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Blockbusters on Disk Grab your remote (and your wallet)—it's going to be a big season on DVD.
Leading the pack among the special bells- and-whistles DVD releases this fall are Warner Home Video’s 60th Anniversary edition of the Orson Welles classic, Citizen Kane and Paramount Home Entertainment’s long-awaited release of The Godfather. Priced at $29.99, the digitally remastered, two-disk edition of Kane (which was recently selected as the best movie of all time by the American Film Institute) includes two separate fill-length commentaries on its audio track—one by film critic Roger Ebert, the other by director and Welles biographer Peter Bogdanovich—and a two-hour documentary, The Battle of Citizen Kane, which reveals the painful back story to the Welles epic: Although the film's thinly veiled portrait of publisher William Randolph Hearst, by all accounts, was dead on, Hearst was enraged by the movie, and set out to destroy Welles’ career—and succeeded. The Kane DVD also boasts a gallery of storyboards, memorabilia (e.g., call sheets), rare production stills and newsreel footage of the 1941 premiere). As daunting as the Kane package is, it practically pales beside the five-disk boxed set of The Godfather (Oct. 9, $74.95). All three of director Francis Ford Coppola’s installments of the Corleone crime family saga (based on the books by Mario Puzo) are included here, accompanied by treasure chest of documentary featurettes. The Godfather: A Look Inside is a 73-minute chronicle of the making of the film, tracing the production back to its origins, with footage of both screen tests and rehearsals. The package also includes separate segments on the cinematography, art direction and music of The Godfather, as well as scenes that did not appear in the film’s original releases (but were added at later dates). For those who have seen the movie repeatedly but still can’t follow along, Paramount has thrown in one other indispensable extra: a special section devoted to “The Corleone Family Tree.” Just as extravagant as The Godfather, but not quite so bloody, is Disney’s two-disk release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Oct. 9, $29.99), which debuted in theaters 64 years ago. Like it did with its critically hailed DVD box sets of Fantasia and Toy Story, Disney has loaded up the Snow package with “guided tours” of the film’s animation process, providing viewers with colorful glimpses of story boards, deleted scenes and even an interactive game (“Dopey’s Wild Mine Ride”). But the jewel of the release—and one that Disney will spare no effort in marketing—is its inclusion of the song Someday My Prince Will Come on the soundtrack, specially recorded for Disney by Barbra Streisand. Disney is also crowing that this is the first DVD release to use a patented grain-reduction process in the film’s restoration— something that will delight technophiles—as well as the first time the studio has used an animated host for DVD navigation (a “Magic Mirror” takes viewers to the various on-disk locations). On the heels of Snow White, Warner will roll out the 1965 Russian Revolution saga (and beloved Oscar hog), Doctor Zhivago (Nov. 6, $29.99), starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, and directed by David Lean (whose Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia have also enjoyed deluxe-set treatment on DVD). Sharif introduces the film, and is then joined by co-star Rod Steiger in a newly produced full-length audio commentary of the film. The double-disk features no less than ten separate documentaries--including the compelling Doctor Zhivago: The Making of an Epic—as well as cleverly inserted audio sound bites of interviews with the cast and filmmakers. On September 25th, Fox Home Entertainment with celebrate the 30th birthday of The French Connection ($26.98), with a two-disk edition of William Friedkin’s drug trafficking thriller, starring Gene Hackman (who, like Friedkin, won an Oscar for his efforts). The disk includes the BBC documentary, The Poughkeepsie Shuffle, a riveting replay of the real life events on which the film was based—an international sting operation that was hailed as the biggest drug bust of all time. The DVD also includes seven deleted scenes, along with explanations by Friedkin as to why these segments ultimately landed on the cutting room floor. Other classic DVD releases throughout the fall will include MGM’s It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (Sept. 18, $14.95), Stanley Kramer’s madcap 1963 buried- treasure comedy, which includes Something a Little Serious, a 60-minute making-of documentary highlighted by celebrity interviews and never-before-seen outtakes; Warner’s Empire of the Sun (Nov. 6, $24.98), Steven Spielberg’s cinematically majestic—but critically overlooked—World War II epic, which is accompanied on disk by the equally gripping behind-the-camera documentary, A China Odyssey; and October 23 double-whammy release by Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment: Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), starring Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint, and Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953), with Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr and Oscar-winner Frank Sinatra ($25.95 each). Columbia has graced both films with a generous array of extras, including backstage featurettes, full-length commentaries, theatrical trailers and “talent files” on all the stars. |
