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 New Price: $28.84 Highlander The Series - Season 1
Actor: Werner Stocker 
Reviews for the Highlander The Series - Season 1  List Price: $9.99 Price: $8.99 You Save: $1 (10%) Ruthless People
Actors: Bette Midler, Danny DeVito, Judge Reinhold, Helen Slater, Anita Morris DescriptionIn this fiendishly funny comedy from the creators of AIRPLANE!, loathesome millionaire Sam Stone (Danny DeVito) is ruthless. How ruthless? When his shrill wife Barbara (Bette Midler) is nabbed by inept kidnappers (Judge Reinhold, Helen Slater), Sam cries tears of joy ... and refuses to pay the ransom. And when the abductors threaten to kill the abrasive heiress, Sam takes immediate action -- he celebrates! RUTHLESS PEOPLE. Raucous ... outlandish ... one of the top box office hits of the year! Amazon.comA milestone comedy of the 1980s, Ruthless People delighted critics and audiences alike and set the tone of Hollywood comedies for years to come. Along with that other popular farce about wealthy Californians, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, this ingenious romp revived Bette Midler's career and launched Disney (by way of its subsidiary, Touchstone Pictures) into the lucrative production of R-rated comedies; it also ensured the star power of then-TV star Danny DeVito. Dale Launer became Hollywood's hot screenwriter du jour by cleverly reworking O. Henry's Ransom of Red Chief into a wicked tale of marital malice heightened by a bungled kidnapping. Midler is sublime as the victim of low-rent abductors ("I've been kidnapped by Kmart!"), and DeVito's the gleeful philanderer who refuses to pay ransom for his wife's unwanted return. With Anita Morris, Judge Reinhold, Helen Slater, and Bill Pullman among the plot-twisting schemers, the movie's so much fun that an eventual remake seems almost inevitable. --Jeff Shannon
Reviews for the Ruthless People  List Price: $9.98 Price: $8.99 You Save: $0.99 (10%) Top Secret!
Actors: Jim Abrahams, Nancy Abrahams, Jim Carter, Warren Clarke, Peter Cushing Product DescriptionA rock star helps a girl free her scientist father from fascists in this spy-movie spoof. Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 01/04/2005 Starring: Val Kilmer Jim Carter Run time: 90 minutes Rating: Pg Director: Jim Abrahams Amazon.comIn between the disaster movie satire Airplane! in 1980 and the hardboiled cop show parody The Naked Gun in 1988, the comedy crew of Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker put together a picture that's almost as funny as their better-known hits. Top Secret! sends up spy movies and cheesy teen rock & roll musicals. Val Kilmer stars as swivel-hipped American rocker Nick Rivers, a sort of blonde Elvis whose secret weapon is Little Richard's tune "Tutti Fruitti." On tour behind the Iron Curtain, Nick strikes blows for democracy overtly and covertly, with his music as well as his espionage skills. In short, this is a very, very silly motion picture. Some great gags, including a subtitled scene in a Swedish book shop, and an inspired bit with a Ford Pinto that not everybody may get anymore. (The Pinto, you may or may not recall, was notoriously prone to gas tank explosions when rear-ended.) --Jim Emerson
Reviews for the Top Secret!  List Price: $38.99 Price: $22.99 You Save: $16 (41%) Macgyver - The Complete Fourth Season
Actors: Richard Dean Anderson, Dana Elcar, Patrie Allen, Darcia Carnie, Rod Crawford Product DescriptionStudio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 05/01/2007
Reviews for the Macgyver - The Complete Fourth Season  List Price: $29.99 Price: $20.99 You Save: $9 (30%) Happy Days - The Complete Second Season
Actors: Ron Howard, Henry Winkler Product DescriptionHappy Days was set in the 1950s in Milwaukee, the heart of middle-class America, and told the story of the Cunningham family. Mr. Cunningham (Tom Bosley) ran the local hardware store and Mrs. Cunningham (Marion Ross), like all good TV Moms, spent her time in the kitchen. Their son, Richie (Ron Howard), hung out at Arnold's Drive-In with his pals Ralph Malph (Donny Most) and Potsie (Anson Williams), trying to be as cool as the coolest greaser in town, the Fonz (Henry Winkler). Richie's sister, Joanie (Erin Moran), tagged along whenever she wasn't at her friend Jenny Piccolo's house. The Cunninghams also had an older son, Chuck, but he mysteriously disappeared after the first season. Amazon.comHappy Days: The Complete Second Season finds Garry Marshall’s immortal, 1970s sitcom hitting its stride with 23 episodes that continue to be built around Milwaukee native Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard) and his family and friends. But there’s also a clear strengthening of one of the show’s eventual, major elements: the close, if unlikely, friendship between Richie and Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli (Henry Winkler). As always, Richie is angling for a way to grow up faster, often getting in over his head. In "Richie Moves Out," the red-haired teen tires of trying to kiss his girlfriend in the goldfish bowl of his house, so he agrees to live with his older brother while finishing high school and holding down a job. The result: there’s no time for making out when one is that busy. A similar scheme backfires in "Richie’s Car," when the Fonz converts a racing vehicle into a family-friendly, second car for the Cunninghams, only to find after the fact that it’s probably stolen. "Fonzie Joins the Band" sees Richie having to stand up to, and disappoint, his greaser pal when non-musical Fonzie presumes to join Richie’s band in exchange for outfitting them in slick tuxedoes. Fonzie looks surprisingly downhearted, too, in "Richie’s Flip Side," in which straight-arrow, young Cunningham gets a job as a disc jockey and develops an unbearable ego. In "Goin’ to Chicago," Richie, Potsie (Anson Williams) and Ralph (Don Most) go on an overnight field trip to the Windy City and discover that stepping into the adult world (they visit a nightclub and end up with a whoppping check they can’t pay) takes some preparation and experience they don’t yet have. Tom Bosley and Marion Ross still look, in retrospect, as wonderful in the roles of Richie’s parents as they did in the early ‘70s. --Tom Keogh
Reviews for the Happy Days - The Complete Second Season  List Price: $14.94 Price: $9.99 You Save: $4.95 (33%) First Knight
Actors: Sean Connery, Richard Gere, Julia Ormond, Ben Cross, Liam Cunningham Product DescriptionNew, in original shrink wrap! Amazon.com1995 had already seen the box-office success of sword-wielding heroes in Rob Roy and Braveheart when along came this glossy revision of the Arthurian legend, in which Lady Guinevere (Julia Ormond) is torn between her love for the noble King Arthur (Sean Connery) and the passionate knight Sir Lancelot (Richard Gere). As the story opens, Guinevere's lands are under attack by the evil knight Malagant (Ben Cross), and she must choose between marriage to Arthur and the security of Camelot, or encouraging the affections of Lancelot, who has heroically rescued her from a potentially lethal attack. Anyone looking for meticulous medieval authenticity won't find it here, but director Jerry Zucker (Ghost) keeps the action moving with exuberant spirit and glorious production values. Even if you don't completely believe Richard Gere as a somewhat too-contemporary Lancelot, the performances of Ormond and especially Connery are effortlessly appealing. --Jeff Shannon
Reviews for the First Knight  New Price: $18.99 Highlander The Series - Season 5
Actors: Adrian Paul, Stan Kirsch, Jim Byrnes, Alexandra Vandernoot, Lisa Howard
Reviews for the Highlander The Series - Season 5  List Price: $170.99 Price: $135.99 You Save: $35 (20%) Macgyver - The Complete Series
Actors: Richard Dean Anderson, Dana Elcar, Bruce McGill, Michael Des Barres, Elyssa Davalos DescriptionMacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson) is a contemporary hero and role model who applies his scientific knowledge to ordinary items to create for himself and others a means of escape from impending doom.
Reviews for the Macgyver - The Complete Series  List Price: $39.95 Price: $35.99 You Save: $3.96 (10%) WWII 60th Anniversary Collection (The Guns of Navarone/From Here to Eternity/The Bridge on the River Kwai) (Includes Collectible Scrapbook)
Actors: William Holden, Alec Guinness, David Niven, Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn Product DescriptionContains: the guns of navarone from here to eternity bridge on the river kwai fighting leathernecks and the fighting leathernecks of wwii. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 10/25/2005
Reviews for the WWII 60th Anniversary Collection (The Guns of Navarone/From Here to Eternity/The Bridge on the River Kwai) (Includes Collectible Scrapbook)  List Price: $59.98 Price: $38.99 You Save: $20.99 (35%) Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4 (Act of Violence / Mystery Street / Crime Wave / Decoy / Illegal / The Big Steal / They Live By Night / Side Street / Where Danger Lives / Tension)
Actors: Cathy O'Donnell, Farley Granger, Van Heflin, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh DescriptionEx-World War II pilot Frank Enley (Van Heflin) is a respected contractor and family man. Then his troubled, gimp-legged bombardier (Robert Ryan) shows up with a gun and a score to settle. Perhaps neither man is what he seems to be as director Fred Zinnemann (The Day of the Jackal) guides a searing Act of Violence, "the first postwar noir to take a challenging look at the ethics of men in combat" (Eddie Muller, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir). Murder lives on Mystery Street. John Sturges (The Great Escape) directs a revealing-for-the-era procedural about a Boston cop (Ricardo Montalban) solving a whodunit with the help of a Harvard forsensic expert (Bruce Bennett). Welcome to CSI Noir. Amazon.comThe fourth volume of Warner Video's Film Noir Classic Collection boasts ten titles on five double-feature discs--appropriate packaging for films that mostly run less than an hour-and-a-half and would have shared the marquee with another picture upon original release. It's a welcome set, with entries by top noir directors Anthony Mann and Nicholas Ray, several unheralded gems, and solid entertainment value in nearly every instance. But somebody (and it looks as if that's us) ought to mention that Warners is getting a mite cavalier with the label "film noir." You can have a '40s or '50s movie that's in black and white, involves criminal activity, and features stars like Robert Mitchum or Edward G. Robinson, and still not tap into the pungent atmosphere, perverse psychology, implacable fatalism, and jagged/voluptuous style that are the hallmarks of noir. Indeed, there are several such movies in this set--and in their non-noir ways, they're not bad. Act of Violence (1948) is the real McCoy, albeit so meticulously directed by Fred Zinnemann in postwar-European style that it's virtually an art-film noir. Van Heflin plays a model small-town citizen suddenly confronted with a guilty WWII past, in the dark, limping, permanently trenchcoated figure of Robert Ryan. The film systematically dismantles the domestic security of Heflin's life till he's forced to flee his own home, which has become a trap, and escape into the nightworld of the big city. Mary Astor is superb as one of its few sympathetic denizens. Co-featured with Act of Violence is Mystery Street (1950), a hard-edged movie about a B-girl's murder and some of the proto-CSI techniques the police use to solve the crime. Directed by John Sturges, from a script by Richard Brooks and Sydney Boehm, the picture is enhanced by atmospheric Boston and Cape Cod settings and camerawork by Mr. Film Noir himself, John Alton. For case-hardened noiristes, the disc holding Decoy and Crime Wave is the collection's prime catch. Decoy (1946), like Dillinger in Volume 2, is an ultra-low-budget offering from Monogram Pictures and a fascinatingly mixed bag of Poverty Row production values and flashes of directorial ambition (one night scene in a woods strongly suggests director Jack Bernhard had seen Sunrise). Its main attraction is a cold-hearted heroine who could pledge the same sorority as the dames from Double Indemnity, Gun Crazy, and The Lady from Shanghai. (Alas, British-born actress Jean Gillie appeared in only one subsequent film, dying at the age of 34.) Andre De Toth's Crime Wave (1954) places us in the awkward position of being grateful for the chance to see an exciting movie and obliged to disqualify it from the set: it's closer to the '50s police procedural (Dragnet et al.) than to film noir. Shot almost entirely on location, the picture virtually reeks of seedy L.A. nightlife and satisfyingly unreels without benefit of music score. Ted De Corsia, Nedrick Young, and Charles Buchinsky-soon-to-be-Bronson supply juicy villainy, with a characteristically unclean contribution late in the film from Timothy Carey. Gene Nelson plays an ex-con, resolved to go straight yet being forced to abet his newly escaped old cellmates, and the world-weary cop keeping tabs on all of them is Sterling Hayden. The set's two stellar noir directors share a disc and costars, Farley Granger and the ethereal Cathy O'Donnell. They Live by Night (1948) was Nicholas Ray's maiden effort, and kinetically and emotionally the director found natural rapport with the spooked-animal vulnerability of his hero and heroine. This was the first film version of Edward Anderson's Depression-era novel Thieves Like Us (adapted again a quarter-century later by Robert Altman), and its tale of a young rural misfit drawn into more violent crime by older, harder fellow escapees from a prison farm anticipates the spirit of Ray's '50s teen classic Rebel Without a Cause. Side Street (1949) is fascinating as a bridge between Anthony Mann's great series of noirs shot by John Alton and the Western genre Mann would soon master. Working this time with a conventional MGM cameraman (Joseph Ruttenberg), the director demonstrates that the terrific "eye" that gave us T-Men, Border Incident, et al. was at least as much Mann's as Alton's, and he visualizes Manhattan as a collection of jagged skylines and deep, shadowed canyons. The script (by Sydney Boehm) involves a mail carrier (Granger) who, worried about taking proper care of his pregnant wife (O'Donnell), impulsively swipes an envelope full of money. Hard upon that "one false step," the family man finds himself caught up in a dark scheme involving blackmail and, several times over, murder. Despite a screenplay by Hitchcock collaborator Charles Bennett and direction by John Farrow (The Big Clock), Where Danger Lives (1950) is easily the weakest entry in Vol. 4. Robert Mitchum plays a doctor who saves a would-be suicide, then falls for her without noticing she's crazy as a loon, and homicidal to boot. Soon they're on the run, sought by the law and at the mercy of every larcenous character between them and the Mexican border. Despite yeoman work by Mitchum and RKO shadowmaster Nicholas Musuraca, and the too-brief participation of Claude Rains, the film founders on the femme-fatale casting of Howard Hughes discovery Faith Domergue. A more memorably dodgy female complicates everybody's life in Tension (1950), the next-to-last Hollywood film for director John Berry before his blacklisting. This one's played by Audrey Totter--never a major star, but a delicious and definitive late-'40s dame (who also supplies sharp commentary on the auxiliary audio track). Her milquetoast husband, pharmacist Richard Basehart, sets up a second identity for himself under which to seek revenge for her numerous infidelities--till the new man he has become makes the acquaintance of neighbor Cyd Charisse. (No, Charisse does not dance, but those awesome legs are nevertheless put to creative use.) Eventually someone is dead, and cops Barry Sullivan and William Conrad enter the picture, contributing their own shades of gray to the noir palette. Another satisfying, little-known film that collections like this one lead us to discover. There's also satisfaction to be had from our final pairing, Illegal and The Big Steal--even if both these titles have to be turned back at the noir border. Illegal (1955) is the third version of The Mouthpiece, a '30s play and film about an esteemed district attorney who falls from grace but rebounds as a spellbinding defense attorney much-sought-after by the criminal class. It was probably the best part Edward G. Robinson had in the '50s, and he's all the reason we need for watching. But the role and the story predated noir (the previous renditions came out in 1932 and 1940), and this movie, for all intents and purposes, postdates noir. In addition, sad to say, it's an artifact from that era when Warner Bros.' movies had started looking like the studio's TV shows. By contrast, The Big Steal (1949) springs from the heart of the classic noir era, was produced for perhaps the most noir-friendly of studios, RKO, and even boasts the costars and screenwriter of the sublime Out of the Past--which is to say, Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Daniel Mainwaring (a.k.a. "Geoffrey Homes"). The whirlwind first reel plops us right in the middle of several chases, with as many switcheroos of allegiance and direction, in pursuit of an "it" that won't be specified till some time later. All nimbly managed by director Don Siegel, on location in Mexico yet, and briskly over with in 72 minutes. But it's a comedy-adventure, not a film noir. Not even close. Most of the films come accompanied by authoritative voiceover commentaries, including contributions by L.A. crime novelist James Ellroy (on Crime Wave) and surviving cast members Nina Foch (Illegal) and Audrey Totter (Tension). However, for a sporadic series of primers on noir style, which feature absurdly florid lighting of the talking heads and lesson-plan intertitles that belong on a blackboard, somebody at Warner Home Video should be taken for a ride. --Richard T. Jameson
Reviews for the Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4 (Act of Violence / Mystery Street / Crime Wave / Decoy / Illegal / The Big Steal / They Live By Night / Side Street / Where Danger Lives / Tension) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 [...] |