conviction that Middle America has little interest in movies about (A) the movie industry and/or (B) monkey funerals.

SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1951)

One of the best musicals ever made, Singin' in the Rain is also one of the freshest self-satires ever to come out of Hollywood. Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen play silent movie stars Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont, whose continuing success as a screen couple is endangered by the coming of sound, which is a problem because of lovely Lina's pronounced vocal resemblance to the sound a cat makes when you feed its tail into the garbage disposal. (I was eight years old. The statute of limitations has long since run out.) As a parody of a narcissistic star's condescending attitude towards the fans, Hagen's adenoidal speech to the "little people" has never been bettered, except maybe for a few real stars at awards shows who didn't know that they were competing with a put-on.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

David Lynch's love/hate relationship with Hollywood is well-documented, and both sides of the equation are on full display in this masterful fever dream, rescued from network television oblivion after clueless ABC suits deep-sixed the pilot for Lynch's proposed follow-up to Twin Peaks. The set-up could have made for an intriguing continuing series: cheery, naïve small-towner Betty (Naomi Watts) comes to L.A. and finds amnesiac raven-haired beauty "Rita" (Laura Elena Harring) hiding in her aunt's apartment. Betty tries to help Rita unlock the secret of her true identity even as she pursues her dream of an acting career, which takes off after an electrifying audition for brooding filmmaker Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux). The feature film version of Mulholland Drive turns the entire scenario inside-out, reconfiguring all the characters and events into a nightmare straight out of Hollywood Babylon. In Lynch's twisted vision, the film industry is presented as a shadowy conspiracy of malevolent oddballs. You get the impression this is exactly how Lynch thinks show business is run, and who knows, he may be right.

BARTON FINK (1991)

One of the Coen Brothers' most divisive films, Barton Fink is famously an extended meditation on writer's block, conceived when they found themselves unable to progress any further on the labyrinthine plot to Miller's Crossing. And, indeed, it's a fine treatment of writing and writers, a subject Hollywood gets terribly wrong more often than not. But there's more than one of Joel & Ethan's crippling neuroses on display here: they're also extremely diffident about working within the Hollywood system, and while they may not feel much sympathy with the phony working-class sentiments of the titular playwright, they're certainly not on the side of the impossibly crass, bullying toadstool of a producer, played by Michael Lerner in one of the Coens' finest 'angry man behind an expensive desk' roles. The writers' own vices, from Fink's arrogance and ego to Faulkner stand-in Bill Mayhew's alcoholism and self-pity, may be what sinks them, but studio bosses like Lerner's bombastic Jack Lipnick, Jon Polito's toadying Lou Breeze, and Tony Shalhoub's irritable Ben Geisler are always willing to throw them a boulder. In the end, Fink, trapped by his own unwillingness to listen, finds himself in what is likely one of the Coen Brothers' worst nightmares: locked into an unbreakable studio contract, largely incapable of producing any worthwhile work, and even when they can, unable to find anyone to produce it.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Cyd Charisse, 1922--2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Cyd Charisse, nee' Tula Ellice Finklea, has died at 86. With legs on hinges and a face abd figure that, to steal a line from dance critic Raymond Chandler, were enough to make a bishop kick a rock through a stained glass window, Charisse was one of the most spectacular ornaments of Hollywood movie musicals in the 1940s and 1950s. Not the least of her achievements is that she was the performer who most conspicuously played a big role in the careers of both the twin titans of dancing movie stars, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. As a young dancer, Tula Ellice joined the Ballets Russes when she was a teenager and married her dance instructor, Nico Charisse, in 1939. (The union would last eight years and produce a son, Nicky. Her second marriage, in 1948, to actor-singer Tony Martin, would last until her death, sixty years later.) She made her movie debut in the 1943 Something to Shout About, but the real kick-start to her film career came when she first danced with Astaire, in a sequence shot in 1944 for inclusion two years later in the variety feature Ziegfeld Follies. Almost ten years after their first encounter, she played the female lead in Astaire's great 1953 comeback movie The Band Wagon, where they danced together in two big numbers, "Dancing in the Dark" and the Mickey Spillane parody ballet "Girl Hunt." They would later appear together in the 1957 Silk Stockings. She also danced with Kelly in the big climactic number to Singin' in the Rain (1952), and co-starred with him in Brigadoon (1953), and It's Always Fair Weather.(1955). Of their collaborations, Astaire later wrote that when you danced with Charisse, "you stayed danced with."

Charisse also appeared in such musicals as The Harvey Girls with Judy Garland and The Kissing Bandit with Frank Sinatra, and in the musical biopics Words and Music (with Tom Drake and Mickey Rooney as Rodgers and Hart) and Deep in My Heart (starring Jose Ferrer as Sig Romberg). She also took straight dramatic (i.e., non-dancing roles) in films ranging from Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town to the 1978 Warlords of Atlantis, and after her retirement from movies, she sometimes turned up on such TV shows as Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, and Murder, She Wrote. When she "acted", whether it was in the non-musical scenes of The Band Wagon or her services to Jessica Fletcher, Charisse usually seemed not quite there, distracted, and occasionally out to lunch. But the contrast between her usual lack of presence and the voltage she gave off as soon as she started throwing those legs around just made her seem that much more fascinating, as if she were an ordinary mortal who had the ability, when her body heard the music, of communing with strange gods, from the hips down.

Summerfest '08: "Summer Lovers"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If beers, rock bands and sausages are all allowed to have summerfests, we here at the Screengrab see no reason why movie blogs shouldn't get to share in the fun. Our Summerfest series will take a look, every Wednesday for fifteen weeks from May until September, at movies with the word 'summer' in the title and some connection, however tenuous, to everybody's favorite bikini party season. These movies are by no means essential; most of them aren't even any good. But they will help you kill a few hours when you're recovering form a margarita hangover. This week, much as we did last week with A Summer Place, we'll be taking a look at a movie that became a huge hit on the strength of a super-cheesy, inescapable theme song and America not wanting to admit it was seeing the movie because it wanted to see sme pretty young things getting it on.

Ladies and gentlemen, we present: 1982's Summer Lovers.

THE ACTION: Peter Gallagher, in the days before he was a leather-skinned, hyper-tanned self-parody, plays a Greco-American schmucko who convinces his hot girlfriend to visit the Greek Isles with him for summer vacation. His girlfriend is played by a pre-crazy, but unfortunately not pre-bad-actress, Daryl Hannah, who nails the part of the role where she is required to look hot, but not the part of the role where she is required to play an artsy intellectual photographer. Eventually she gets on Gallagher's nerves, and he starts carrying on with a juicy little archaeologist, played with world-class ennui by the doomed Valerie Quennessen, who you may remember from...well, nothing else ever, really. Daryl stomps off to confront this French tart, and guess what happens? No, really, guess. The answer will shock and amaze you.

THE PLAYERS: Writer/director Randal Kleiser -- yes, folks, this is another auteur-theory bikini movie -- certainly had a strange career. Coming up from TV with The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, he made a huge splash with his first two major films -- Grease and The Blue Lagoon. Both of them made a kerjillion dollars and seemed to prove that Kleiser could do no wrong, and so he went ahead and made Summer Lovers to establish that he could do very wrong indeed. After that, he fell into directing a bunch of kid-flicks, and then apparently met his match in being asked to make a movie that starred both Amanda Bynes and Jamie-Lynn Sigler, after which he fell off the face of the Earth. Gallagher and Hannah both went on to have extremely successful careers, but Valerie Quennessen, who is so admirably naked through most of this movie, became co-founder of the 1980s Obscurity Club with Klinton Spilsbury.

SUMMER FUN: The ubiquity of "Hard To Say I'm Sorry (Get Away)" by Chicago, among a bunch of other hits by the Pointer Sisters, Prince, and Michael Sembello, mde this the inescapable soundtrack of 1982, but as someone who lived through it the first time, I'd call listening to that song less "summer fun" than "summer torture that the authors of the Geneva Conventions were too short-sighted to anticipate". Even worse, while the three main characters develop a menage a trois with one another, at no point in the movie are we treated to a scene of Daryl Hannah and Valerie Quennessen making out! This is as unconscionable as making a movie with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly and not letting either of them dance. Also, there is way too little lounging around the beach naked, and way too much sitting around talking about people's feelings. The proper ratio of these activities in a movie like this is 100:0.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Unfortunately, Peter Gallagher is meant to be portraying a sensitive intellectual and modern male, so there is little room in his weltanschaung for the universal signifier of the big fat party animal. He does spend a lot of time shirtless, which is meant to be a sop to the ladies in hopes that they don't notice what an unbelievably sexist movie this is, what with the two girls servicing his needs all the time and whenever one of them feels a little taken advantage of she gets a lecture on how to not, like, get hung up on the jealousy thing, babe. He also charms Valerie Quennessen by comparing her lovemaking technique to that of a horse.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: If nothing else, Summer Lovers rates very, very high on the Bikini Party Time scale. Shedding all the inhibitions he was forced to observe due to The Blue Lagoon' s underage stars, Kleiser pulls out all the stops here, cramming the movie with as much bikini action as he can possibly conjure up. Even the plot rolls into action with the common observation of tourists who have never actually been to Europe before: look at how uninhibited they all are! They're not, like, all hung up on sex! Therefore, let's screw around as much as is humanly possible. It's pretty stupid, but as '80s softcore goes, you could do a lot worse. Young people would be well advised to watch this movie and realize how desperately bad things were for the rest of us in the 1980s and contemplate how truly far we've come. Everybody needs a little time away...

DVD Digest for May 13, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: two new Criterion DVDs, the comeback effort of a master filmmaker, and the Chairman of the Board all compete for your DVD dollar. Who will win? Why, DVD buyers, of course!

DVD of the Week: For sheer comprehensiveness, nothing can touch Warner’s 22-film, 5-box-set tribute to the one and only Frank Sinatra. For all of Sinatra’s success as a recording artist, he was also a talented actor, given the right role, and this week sees the release of a number of his finest films. Among these are his Oscar-nominated performance in Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm and Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running, both of which are included in the Frank Sinatra: The Golden Years box set. But if you prefer Sinatra the fresh-faced young crooner, check out Frank Sinatra: The Early Years, which includes such early-career titles as Step Lively, It Happened in Brooklyn, and The Kissing Bandit. Or see Sinatra match his pipes with Gene Kelly’s nimble feet in The Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly Collection, comprised of the classic musicals On the Town, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, and Anchors Aweigh. And if special features are your thing, there’s always The Rat Pack Ultimate Collector’s Edition, which finds the Chairman at his least inspired vehicles but leaves plenty of room for gawking at swingin’ celebrities of yore. Heck, Warner is even releasing 1993’s miniseries Sinatra on DVD this week, in case you want your Sinatra without all that Sinatra. All that’s missing is Sinatra’s two most acclaimed films, The Manchurian Candidate and From Here to Eternity. But I’m guessing you already own those, right?

As previously mentioned, this week also brings the release of two brand-spankin' new Criterions, Louis Malle’s The Lovers and The Fire Within. Also of note in classics on DVD: The Big Trail: Fox Grandeur Special Edition; the Godard double-feature of La Chinoise (Kino) and Le Gai Savoir; a new edition of Anthony Mann’s Man of the West (Fox); Saturday Night Live: The Complete Third Season (Universal); and the Fox Western Classics Collection, which includes the new-to-DVD titles Garden of Evil, Rawhide, and The Gunfighter. And in shameless cash-in news, this week brings new DVDs of all three Indiana Jones films, with a few added extra features so that buyers won’t feel completely ripped off.

In more recent films, today brings the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth (Sony, also Blu-Ray), his first official directorial effort in a decade. The film was generally regarded as a critical and popular disaster, but I found it fascinating- flawed to be sure, but intriguingly so- and I believe it’ll finally be appreciated for what it is on DVD. Also this week: Diane Lane in Untraceable (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Diane Keaton, Katie Holmes and Queen Latifah in Mad Money (Anchor Bay); and the French horror film Frontier(s) (Lionsgate). The other major new release this week is the DVD debut of The Animation Show 3 (Paramount), last year’s touring program of animated shorts presented by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt. The DVD includes Hertzfeldt’s latest masterpiece Everything will be OK, as well as sixteen other shorts, some of which have been added especially for the DVD release.

This week’s Blu-Ray only releases are: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Fox); Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Fox); Mrs. Doubtfire (Fox); and just in time for this weekend’s new blockbuster, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Which brings me to this week’s Huddleston corner, in which we sigh over the lonely release of Warner’s One Missed Call on HD-DVD. I mean really, guys- you’re just kidding around now, right?