New DVDs: Box Sets (Published 2006)

HOLLYWOOD TREASURES, BOXED, TINNED AND READY FOR VIEWERS

DVD distributors have been increasing their production of elaborate box sets in time for the holiday season, and as last-minute gifts — they’re easy to wrap! — you can’t really go wrong with a big fat bundle of classic movies. Here are some highlights from the last two months of box-set releases geared for movie fans.

Television addicts may want to have a look at “M*A*S*H — Martinis and Medicine, Complete Collection” (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 36 discs, $199.98), “The West Wing — The Complete Series Collection” (Warner Home Video, 45 discs, $299.98) and “Friends — The Complete Series Collection” (Warner Home Video, 40 discs, $299.98).

‘CHARLIE CHAN COLLECTION, VOLUME 2’ (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, $59.98) “20th Century Fox presents Warner Oland vs. Boris Karloff in ‘Charlie Chan at the Opera,’ ” reads the opening title of the most sought-after film in this second volume of Chan features from Fox, all presented in shimmering, digitally restored versions. In addition to H. Bruce Humberstone’s “At the Opera” (1936), the box includes “At the Circus” (Harry Lachman, 1936), “At the Race Track” (Humberstone, 1936) and “At the Olympics” (Humberstone, 1937), with a short documentary included on each disc.

‘FORBIDDEN HOLLYWOOD COLLECTION, VOL. 1’ (Warner Home Video, $39.98) Before Hollywood began serious enforcement of the puritanical Production Code in 1934, the studios were astonishingly free to treat adult themes in adult terms. This two-disc box revives a much-missed series started back in the days of VHS with three exemplary pre-Code pictures, including both the pre- and post-censorship versions of Alfred E. Green’s jaw-dropping “Baby Face” of 1933, starring Barbara Stanwyck as a mill-town tramp who sleeps her way to the top at a Manhattan bank. The cut version is a shocker in itself; the uncensored version, discovered in the archives of the Library of Congress, is even more cynical and deliciously sordid. Jack Conway’s 1932 “Red-Headed Woman” is a Jean Harlow vehicle familiar from many television broadcasts, but James Whale’s 1931 “Waterloo Bridge” — a Universal production suppressed when MGM remade it in 1940 — is a welcome rediscovery, particularly for its commanding lead performance by Mae Clarke, a gifted actress best remembered for having a grapefruit ground in her face in “The Public Enemy.”

‘JAMES BOND ULTIMATE EDITION,’ VOLUMES 1 THROUGH 4’ (MGM, $89.98 each) All 20 pre-“Casino Royale” James Bond films, assembled in four separately sold boxes. The producers have been clever enough to portion out the Sean Connery gold with the Roger Moore dross so that if you want, say, “Goldfinger,” you will have to take “Diamonds Are Forever,” “The Man with the Golden Gun,” “The Living Daylights” and “The World Is Not Enough” as well. But each film has been digitally scrubbed down, restored to the proper aspect ratio, fitted out with woofer-exploding 5.1 soundtracks and paired, in individual double-disc slim cases, with supplementary discs loaded with extras.

‘ELIZABETH TAYLOR AND RICHARD BURTON FILM COLLECTION’ (Warner Home Video, $49.98) Five discs documenting Liz and Dick at the height of their outsize 1960s celebrity, including a double-disc treatment of Mike Nichols’s seasonal favorite, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966), Vincente Minnelli’s worst film, the embarrassing bohemian romance “The Sandpiper” (1965), and two of the high camp all-star movies the Burton-Taylors made in Britain: Anthony Asquith’s “V.I.P.’s” (1963) and Peter Glenville’s Haitian-set “Comedians” (1967).

‘FORBIDDEN PLANET ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION’ (Warner Home Video, $59.98) For the young cinephile on your list, Warners has taken its fine double-disc restoration of “Forbidden Planet” — the classic science-fiction reimagining of “The Tempest,” with Walter Pidgeon as an outer-space Prospero — and packaged it in an attractive tin case along with a tiny statue of the film’s real star, Robby the Robot, and a set of miniature lobby card reproductions. The extras include an entire feature, Robby’s star vehicle “The Invisible Boy” (1957), the TCM documentary “Watch the Skies: Science Fiction, the 1950s and Us,” a collection of 50s science-fiction trailers and some rough but intriguing deleted scenes included on the old Laserdisc release but unavailable since.

‘GLAMOUR GIRLS’ (Kino, $49.95) Five films from the Kino library, repackaged in a slim case at a very attractive price. The set includes Josef von Sternberg’s “Blue Angel” (1931) with Marlene Dietrich, Rouben Mamoulian’s “Love Me Tonight” (1932) with Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier, Albert Lewin’s delirious Technicolor romance “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” (1951) with Ava Gardner, Douglas Sirk’s thriller “Lured” (1947) with Lucille Ball, and William Wyler’s folkloric “Good Fairy” (1935) with the sublime Margaret Sullavan.

‘OLDBOY THREE DISC ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION’ (Tartan, $39.95) Those tin boxes are becoming very popular this year. This one contains Park Chanwook’s manically inventive Korean revenge film of 2004 along with lots of supplementary material (no less than 5 “making of” documentaries, 10 deleted scenes, and Mr. Park’s 212-minute video diary of the production) and some fetish objects: a frame cut from an original 35-millimeter print, a reprint of the first volume of the comic book the film is based on. The amazing Choi Min-sik stars as an average Seoul workman, kidnapped and kept captive for 15 years; when he escapes, he wants to know why and by whom. Probably not suitable for Christmas Eve viewing, but some kind of a masterpiece.

‘THE PREMIERE FRANK CAPRA COLLECTION’ (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, $59.95) It’s encouraging to see foot-dragging Sony paying some attention to its Columbia patrimony by finally releasing new editions of four of its Frank Capra heirlooms: “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939), “You Can’t Take It with You” (1938), “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” (1936) and “It Happened One Night” (1934), as well as the lesser known but politically fascinating “American Madness” (1932), with Walter Huston as a populist banker. But for all of the remastering vaunted on the packaging, the new transfers aren’t much better than the old stand-alone editions and in some cases seem downright worse: darker and smudgier. Included on a sixth disc is the 1997 documentary “Frank Capra’s American Dream.”

‘PRESTON STURGES — THE FILMMAKER COLLECTION’ (Universal Studios Home Entertainment, $59.98) Sturges, the Mark Twain of American movies, receives his belated due from Universal, the studio that currently owns most of his important work. There are seven films in the set, ranging from his first as a director, “The Great McGinty” (1940), to his daring satire on war-fueled patriotism, “Hail the Conquering Hero” (1944). (Missing, inevitably, is his supreme achievement, “The Miracle at Morgan’s Creek” — a ribald retelling of the Nativity story — though it is available in a good edition from Paramount.) Those who own the Criterion editions of “The Lady Eve” (1941) and “Sullivan’s Travels” (1941) won’t notice any dramatic improvement in print quality, and the edition of “The Palm Beach Story” is the same as the stand-alone that Universal issued earlier this year. But a little duplication is a small price to pay for the rarities here, which include “Christmas in July” (1940) and “The Great Moment (1944), a depressive, crypto-autobiography that was not a commercial or critical success.

‘THE WIM WENDERS COLLECTION, VOL. 2’ (Anchor Bay, $89.98) The second installment in Anchor Bay’s Wim Wenders series contains all of Volume 1 — the fiction feature “The American Friend” (1977) and the documentaries “Lightning Over Water” (1980) and “Notebooks on Cities and Clothes” (1989) — and adds the Fassbinder-influenced “False Movement” (1975), the oddly conventional television movie “The Scarlet Letter” (1973) and the documentaries “Tokyo-Ga” (1985), “Room 666” (1985) and “A Trick of the Light” (1995). Mr. Wenders remains, paradoxically, one of the most intellectually rigorous as well as one of the most air-headedly romantic filmmakers working today. This early work avoids the lyrical absurdities of “Million Dollar Hotel” (2000) — that’s the one with Mel Gibson as an F.B.I. agent with a third arm growing out of his back — and the preachiness of “The End of Violence” (1997),and remains grounded in the physical experience of travel and the epiphanies of popular culture.

ALSO OUT TODAY

‘LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE’ (Fox, $29.95, R) A dysfunctional family finds happiness in this independent comedy by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, with Greg Kinnear and Steve Carell.

‘THE SIMPSONS — THE COMPLETE NINTH SEASON’ (Fox, $49.98, not rated) 25 episodes from the 1989-90 season.

‘INVINCIBLE’ (Walt Disney Video, $29.99, PG) Inspirational sports story, with Mark Wahlberg as a 30-year-old bartender intent on realizing his dream to play professional football. Ericson Core directed.