Dorothy, Criterion and Kurosawa, Oh My!

Studios find more ways to bring you the movies you want (and extras you don't).

by Sam Adams

Turner Entertainment Co and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc GOODBYE YELLOW BRICK ROAD: Warner Bros.' Wizard of Oz box set looks great but is stuffed with tchotchkes, including a wristwatch.

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There's no question that the recession has taken its toll on DVD production, especially where older films are concerned. Warner Bros., whose catalogue box sets once rivaled the Criterion Collection's, has slowed archival releases to a crawl, shifting to an on-demand model offering movies like Nicholas Ray's Party Girl and the punk doc URGH! A Music War as featureless DVD-Rs — worth having if you can swallow the $20 price tag, but no better than you'd get TiVo-ing Turner Classic Movies.

The flip side of Warner's strategic shift, and one that may be a harbinger of things to come, is the focus on super-deluxe packages that trap gorgeous transfers of the studio's crown jewels inside boxes full of superfluous junk. Blu-rays of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind are faultless, and the latter in particular is a welcome corrective to decades of souped-up "restorations" that exchanged the film's muted hues for a cartoonish palette of garish reds and oranges. But to procure the discs, which list for $85 each, you need to purchase an "ultimate collector's edition," which in Wizard's case includes a matching wristwatch. If their similarly overstuffed edition of Casablanca is any indication, tchotchke-free versions should be along in 18 months, should the sagging industry's fortunes hold out that long. The studio's Blu-ray ofNorth by Northwest, at least, comes unencumbered by add-ons, presenting Alfred Hitchcock's most captivating entertainment — and his least icky romance — in a magnificent transfer that shows off the way the director uses space to suggest the underlying solitude of Cary Grant's cocksure bachelor.

For the high-def-enabled on your gift list (or as a treat for your shopped-out self), Kino's Blu-ray of Buster Keaton's The General spiffs up his comic masterwork with a pristine image and three choices of score, the better to appreciate the intricate choreography of the film's large-scale set pieces. Even the cinephile who has everything might not be aware that the Blu-ray format finally does away with the nettlesome difference between American and European video standards, opening the door for the region-free discs of F.W. Murnau's transcendent Sunrise and John Woo's epic Red Cliff (read Molly Eichel's review of the U.S. theatrical version) in its uncut four-hours-plus version.

Criterion may have sat out the format war, but their belated entry into the Blu-ray game has produced some stunners, most recently Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, which renders Cocteau cameraman Henri Alekan's photography with such clarity that it's possible to overlook the film's sophomoric philosophizing. If the warm grain of 16 mm makes your heart swell, the new discs of music documentaries Monterey Pop and Gimme Shelter will break your ribs wide open, and the sonic upgrades are nothing short of a revelation. Shelter, which covers the Rolling Stones' 1969 concert at Madison Square Garden as well as their disastrous free show at Altamont Speedway, overlaps with the bloated four-disc reissue of the Stones' live album Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!, which includes a DVD of what amount to Shelter outtakes. In the areas where the live album and the documentary overlap, the expansive, electric mix of the Criterion disc crushes the reissue's crowded and compressed sound. A more intriguing contrast can be found on the Stop Making Sense Blu-ray, which allows you to choose between "theatrical" and "studio," adding and subtracting live ambience from the blissful collaboration between Jonathan Demme and Talking Heads.

Bouncing down to standard-def, Sony has stepped into the breach with a succession of boxes devoted to cinema-fist auteur Samuel Fuller and the gloriously gimmicky William Castle, as well as a set tapping the studio's repository of films noirs. The compilations are eccentric, to say the least. Of the Fuller set's seven films, he directed only two; the rest are directed from his scripts, including Shockproof, a mind-boggling pairing with Douglas Sirk, whose baroque melodramas are worlds away from Fuller's muscular grit. With the notable exception of House on Haunted Hill, the Castle collection is the closest to complete, lovingly annotating such shock-tactic classics as Homicidal, with its coward-shaming "fright break," and The Tingler, although you'll have to supply your own electrical shocks.

If there's one megabox that makes the grade, it's Criterion's AK 100, a centennial celebration of Akira Kurosawa that collects 25 of the master's films, including new, variable-quality transfers of his first four films: The Most Beautiful, The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail and both parts of Sanshiro Sugata. Due to rights issues, Criterion's now out-of-print Ran is not included, nor are the company's trademark profusion of extras, but considering the set would cost a cool thousand at Criterion's usual rates, the fact that it's available for roughly a quarter of that makes it a steal.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)