Mystery Classics

Starring:Mystery
Studio: Platinum Disc
Product Type: DVD

Average customer rating:

Another wonderful Disney Movie
Great Mouse Detective
One of Disney's Best
Classic
Great Mouse Detective = Great Disney Film

The Great Mouse Detective
Starring: Vincent Price , Barrie Ingham , Val Bettin , Susanne Pollatschek , and Candy Candido
Director: David Michener , Burny Mattinson , and John Musker
Manufacturer: Walt Disney Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

Animation | Kids & Family | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Kids & Family | Genres | DVD | Video

Fantasy | Kids & Family | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Animation | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

All Disney Titles | Disney Home Entertainment | Stores | DVD | Video

DVDs Under $9.99 | Today's Deals in DVD | Special Features | DVD | Video

( G ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
Similar Items:

The Rescuers
The Rescuers Down Under (Disney Gold Classic Collection)
The Sword in the Stone (Disney Gold Classic Collection)
The Black Cauldron (Disney Gold Classic Collection)
Oliver & Company (Special Edition)

ASIN: B00005T7H5
Release Date: 2002-07-23

Amazon.com

Just because Walt Disney created contemporary and traditional classics of animation doesn't mean the studio is out of ideas--not by a long shot. The Great Mouse Detective is richly animated and offers a clever tale. It may not be as easily recognized a title as Aladdin or The Little Mermaid, but all three share the same director, Ron Clements. Originally released theatrically in 1986, the mystery borrows easily from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and is based on Eve Titus's book Basil of Baker Street.

When a brilliant toymaker is kidnapped by a creepy peg-legged bat, his daughter, Olivia, enlists the aid of the legendary Basil. Basil, Olivia, and Basil's assistant, Dr. Dawson, are part of an intricate city system of Victorian-era London mice. Basil quickly realizes his archenemy, Professor Ratigan (a rat who wants to be a mouse), is behind the abduction. Ratigan (voiced by Vincent Price) fiendishly aspires to take over London rodents--and will stop at nothing to achieve his greatest desire. The unlikely trio of good guys become heroes, of course. The engaging story line is a perfect introduction to Doyle's work and mysteries in general. Look for a very cleverly executed voice-cameo by Basil Rathbone (as Sherlock Holmes, natch). Alan Young (Mr. Ed) also provides a voice. Ages 4 and up. --N.F. Mendoza

Description

The clues are in, the chase is on, and the case of the century is about to break wide open in Disney's greatest little mystery in history! Let the creators of ALADDIN and THE LITTLE MERMAID take you on an adventuresome journey through the cobblestone streets of 1897 London, where some suspicious "mousechief" is the suspenseful start to this thrilling musical adventure. Olivia, the brave daughter of a beloved London toymaker, turns to Basil of Baker Street for help with her father's disappearance. Basil's jolly assistant, Dr. Dawson, and loyal dog Toby lend a hand ... and nose ... as they sniff out clues through their charming miniature world. The final chase leads to Professor Ratigan (voiced by Vincent Price), a hard-hearted criminal whom Basil must outwit to save all of Mousedom! Now digitally remastered, fully restored and full of unforgettable characters and spectacular animation -- all leading to a climactic climb atop Big Ben -- it's elementary who you'll want to watch again and again ... THE GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE!

Customer Reviews:

Another wonderful Disney Movie.......2007-04-12

Disney doesn't disappoint!! This is a nother wonderful Disney adventure that you will enjoy!!

Great Mouse Detective.......2007-03-16

Very pleased with the quality of the product and the timely delivery.

One of Disney's Best.......2007-02-12

This is one of Disney's best stories. The amusing mystery, spooky characters and charming leads will delight young and old alike.

Classic.......2007-02-06

This is another disney classic. Set in the heart of London a Sherlock Holmes type mouse sets off to find a missing father with the help of his friend, a Watson type mouse. This is a great movie for all ages.

Great Mouse Detective = Great Disney Film.......2007-01-24

When I first got this movie, I thought this would totally not be as good as the Lion King. But I realized then that it was an awesome Disney film! The animation is dark and quite exciting. The humor is also likeable, and Ratigan is totally the best character in the film, thanks to Vincent Price. One of the best Disney Villains of all time! Not to mention "The World`s Greatest Criminal Mind" and "Let Me Be Good To you". The striptease part in the bar and Ratigan`s drunken henchman made me chuckle.

I think Great Mouse Detective is very underrated, and should belong in the True Classics of Disney-list with the Lion King, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mulan, Rescuers Down Under, Little Mermaid and Hercules.

Mystery Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection

Average customer rating:

Best of the box sets
too old
Whoa! Back to Saturday AM (40s) or Thursday nights 2AM (60s)
On a 1 to 10 scale, this collection is rated: 6.3
Mystery Classics 50 Movie Pack

Mystery Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection
Starring: Frank Sinatra , Arthur Wontner , and Basil Rathbone
Manufacturer: Mill Creek Entertainment
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

Thrillers | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

Mystery | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

Mystery & Suspense | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

Deals Over $10 | DVD Blowouts | Stores | DVD | Video

All Blowouts | DVD Blowouts | Stores | DVD | Video

Movie Packs Under $20 | DVD Blowouts | Stores | DVD | Video

DVDs Under $14.99 | Today's Deals in DVD | Special Features | DVD | Video

( M ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
Similar Items:

Horror Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection
Suspense Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection
Dark Crimes Collection: 50 Movie Pack
SciFi Classics Collection 50 Movie Pack Collection
Family Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection

ASIN: B0001HAGTW
Release Date: 2004-01-20

Product Description

Get an instant library of some of the greatest mystery classics ever to come out of Hollywood on twelve double-sided DVDs. Never has such a comprehensive collection of great classic mystery features been assembled in one exciting package - all for an amazingly low price!

System Requirements:

Mystery Classics 50 Movie MegaPack - Bulldog Drummond's Revenge
B. Drummond Escapes
B. Drummond in Africa
B. Drummond's Secret Police
B. Drummond Comes Back
B. Drummond's Peril
Dick Tracy Detective
D.Tracy Meets Gruesome
D. Tracy vs. Cueball
Shadow Strikes
Shadow: International Crime
Mr. Moto's Last Warning
Mysterious Mr. Wong
Mr. Wong Detective
S. Holmes: Sign of Four
Triump of S. Holmes
S.Holmes: Murder at Baskervilles
S. Holmes: Woman in Green
S. Holmes: Study in Scarlet
S. Holmes and the Secret Weapon
S. Holmes: Terror By Night
S. Holmes: Dressed to Kill
Nancy Drew Reporter
Kennel Murder Case
Death Kiss
Suddenly
Impact
He Walked By Night
Quicksnd
Eyes in the NIght
Man on the Eiffel Tower
Topper Returns
Green Glove
Second Woman
Fog Island
They Made Me a Criminal
Jigsaw
Algiers
Murder with Pictures
Stranger
Murder at Midnight
Kansas City Confidential
Detour
Too Late for Tears
Mystery Liner
Scarlet Street
Midnight Manhunt
Murder By Television
Moonstone
Great Guy

Running Time 3728 Min

Format: DVD MOVIE

Customer Reviews:

Best of the box sets.......2007-06-19

This is actually the best of the Treeline/ Creek Mill box sets as it really contains some classics which are hard to find. The quality is amazing given the price. The quality of the picture varies but I usually find the sound most difficult with old movies and that is surprisingly good. So if you're a film buff: this is one collection worth buying.

too old.......2007-05-14

these are really old movies -- 30s and 40s, so the image quality is very poor. I'd say go for other options unless you're into those old movies.

Whoa! Back to Saturday AM (40s) or Thursday nights 2AM (60s).......2007-05-03

I haven't seen all 50 films yet, but this is a collection you've been looking for to bring back those nostalgic moments of sleeplessness, turning on the TV and seeing Boris Karloff as a Charlie Chan knock-off: British accent, that delightful, endearing lisp of his, ham-fisted private detectives sleuthing for ham-fisted clues(all wearing fedoras). Oh, the memories!! These are the movies that cling like dreams.

This collection is GREAT! The quality of the copy is good, too: they've minimized the scratchiness of the old film, sound is good overall, some other quirks ... but hey! these films are older than grandpa!

Wonderful value!

On a 1 to 10 scale, this collection is rated: 6.3.......2007-03-30

Based on current polling numbers at a film resource website, the 50 titles in MYSTERY CLASSICS received an average rating (on a 1 to 10 scale) of 6.3.

Not factored in are such considerations as audio/video transfer quality and condition of original footage. An outstanding mix of actors and titles make this collection very attractive for all fans of early cinema. Recommended.

Below is program list, including individual movie ratings, years of release and main actors--

(5.9) Bulldog Drummond's Revenge (1937) - John Barrymore/John Howard
(5.7) Bulldog Drummond Escapes (1937) - Ray Milland/Guy Standing
(5.9) Bulldog Drummond In Africa (1938) - John Howard/Anthony Quinn (in a minor role)
(6.4) Bulldog Drummond's Secret Police (1939) - John Howard/Heather Angel
(5.6) Bulldog Drummond Comes Back (1937) - John Barrymore/John Howard
(6.0) Bulldog Drummond's Peril (1938) - John Barrymore/John Howard
(5.5) Dick Tracy(, Detective) - Morgan Conway/Anne Jeffreys
(6.1) Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947) - Boris Karloff/Ralph Byrd
(6.0) Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946) - Morgan Conway/Anne Jeffreys
(5.3) The Shadow Strikes (1937) - Rod La Roque/Agnes Anderson
(6.1) International Crime ("The Shadow") (1938) - Rod La Roque/Astrid Allwyn
(6.4) Mr. Moto's Last Warning (1939) - Peter Lorre/John Carradine
(4.6) The Mysterious Mr. Wong (1934) - Bela Lugosi/Wallace Ford
(5.9) Mr. Wong, Detective (1938) - Boris Karloff/Grant Withers
(6.0) The Sign Of Four ("Sherlock Holmes") (1932) - Arthur Wontner/Ian Hunter
(6.1) The Triumph Of Sherlock Holmes (1935) - Arthur Wontner/Ian Fleming (as Dr. Watson)
(5.9) Silver Blaze ("Murder At the Baskervilles") ("Sherlock Holmes") (1937) - Arthur Wontner/Ian Fleming
(6.9) The Woman In Green ("Sherlock Holmes") (1945) - Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce/Hillary Brooke
(6.4) A Study In Scarlet ("Sherlock Holmes") (1933) - Reginald Owen/Warburton Gamble
(6.8) Sherlock Holmes And The Secret Weapon (1943) - Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce/Lionel Atwill
(7.0) Terror By Night ("Sherlock Holmes") (1946) - Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce/Alan Mowbray
(7.0) Dressed To Kill ("Sherlock Holmes") (1946) - Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce
(6.3) Nancy Drew, Reporter (1939) - Bonita Granville/John Litel
(6.9) The Kennel Murder Case (1933) - William Powell/Mary Astor/Eugene Pallette
(6.3) The Death Kiss (1932) - David Manners/Bela Lugosi
(7.0) Suddenly (1954) - Frank Sinatra/Sterling Hayden
(7.0) Impact (1949) - Brian Donlevy/Charles Coburn
(7.4) He Walked By Night (1948) - Richard Basehart/Jack Webb
(6.4) Quicksand (1950) - Mickey Rooney/Peter Lorre
(6.8) Eyes In The Night (1942) - Edward Arnold/Ann Harding/Donna Reed
(6.0) The Man On The Eiffel Tower (1950) - Charles Laughton/Franchot Tone/Burgess Meredith
(6.9) Topper Returns (1941) - Joan Blondell/Roland Young/Billie Burke
(6.7) The Green Glove (1952) - Glenn Ford/Cedric Hardwicke
(6.0) The Second Woman (1951) - Robert Young/Betsy Drake
(5.2) Fog Island (1945) - George Zucco/Lionel Atwill
(5.2) They Made Me A Criminal - John Garfield
(6.3) Jigsaw (1949) - Franchot Tone/Jean Wallace
(7.1) Algiers (1938) - Charles Boyer/Hedy Lamarr/Alan Hale
(6.0) Murder With Pictures (1936) - Lew Ayres/Gail Patrick
(7.5) The Stranger (1946) - Edward G. Robinson/Loretta Young/Orson Welles
(5.5) Murder at Midnight (1931) - Aileen Pringle/Alice White
(7.5) Kansas City Confidential (1952) - John Payne/Neville Brand/Lee Van Cleef
(7.3) Detour (1945) - Tom Neal/Ann Savage
(7.2) Too Late for Tears (1949) - Lizabeth Scott/Don DeFore/Dan Duryea
(5.0) Mystery Liner (1934) - Noah Beery/George "Gabby" Hayes (in a minor role)
(7.8) Scarlet Street (1945) - Edward G. Robinson/Joan Bennett/Dan Duryea
(6.0) Midnight Manhunt (1945) - William Gargan/Leo Gorcey
(4.4) Murder By Television (1935) - Bela Lugosi/June Collyer/Hattie McDaniel
(6.2) The Moonstone (1934) - David Manners/Phyllis Barry
(6.0) Great Guy (1936) - James Cagney/Mae Clarke

Mystery Classics 50 Movie Pack.......2007-03-25

After reading the reviews I was somewhat skeptical about purchasing this
set but decided to try it. While there are a few serial types CD's I
found this set contained a number of really good movies I had never seen
before. Impact, Eyes in the Night, Kennel Club and others I found to be
excellent movies. I guess a lot depends on what you are looking for.
I was somewhat concerned from the reviews as to their being rather dark,
but having played a great many of them on my computer monitor, found only
a few I could consider dark.

Chilling Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection

Average customer rating:

For the Price Well Worth It
Forget the other titles, watch this one.
This set may not be 'great', but it is good.
WARNING!! Beware of 2 different versions
On a 1 to 10 scale, this collection is rated: 4.2

Chilling Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection
Starring: Peter Falk , and Richard Boone
Manufacturer: Mill Creek Entertainment
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Horror | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

Drama | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

Sci-Fi & Fantasy | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

Deals Over $10 | DVD Blowouts | Stores | DVD | Video

All Blowouts | DVD Blowouts | Stores | DVD | Video

Movie Packs Under $20 | DVD Blowouts | Stores | DVD | Video

( C ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
Similar Items:

Horror Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection
50 Movie Pack: Drive-In Movie Classics
SciFi Classics Collection 50 Movie Pack Collection
Tales of Terror 50 Movie Pack Collection
Nightmare Worlds 50 Movie Pack Collection

ASIN: B000AOEQ4W
Release Date: 2005-09-01

Product Description

Get ready for a gut-wrenching journey into terror and madness that is strewn with bloody corpses and rocked by terrifying creatures in a relentlessly horrific universe.

Customer Reviews:

For the Price Well Worth It.......2007-05-21

With shipping I paid approxamately $20 for 50 movies. It works out to about .40 cent each. I have not seen all of them but enjoyed the ones I have. A inexpensive way to spend a evening. If you were Elvira Fans, they can be used to through an Elvira get together. Pick 2 selections have your your invited friends bring the chips, popcorn, whatever and you have a party.

Forget the other titles, watch this one........2007-05-19

Once again I don't normally watch this kind of movie--not serious enough.
But it has its moments funny and chuckles. Earth has been invaded by a galaxtic fast food chain and we are the food.

1. Neat idea.
2. Interesting storyline.
3. Interesting characters. Example: the aliens chase this one guy in to a shed. He closes the door. There are five aliens. The four aliens pick up the odd one and use him for a battering ram. It's somewhat funny, certaintly original as far as I know, and bloody. R rated, not family but worth a look.
4. Sometimes interesting special effects. Somebody at least took a shot at trying to be original.
5. Lots of gun fire...they look like full-loads from where I'm setting.

Hmmm, yes, I'm going to have to recommend this to the somewhat jaded popcorn group. Those of us who like our old movies this isn't going to be such a treat--myself included. Nevertheless, it is interesting enough to keep your attention throughout the movie and therefore it gets my recommendation. Bye!

This set may not be 'great', but it is good........2007-05-13

I own several 50 movie sets, and this one is pretty much standard. Most movies are fairly 'rough', but, that's how I remember them on the old B&W TV's. I am an old horror movie buff, so, I can find enough 'good movies' on this to make it well worth the price.

WARNING!! Beware of 2 different versions.......2007-05-09

I purchasing this set with the intent of watching Deadtime Stories since I remember it as a kid. I noticed when I got the set in the mail that it was not on the set. I Looked at the picture provided from Amazon and it shows Deadtime Stories on the bottom right however mine shows Horror Express in it's place. I have also noticed that the "50 MOVIE PACK" red box is located on the left as here is shows it on the right. So there are two versions of this set. So for people looking for the Deadtime Stories version make sure it says it on the bottom like the picture Amazon has, but if you order it from Amazon you won't get it. Sucks big time, oh well.

On a 1 to 10 scale, this collection is rated: 4.2.......2007-04-14

To all fans of blood-by-the-bucket cinema, monsters, ghouls and gore:
The CHILLING CLASSICS 50 MOVIE PACK was made JUST for you! These drive-in theater spectaculars are certain to amaze, the "special effects" dazzle, and the bizarre stories keep you entertained for many a day. Watch 'em with someone you'd love to squeeze when things get gruesome.

The averaged-out rating for this box set was determined from data gathered at a film-intensive website. User polling numbers (on a 1 to 10 scale) rate CHILLING CLASSICS at: 4.2.

The alphabetized program list below includes individual poll scores, original theatrical titles (where indicated), country of origin (if other than USA), years of release and prominent actors for each film.

(3.9) The Alpha Incident (1978) - Stafford Morgan/John F. Goff/Ralph Meeker (in support)
(6.7) Bad Taste (New Zealand-1987) - Terry Potter/Peter Jackson
(6.1) A Bell From Hell (Spain/France-1973) - Renaud Verley/Viveca Lindfors
(5.1) The Blancheville Monster ("Horror") (Italy/Spain-1963) - Gerard Tichy/Joan Hills
(4.5) The Bloody Brood (Canada/USA-1959) - Jack Betts/Barbara Lord/Peter Falk
(6.8) A Bucket Of Blood (1959) - Dick MillerBarboura Morris/Ed Nelson (in support)
(3.8) Cathy's Curse (France/Canada-1977) - Alan Scarfe/Beverly Murray
(4.0) Christmas Evil ("You Better Watch Out") (1980) - Brandon Maggart/Jeffrey DeMunn
(2.2) The Cold ("The Game") (1984) - Tom Blair/Carol Perry
(4.3) Crypt Of The Living Dead (USA/Spain-1973) - Andrew Prine/Patty Shepard/Mark Damon
(3.0) Deadtime Stories (1986) - Scott Valentine/Nicole Picard
(5.1) Death Rage (Italy-1976) - Yul Brynner/Martin Balsam
(7.8) Deep Red (Italy-1975) - David Hemmings/Daria Nicolodi
(3.3) The Demon (S Africa/Netherlands-1979) - Jennifer Holmes/Cameron Mitchell
(3.4) The Demons Of Ludlow (1983) - Paul Von Hausen/Stephanie Cushna
(4.4) The Devil's Hand (1962) - Linda Christian/Robert Alda
(4.4) Driller Killer (1979) - Abel Ferrara/Carolyn Marz
(1.7) Drive-In Massacre (1976) - Bruce Kimball/Adam Lawrence
(4.4) Dr. Tarr's Torture Dungeon ("Mansion Of Madness") (Mexico-1972) - Claudio Brook/Ellen Sherman
(5.3) Funeral Home (Canada-1980) - Kate Hawtrey/Lesleh Donaldson
(5.5) The Ghost (Italy-1963) - Barbara Steele/Peter Baldwin
(5.3) Gothic (UK-1986) - Gabriel Byrne/Julian Sands/Natasha Richardson
(5.2) Hands Of A Stranger (1962) - Paul Lukather/Joan Harvey/Sally Kellerman (minor role)
(4.8) Haunts (1977) - May Britt/Cameron Mitchell/Aldo Ray
(6.2) Horror Express (UK/Spain-1973) - Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing
(2.2) Horrors Of Spider Island (W Ger/Yugoslavia-1960) - Alexander D'Arcy/Barbara Valentin
(4.6) House Of The Dead ("Alien Zone") (1978) - John Ericson/Ivor Francis
(6.2) I Bury The Living (1958) - Richard Boone/Theodore Bikel
(2.3) Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (1966) - John Lupton/Narda Onyx
(4.6) Lady Frankenstein (Italy-1971) - Joseph Cotten/Rosalba Neri
(3.9) The Legend Of Big Foot (1976) - Ivan Marx/Peggy Marx
(5.8) Man In The Attic (1953) - Jack Palance/Constance Smith/Francis Bavier
(2.7) Medusa (UK/Greece-1973) - George Hamilton/Cameron Mitchell
(3.0) Memorial Valley Massacre (1988) - John Kerry/Mark Mears/Cameron Mitchell (in support)
(6.0) Messiah Of Evil ("Dead People") (1973) - Michael Greer/Royal Dano/Elisha Cook Jr. (in support)
(3.3) Metamorphosis (Italy/USA-1990) - Gene LeBrock/Catherine Baranov
(2.4) The Milpitas Monster (1975) - Paul Frees/Douglas Hagdohl/'Crazy George' Henderson
(5.3) Naked Massacre ("Born For Hell") (W Ger/Canada/France/Itly-1976) - Mathieu Carrière/Debra Berger
(2.3) Oasis Of The Zombies (France-1983) - Manuel Gelin/Jeff Montgomery
(3.2) Panic (Italy/Spain-1976) - David Warbeck/Janet Agren
(2.5) Revenge Of Doctor X ("The Double Garden") (USA/Japan-1970) - James Craig/James Yagi
(3.4) Scream Bloody Murder (1973) - Fred Holbert/Leigh Mitchell
(5.0) Silent Night, Bloody Night (1974) - Patrick O'Neal/James Patterson/John Carradine (in support)
(4.2) Sisters Of Death (1977) - Arthur Franz/Claudia Jennings
(3.3) Slashed Dreams (1975) - Peter Hooten/Robert Englund/Rudy Vallee/James Keach
(2.7) The Snake People (Mexico/USA-1971) - Boris Karloff/Julissa
(2.3) Track Of The Moon Beast (1976) - Chase Cordell/Leigh Drake
(6.4) Virus (Japan-1980) - George Kennedy/Bo Svenson/Edward James Olmos (minor role)
(2.4) War Of The Robots (1978) - Antonio Sabato/Yanti Somer
(3.4) The Witches' Mountain (Spain-1972) - Patty Shepard/Cihangir Gaffari

Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 3 (Border Incident / His Kind of Woman / Lady in the Lake / On Dangerous Ground / The Racket)

Average customer rating:

awesome noir
A must-have
Good copies of good films
Film Noir Classics of the second rank, Very Good indeed
Noir 3 Collection

Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 3 (Border Incident / His Kind of Woman / Lady in the Lake / On Dangerous Ground / The Racket)
Starring: Film Noir Classics Collection
Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

Classics | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

Classics | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

( F ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video

Drama | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

Warner Bros. Pictures Tough Guys Collection (Bullets or Ballots / City for Conquest / Each Dawn I Die / G Men / San Quentin / A Slight Case of Murder)
Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 2 (Born to Kill / Clash by Night / Crossfire / Dillinger (1945) / The Narrow Margin (1952))
I Wake Up Screaming (Fox Film Noir)
Double Indemnity (Universal Legacy Series)
Fallen Angel (Fox Film Noir)

ASIN: B000FI9OCW
Release Date: 2006-07-18

Amazon.com

Two peak achievements by as many top noir directors ... a customized vehicle for one of noir's premier icons ... an oddball experiment in making a truly "private eye" movie ... and a Howard Hughes remake of his earliest contribution to the gangster genre. Such are the five titles corralled for Warner Home Video's third box set of film noir classics.

For eye-popping dynamism coupled with ferocious intensity, no noir director matched Anthony Mann. Border Incident (1949) was Mann's and cinematographer John Alton's first film for MGM following a string of darkly dazzling low-budget beauties at Eagle-Lion (T-Men, Raw Deal, The Black Book, et al.). In structure it's virtually a remake of T-Men, transposed from the shadowy city where a Secret Service team battled counterfeiters, to California's Imperial Valley where the Immigration Service sets out to infiltrate a gang exploiting--and often murdering--Mexicans eager to work the farms. From the opening night scene of three laborers trying to recross the border and meeting a grisly end, the movie relentlessly imagines ways the human body can merge with the earth. Visually stunning, and replete with memorable villains (headed by Howard Da Silva, a past master at making affability lethal), this is one of Mann's strongest noirs and surely his most inventive. Its neglect can be explained only by people's assumption that nothing worthwhile could come of a movie top-billing Ricardo Montalban and George Murphy (as the government agents). Wrong, wrong, wrong.

After a scalding first reel in big-city night streets, Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground (RKO, 1951) likewise forsakes familiar noir terrain for the countryside--the mountains and snowfields where city cop Robert Ryan seeks a psychotic killer. For both the actor and the director, Ryan's character is an exemplary creation: a man with personal demons whose overzealous pursuit of criminals has pushed him into sadism. His passage from urban darkness into the silent white mountain country becomes a redemptive journey, thanks largely to his interaction with a blind woman (Ida Lupino) in an isolated farmhouse whose younger brother may be the quarry he's after. Ray developed the screenplay with A.I. Bezzerides under the supervision of producer John Houseman (for whom Ray had made his feature debut, They Live By Night). The film boasts a thrilling music score by Bernard Herrmann, anticipating his great soundtrack for North by Northwest.

His Kind of Woman (also RKO, 1951) is a vehicle for both RKO's reigning bad boy, Robert Mitchum, and Howard Hughes' definitive coup of distaff engineering, Jane Russell. Their characters cross paths en route to a seaside Mexican resort, where she aims to continue her gold-digger pursuit of Hollywood ham Vincent Price, and Mitchum will figure in a plot to get deported mobster Raymond Burr back into the U.S.A. The slow-brewing romance between this dauntingly tall, broad-shouldered pair gives off little heat, but the players' good-natured, weary-pro rapport as they go through their mostly preposterous paces makes for very good fun. Still more is supplied by Price, who just about steals the movie when he gets to extend his sub-Errol Flynn screen heroism into real life--all the while supplying his own florid running commentary on the action. The urbane director John Farrow filled the movie with one delicious, what-the-hell-is-going-on-here scene after another (highlight: a bored Mitchum ironing his money), but that wasn't enough for studio boss Hughes. Richard Fleischer was brought in to stretch the climactic melodrama aboard Burr's yacht in the harbor, and the picture grew to an overblown two hours in length. Not that you're likely to regret a minute of it.

Robert Montgomery directed and played Phillip Marlowe in Lady in the Lake (MGM, 1947), Raymond Chandler's novel as adapted by Steve Fisher (I Wake Up Screaming). The gimmick is that, apart from a few scenes of private detective Marlowe chatting us up in his office, everything is viewed through his eyes, with Marlowe himself remaining unseen unless he glances in a mirror. This literal-minded conceit is more curious than compelling; the camera simply doesn't see the way the human eye does, and the artificiality constantly calls attention to itself. Montgomery, a suave actor who enjoyed playing it coarse and obnoxious on occasion, makes his screen Marlowe more smartass than any other ("dumb, brave, and cheap"). With him cracking wise off-camera, much of the movie is really carried by Audrey Totter, a swell late-'40s dame who has to stand up under more relentless scrutiny than even her shifty character deserves.

The Racket (RKO, 1951) is the second film version of a 1920s play about municipal corruption, gangsterism, and the attempt to squash an honest police precinct captain. John Cromwell had acted in the original Broadway production, which may help explain why, as director, he let so much of this movie turn back into a play. Eventually studio boss Howard Hughes, who had produced the 1928 film version (directed by Lewis Milestone), once again called in another director to do salvage work.

That was Nicholas Ray, whose scenes include police captain Robert Mitchum's pursuit of the man who has just bombed his home. Mitchum's fellow cast members include Robert Ryan as the ultra-paranoid gangster; husky-voiced noir blonde Lizabeth Scott as a nightclub thrush romanced by Ryan's brother; future Perry Mason D.A. William Talman as a dedicated street cop; and Ray Collins and William Conrad as two municipal officials negotiating a delicate dance with morality and expediency. --Richard T. Jameson

Description

Five more film noir classics lined up with genre stars such as Robert Mitchum, Robert Montgomery, Robert Ryan, and Jane Russell, are now available in Volume 3 of the Film Noir Classics Collection series. The new 6-Disc DVD set is only available as a collection and includes a bonus documentary disc on the Noir genre.

Customer Reviews:

awesome noir.......2007-04-20

like the other 2 volumes in this series vol 3 outshines even them. found all dvd's compelling viewing,well remastered for excellent sound and picture quality. if film noir from the 40's and 50's is your penchant then look no further than these releases. i have only one question, when or where are we getting volume 4? Jim Boggan, Dublin, Ireland

A must-have .......2007-03-23

The Noir genre appears as the most original cinematographic legacy of the American cinema along the Century.

Unlike the Western whose emblematic epic feature (with their few exceptions), the Noir is supported by the unbearable lightness of the being in which twists of fate, ironic designs, existential instability, lack of center, cosmic nasty tricks hovered by an irrational universe in which nobody is like it seems.

This manifest incapacity of distinguishing what's right or what's wrong, the awful sensation of diffidence respect your beloved couple, the new friend you met last night, was systematically enhancing with new visions, fed by the plethora of European filmmakers that certainly had experienced his particular fears and anguishes with the dark shadows of a raising Nazism and the emerging void's perception that you could feel and even breath in your environment.

All this set of new factors, enriched, enhanced and expanded the vision of many layers of a society, seers, salesmen, boxers, gangsters, false policemen, doctors, sideshow performers, psychologists or depressive characters.

The WW2 in good measure, renovated the internal demons of the alcoholism, gangster's rivalries, corruption, sexual frustrations or the figure of the classic antihero of the thirties ( The petrified forest or High Sierra) frequently ex cons or orphans youngsters whose parents died in the WW1 or committed suicide during the great Depression.

Good copies of good films.......2007-01-13

An excellent product, good copies of some really good films

Film Noir Classics of the second rank, Very Good indeed.......2007-01-06

Lady in the Lake is the weakest and On Dangerous Ground/The Racket are the strongest Border Incident and His Kind of Woman quite good as well. The other two volumes are as good or better but where can you see good prints of these exciting noir movies for a great price? The only other set to recommend to those new to the genre is the Kino's noir set with star performers (and some non-star performers) with great directors. Don't miss out on these four sets, they're terrific entertainment (after a noir movie, we watch a Charley Chase, Keaton or Lloyd short). Great night at home watching these movies before our time (born 1956).

Noir 3 Collection.......2007-01-05

Border Incident and Lady in the Lake are particularly important films in the noir tradition. Though they are all B films, Lady carries the imprint of Raymond Chandler.

The collection is worth having if one is interested in studying noir films, but don't expect any great films here...or even really good ones.

Suspense Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection

Average customer rating:

ITS JUST FINE
On a 1 to 10 scale, this collection is rated: 4.7
suspense classics 50 moviepack collection
I won't resell this because...
Suspense Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection

Suspense Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection
Starring: Dennis Hopper , Robert De Niro , and Kathy Baker
Manufacturer: Mill Creek Entertainment
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

Thrillers | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

Drama | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

Mystery & Suspense | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

Deals Over $10 | DVD Blowouts | Stores | DVD | Video

All Blowouts | DVD Blowouts | Stores | DVD | Video

Movie Packs Under $20 | DVD Blowouts | Stores | DVD | Video

DVDs Under $14.99 | Today's Deals in DVD | Special Features | DVD | Video

( S ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
Similar Items:

Dark Crimes Collection: 50 Movie Pack
Mystery Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection
Chilling Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection
50 Movie Pack: Drive-In Movie Classics
Historic Classics 50 Movie Pack

ASIN: B000A2X4PQ
Release Date: 2005-09-01

Product Description

Get ready for nail-biting suspense and white knuckle thrills in this incredible collection of suspense features. You get 50 full-length feature films that have been carefully selected and digitally re-mastered to deliver maximum value.

System Requirements:
Suspense 50 Movie Pack -

A Dangerous Summer
A Killing Affair
A Tattered Web
Bailout
Beyond Justice
Black Raven
Born to Win
Boxer
Cape Town Affair
Cat O' Nine Tails
Code Name Zebra
Cold Blood
Cold Room
Corrupt
Crime Boss
Cross Mission
Cry of the Innocent
Death Collector
Death in the Shadows
Dominique
Door to Door Maniac
Escape From Sobibor
Forest
Hollywood Man
Julie Darling
Kill Cruise
Lady Gangster
Lucifer Complex
The
Manipulator
Master Touch
Midnight Cop
Millions
Mitchell
Murder Once Removed
Mysteries
Night of the Sharks
Night They Took Miss Beautiful
Paco
Paper Man
Power
Passion and Murder
Rogue s Gallery
Seducers
Sellout
Seven Doors to Death
Squeeze
The Stoolie
TSwap
TTarget of an Assassin
The Sphinx
Woman Hunter

Running Time 75 hrs 30 mins.

Format: DVD MOVIE

Customer Reviews:

ITS JUST FINE.......2007-05-08

IT'S WAS OK. IT'S NOT AS GOOD AS THE HORROR MOVIE COLLECTION BUT WORTH WHILE TO SEE IT.

On a 1 to 10 scale, this collection is rated: 4.7.......2007-04-06

(AMAZON rating: 2½ stars)

SUSPENSE CLASSICS 50 MOVIE PACK is a nicely mixed collection of lesser known thrillers, both domestic and imported. Half of these are foreign productions, while a small percentage were originally made-for-TV. Video quality of MILL CREEK ENTERTAINMENT products tends to be good and for the price you definitely can't go wrong with their SUSPENSE CLASSICS set.

The current average 1 to 10 scoring for these 50 titles (as voted on by users of a film data website) is: 4.7.

Program list is alphabetized and includes individual movie ratings, original titles (in parentheses), years of release (and country, if other than USA) as well as principal actors.

(3.9) Bail Out ("W. B., Blue And The Bean") (1994) - David Hasselhoff/Linda Blair
(4.1) Beyond Justice (Italy-1992) - Rutger Hauer/Omar Sharif/Elliot Gould
(5.3) The Black Raven (1943) - George Zucco/Wanda McKay
(5.6) Born to Win (1971) - George Segal/Karen Black/Robert De Niro (in support)
(4.3) The Boxer (Italy-1972) - Robert Blake/Ernest Borgnine
(4.8) The Cape Town Affair (So. Africa-1967) - Claire Trevor/James Brolin/Jacqueline Bisset
(6.4) Cat O' Nine Tails (Italy/France/W Ger-1971) - James Franciscus/Karl Malden
(2.2) Code Name Zebra (1984) - James Mitchum/Frank Sinatra Jr. (minor role)
(5.0) Cold Blood (W. Germany-1975) - Rutger Hauer
(5.1) The Cold Room (TV-UK-1984) - George Segal/Amanda Pays
(5.5) Corrupt ("Copkiller") (Italy-1983) - Harvey Keitel/John Lydon
(4.4) Crime Boss (Italy-1972) - Telly Savalas
(4.7) Cross Mission (Italy-1988) - Richard Randall
(5.8) Cry Of The Innocent (TV-Ireland-1980) - Rod Taylor/Nigel Davenport
(3.2) A Dangerous Summer (Australia-1981) - Tom Skerritt/James Mason (in a minor role)
(4.5) The Death Collector (1976) - Joseph Cortese/Joe Pesci
(???) Death In The Shadows (TV-Netherlands-1985) - Maayke Bouten
(4.4) Dominique (UK-1978) - Cliff Robertson/Jean Simmons/Ron Moody
(5.7) Door-To-Door Maniac (1961) - Johnny Cash/Pamela Mason/Ron Howard
(7.4) Escape From Sobibor (TV-Yugo/UK-1987) - Alan Arkin/Rutger Hauer
(3.1) The Forest (1982) - Dean Russell/Gary Kent
(3.7) Hollywood Man (1976) - William Smith/Jennifer Billingsley
(5.8) Julie Darling (W Ger/Canada-1983) - Anthony Franciosa/Sybil Danning
(4.8) Kill Cruise (W. Germany-1990) - Jurgen Prochnow/Elizabeth Hurley
(5.7) A Killing Affair (1986) - Peter Weller/Kathy Baker
(5.9) Lady Gangster (1942) - Faye Emerson/Jackie Gleason (in support)
(3.3) The Lucifer Complex (1978) - Robert Vaughn/Keenan Wynn/Aldo Ray
(1.9) The Manipulator (1971) - Mickey Rooney/Keenan Wynn
(5.5) Master Touch (Italy/W Ger-1972) - Kirk Douglas
(4.0) Midnight Cop ("Killing Blue") (W. Germany-1988) - Morgan Fairchild/Frank Stallone/Michael York (in support)
(3.6) Millions (Italy/Spain-1991) - Billy Zane/Lauren Hutton
(2.8) Mitchell (1975) - Joe Don Baker/Martin Balsam/John Saxon/Linda Evans
(5.8) Murder Once Removed (TV-1971) - John Forsythe/Richard Kiley/Joseph Campanella
(4.6) Mysteries (Netherlands-1978) - Rutger Hauer
(3.1) Night Of The Sharks (Italy/Spain/Mexico-1987) - Treat Williams/Janet Agren
(3.8) The Night They Took Miss Beautiful (TV-1977) - Gary Collins/Chuck Connors/Phil Silvers (minor role)
(4.1) Paco (Colombia-1976) - Jose Ferrer/Allen Garfield
(6.2) Paper Man (TV-1971) - Dean Stockwell/Stefanie Powers
(4.6) Power, Passion And Murder ("Tales from the Hollywood Hills: Natica Jackson") (TV-1987) - Michelle Pfeiffer/Hector Elizondo
(5.1) Rogues' Gallery (1944) - Frank Jenks/Robin Raymond
(4.8) The Seducers ("Death Game") (1977) - Sondra Locke/Seymour Cassel
(4.7) The Sell-Out (1976) - Oliver Reed/Richard Widmark
(5.6) Seven Doors To Death (1944) - Chick Chandler/June Clyde
(5.2) The Squeeze (Italy/W Ger-1978) - Lee Van Cleef/Karen Black/Edward Albert/Robert Alda
(5.6) The Stoolie (1972) - Jackie Mason/Marcia Jean Kurtz
(3.3) The Swap ("Sam's Song") (1969/1980) - Robert De Niro/Jennifer Warren
(4.8) Target Of An Assassin (So. Africa-1976) - Anthony Quinn/John Phillip Law
(5.6) A Tattered Web (TV-1971) - Lloyd Bridges/Broderick Crawford (in support)
(6.2) The Sphinx (1933) - Lionel Atwill/Sheila Terry
(5.0) The Woman Hunter (TV-1972) - Barbara Eden/Robert Vaughn/Stuart Whitman

suspense classics 50 moviepack collection.......2007-03-18

have seen the 4 movies and liked three out of four, judging by quality of contents, picture and sound...and NO commercials...
Evelyn

I won't resell this because..........2007-01-27

I would not want anyone else to be subjected to these choices of movies. Upon afterthought of when I read the reviews before I made the purchase, I began to wonder if maybe some hadn't been paid. The sellers(Mill Creek)could certainly have offered ten people a hundred dollars each + or - to write a seemingly regular person review, but make it reasonably positive enough to cause people to try out the DVD set. Hence, a simple $1000 advertising budget. So without emotion or fanfare, I will itemize my experience with this set.

I saw 41 of the 50 movies. The nine I did not see were because the write-up of them already told me the content was not something that I wanted to fill my mind with. Most of them were European/Italian made. Out of those, about 1/2 dozen had such bad sound I was unable to understand them. (If just the sound had been fixed a little, I would have been willing to pay a couple dollars more.) Three were so hokey, I did not continue viewing them. Four had content that was on the verge of sick. And the most surprising of all, ten had nudity from complete to partial. For those who value the beauty and sanctity of the created body and its intimacy in marraige, and prefer not to degrade it by exposure and abuse, this information would be appreciated. For those who don't care, so be it. That leaves seventeen that range from bearable to a few good. Even with the good ones, however, the sound was not great.

Now for the itemization of costs. New, at $19 (including S&H), 50 movies would be around $.38 each. Sorting through the trashy ones to get the possible 17 viewable movies makes each one around $1.11. I won't argue that is an okay price, but to find the 17, who wants to fill their mind with what I've just done? I wish I'd never seen the images I did, and I did turn off several after I found out what they were about, but that did not take care of having to be surprised and see them in the first place. That is why I will not resell this set. I am now going to throw the entire set into the garbage

Suspense Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection.......2007-01-13

50 DVD for less than $15? How can one complain. I bought this item with the full understanding that the DVDs were not remastered. The picture quality on some was poor and some good. However they are all viewable and quite entertaining. I have not seen all of them but from the few I have seen, I would recommend this product to anyone who likes pure black and white suspense from the past but is willing to overlook some flaws in picture quality.

Unseen Cinema - Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941

Average customer rating:

Rare Film Festival in a Box!
A collection of films you'll find nowhere else for the serious film history buff
A great collection for anyone seriously interested in film history and it's language
Awesome -- must be seen
Massive Art-exhibition-in-a-box Collecfion of Avant-garde titles

Unseen Cinema - Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941
Starring: Orson Welles
Manufacturer: Image Entertainment
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Classics | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

Classics | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

( U ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video

Drama | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

Classics | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s
Treasures From American Film Archives - Encore Edition
More Treasures from American Film Archives 1894-1931
Edison - The Invention of the Movies (1891-1918)
By Brakhage - Anthology - Criterion Collection

ASIN: B000AYEIJA
Release Date: 2005-10-18

Amazon.com

Avant-garde cinema remains unseen for all sorts of reasons. Because it's rare. Because it's elusive. Because the mainstream distribution and exhibition apparatus is not designed to serve it (and, arguably, to a large extent is designed to suppress and deny it). Because people--that vast army of us proud to be unpretentious "regular moviegoers"--basically don't want to see it, fearing that it's esoteric and challenging and probably boring. These are excellent--which is to say, very real--reasons. Except that, as of autumn 2005, they're obsolete. All but the personal-resistance part, anyway. Now, thanks to Anthology Film Archives, curator Bruce Posner, and the cooperation of the world's foremost film museums, anybody with a DVD player can make the acquaintance of 20some hours of definitive avant-garde film experiences through this often dazzling seven-disc set. And whaddaya know: a lot of "unseen cinema" turns out to be fascinating, thrilling, spectrally beautiful, tantalizingly mysterious--in a word, eye-opening, to both the art of film and the world we all share.

Moreover, it's not all precious, artist(or would-be artist)-in-a-garret stuff. Some of it has glimmered on regular movie screens, from nickelodeon days through the golden age of Hollywood, doing its avant-garde thing (often without knowing it's avant-garde) as one- and two-reel narratives or astonishing sequences in commercial Hollywood pictures. A 1910 D.W. Griffith two-reeler that compresses several decades (including the Civil War) into 16 minutes. Prologue and transitional montages that goosed up pedestrian feature films with lunges into jagged surrealism and abstraction. The erotically crazed, visually dynamic, sometimes nightmarish phantasmagoria that are Busby Berkeley's "By a Waterfall" and "Lullaby of Broadway."

In Posner's own words: "American experimental film has existed since the technological inception of cinema ... The background against which the experimentalists toiled provides a fascinating review of Americana coupled with numerous cross-currents ... and an unfailing desire to create on film an image that can be viewed as an independent and provocative art.... The goal [of this set] is to present the broadest possible spectrum of experimental films produced between the 1890s and 1940s."

Each of the seven discs is organized around a central theme, and which one you first reach for will be determined by individual curiosity and susceptibility. The Devil's Plaything: American Surrealism steps off with Edwin S. Porter's 1902 Jack and the Beanstalk, its visionary transformations of settings and now-you-see-'em, now-you-don't appearances and disappearances of cast members the more remarkable for having been entirely achieved in the shooting, without postproduction optical trickery. Griffith's cameraman-to-be Billy Bitzer sends time scurrying dreamily backwards in Impossible Convicts (1905), while such classic 1920s experiments as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Telltale Heart seek to meet Edgar Allan Poe halfway by portraying distorted/demented worlds via stylized lighting and decor. The ambitious Robert Florey, whose feature-directing career would be almost entirely confined to the B zone, collaborates with montage maestro Slavko Vorkapich on The Life and Death of 9413--A Hollywood Extra and with premier production designer William Cameron Menzies on The Love of Zero.

Inverted Narratives: New Directions in Storytelling includes Suspense, a 1913 two-reeler by Lois Weber that emulates and occasionally tops her august contemporary, D.W. Griffith; the adventurous selection of camera angles and big, then still-bigger closeups continue to amaze. Charles Vidor's The Bridge, a 1929 rendering of the Ambrose Bierce story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," is starker than but not inferior to the more poetic French version that won an Oscar in the 1960s. Josef Berne's Black Dawn, aka Dawn After Dawn, weaves a Gothic spell with its account of love and death on an isolated farm, including a startling passage of sunstruck eroticism. And twelve minutes of Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand's agitprop, allegorical docudrama of American corporate fascism Native Land, narrated by Paul Robeson, inspires an urgent wish to see the entire film.

Light Rhythms: Music and Abstraction moves from surrealist milestones such as Man Ray's Le Retour à la raison, Fernand Léger's Ballet mécanique, and Rose Sélavy's Anémic cinéma (an anagram many times over) to never-seen full-length versions of montages created by Slavko Vorkapich for such films as Crime Without Passion and The Firefly. Vorkapich's mesmerizing nature poem Moods of the Sea, set to Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave, is among the most relentlessly stunning passages on celluloid. An ecstatically extended bal sequence from Ernst Lubitsch's So This Is Paris inspires, again, a craving to see that unavailable 1926 feature film, while George L.K. Morris' Abstract Movies is an encyclopedic and hilarious amateur re-creation of fond cliches and tropes of generic filmmaking.

Still, if one had to pick a single DVD to luxuriate in (and one can: it's the only disc available separately), it would have to be Picturing a Metropolis: New York City Unveiled. The Blizzard, a Gotham panorama grabbed by an unknown cameraman standing outside the Mutoscope film company office one day in 1898, is one of the most enchanting moments you'll ever experience on film, with an urban crowd sharing the bemusement of a winter day slipping into evening, and the fairy-tale vastness of a nearby park softened by falling snow: an absentminded documentary record become sheer poetry. Bitzer's Interior New York Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street, an unbroken take from the front of an onrushing train (with supplementary illumination supplied by lights mounted on another train on a parallel track!), was shot in 1905, though the itinerary looks exactly the same today; only the crowds have changed. (One comical, endearing touch: a mother and her children, caught in passing at Grand Central, stop in their bustling journey to stare at the camera.) The 1901 Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theatre uses time-lapse photography to chronicle the taking down, and then to imaginatively ordain the resurrection, of an urban show palace. And Robert Flaherty's 24 Dollar Island (c. 1926) is so razor-sharp and judiciously observed that it remains the definitive portrait of Manhattan on film--truly a portrait of the city itself as a living, dynamic space, with scarcely any intrusion of humankind to distract us from the place, its light and shapes and rhythms.

There's additional, virtually prehistoric contemplation of urban spaces--including the 1900 Paris Exposition and the Eiffel Tower--in The Mechanized Eye: Experiments in Technique and Form. The Amateur as Auteur: Discovering Paradise in Pictures celebrates the intentional and inadvertent sublimities of home movies. And Viva la Dance: The Beginnings of Ciné-Dance collects everything from the various Annabelle Dances of 1894-97 through Mexican footage shot for Sergei Eisenstein's Que viva México to one more bravura sequence by Busby Berkeley (from Wonder Bar) and the avowedly avant-garde Tarantella and Spook Sport by Mary Ellen Bute in 1940.

It cannot be overstated that much of this footage is beautifully preserved, whether transferred from paper prints or exhumed from still-luminous nitrate footage cached in a European archive. And the brief headnotes by such authoritative commentators as Jan-Christian Horak, David Shepard, Kevin Brownlow, and Bruce Posner himself are marvels of lucidity and concision, supplying just the right context--in a mere 50 words or so--to enable the uninitiated viewer to appreciate the film he or she is about to witness. Unseen Cinema is not just (just!) an awesome collection of film landmarks--it's a landmark achievement in its own right. --Richard T. Jameson

Description

7 DVDs - 20 Hours - 155 Classics of Avant Garde Cinema! "Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941" reveals hitherto unknown accomplishments of American filmmakers working in the United States and abroad from the invention of cinema until World War II, and offers an innovative and often controversial view of experimental film as a product of avant-garde artists, of professional directors, and of amateur movie-makers working collectively and as individuals at all levels of film production. Many of the films have not been available since their creation, some have never been screened in public, and almost all have been unavailable in copies as good as these until now. Sixty of the world's leading film archive collections cooperated with Anthology Film Archives to bring this long-neglected period of film history back to life for modern audiences.

Customer Reviews:

Rare Film Festival in a Box!.......2007-01-18

As a Cinephile who travels literally thousands of miles a year in search of
amazing old films at classic film festivals & conventions, it is my opinion
this is the best box set of films I've ever seen. Whether you're a new film
fan or an old one looking for new kicks, this is the set for you. From the
surreal dream sequence in Douglas Fairbanks 1919 masterpiece "When the Clouds
Roll By" to Neil McGuire & William A. O'Connor's dreamy short "Moonland",
you'll see where Hollywood has gone to steal ideas for some of its best (and
most well-loved) sequences. I've personally paid more than the cost of this
set on a 16mm film print of just one of the short films it contains. If I could have
only one collection of these films on dvd, it would be this all-encompassing
box set. I've never written a review before but really wanted you true film
fans out there to know about this amazing set. It is my opinion that you
won't be sorry you bought it. Good Luck and Happy Filmwatching!

A collection of films you'll find nowhere else for the serious film history buff.......2006-12-13

If I was getting a gift for TCM host and film historian Robert Osborne, and I knew he didn't already have this DVD set I would (a) be very surprised and (b) buy it for him. This DVD set is for film buffs who aren't satisfied with the essentials that everyone knows about - "Birth of a Nation", "The Jazz Singer", "Frankenstein", etc., which are great films, but don't tell the whole story of early cinema. The set was organized by Bruce Posner and runs to some nineteen hours, and is an astonishing achievement. The set consists of seven discs each of which explore a different aspect of early cinema.

Among the films included are Douglass Crockwell's "Simple Destiny Abstractions", plus some animations with some very good detail on the level of Windsor McCay. The 1928 version of "The Fall of the House of Usher" focuses more on displaying some complex optical work than the story, reducing Poe's tale to only ten minutes in length. "Night on Bald Mountain" is an example of pinboard animation, in which a film is made completely using shadows from a pin screen. This technique continued to be used for decades. Suspense - a 1913 melodrama in which a housewife and her baby are nearly attacked by a knife-wielding drifter - is included because of its split-screen techniques. However, it is also interesting as the beginnings of what became the psycho-thrillers that exist to this day.

For the budget conscious, the disc entitled "PICTURING A METROPOLIS, New York City Unveiled" is the only disc available for individual purchase. This particular disc is great for history buffs as well as film buffs for all of its views of New York City life during the period from 1890-1940. The New York City disc moves from early footage of the city, including the Edison Company's famous and poetic Coney Island at Night, to Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's well-known Manhattan, to some work by Rudy Burckhardt, the film-maker, photographer, and painter who was also one of de Kooning's earliest friends in New York.

There are also some films financed by the depression-era WPA. Among them, Elia Kazan makes an appearance in a rather odd socialist movie about the poor of New York. There are some pictures sponsored by Labor Unions that offer 'alternative newsreels' that expose illegal business thuggery and a reactionary murder cult known as The Black Legion. Entertainment figures that are later blacklisted for their political beliefs and actions also make an appearance here - most notably, Paul Robeson, an actor often forgotten because of this. Robeson can be seen narrating a film on organized labor in this collection.

The disc entitled "The Beginnings of Ciné-Dance" has quite a bit of variety, but is still clearly delimited, opening with Annabelle Moore's "Butterfly Dance" and offering near its end David Bradley's Peer Gynt of 1941, starring a teenage Charlton Heston.

Some of the best material on the set is from Hollywood, probably due to the larger budgets involved. Included in this category would be some of the original montages of Slavko Vorkapich that were done for some MGM movies. This includes a bit of film in which the entire Napoleanic war appears to play out in just two minutes. Also included is Vorkapich's opening montage to "Crime Without Passion" in which three banshees fly about and terrorize the streets of Manhattan. The Ernst Lubitsch "touch" also apparently includes montages, and there is an excerpt from 1926's "So This is Paris" that shows a flapper dance in montage. It does a good job of conveying the wildness of the place at that time, which is part of the central theme of the movie. Also included are Busby Berkeley's numbers "Lullaby of Broadway" and "By a Waterfall", which are light compared to the other pieces with their more hidden deeper meanings.

I could go on forever describing the contents of this DVD set, but these were the pieces that stood out the most to me, anyway. The label of "Avant Garde" does not really fit this collection as we know the meaning of the term today. After all, there is work here by the Edison Company, D.W. Griffith, and a host of other people who have secure places in mainstream motion picture history. The "Avant Garde" label is more of an indication that film as an artform during the time period covered was inherently avant-garde just because it was new. The quality of the video is quite good considering the probable shape of the originals. I personally love this set and think it is well worth the price.

A great collection for anyone seriously interested in film history and it's language.......2006-09-24

Unseen Cinema is a fascinating collection of films, that shows the development of (and the experiment with) the film language in America from its beginning there and half a century onward.

It's title is a little misleading. Many of the films are not really Avant Garde, unless sound testing and family films showing children opening Christmas gifts is Avant Garde. The goal of the collectors is to prove that there was an Avant Garde film making from the beginning of cinema in America (America meaning films made by Americans anywhere in the world and films made by foreigners in America). They say that this was a needle-in-a-haystack search and I have to admit that sometimes I felt that they mistook the hay for a needle. So if you want to get to know early Avant Garde film making (in general) then I rather recommend "Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s". It has many of the best bits from this collections plus others not found here.

But if you are interested in film history and it's language then this is your thing. There are many fantastic films here, some of them not available anywhere else (to the best of my knowledge), such as The Telltale Heart (Charles Klein: 1928), Portrait of a Young Man in Three Movements (Henwar Rodakiewicz: 1931) and Footnote to Fact (1933: Lewis Jacobs). Portrait of a Young Man in Three Movements (54 min) is one of the greatest cinema poems I have ever seen, a must see.

There are also some great classics, here, like:
Autumn Fire (1930-33)-Herman Weinberg (a 22 min. version!).
The Fall of the House of Usher (1926-27)-J.S. Watson, Jr. & Melville Webber
The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (1927)- Robert Florey & Slavko Vorkapich
The Love of Zero (1928)-Robert Florey & William Cameron Menzies
H20 (1929)-Ralph Steiner

The collection is on 7 disks, some of them more interesting than others. My personal favorite where the first four of them. The New York disc is probably interesting to people who live there or have been there. It did little for me and I think that the Amateur disk was a waste of time.

The transfer is quite good, often surprisingly good. The music varies. Some of it is quite fitting while others are just tiring. I for one liked the music on "Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s" better (comparing the films that both of the collections share).

The real downside to this collection is the extra material. The notes at the beginning of the films are way to short and the extra information on the PDF files are not so great either. I would like to see a better bio with filmography, and some commentaries would have been nice.

So this is a great collection for anyone seriously interested in film history and it's language. Others might want to stay away.

Awesome -- must be seen .......2005-11-22

Old weird Americana takes a bow in the sprawling and richly rewarding DVD set "Unseen Cinema." Running almost 20 hours, the collection provides ample evidence that bold experimental filmmaking thrived in the early days of moving pictures -- decades before the avant-garde torch-bearer "Un Chien Andalou" seared its way onto screens in 1929.

"Unseen" curator Bruce Posner says his goal was to "provide the broadest possible spectrum of experimental films produced between the 1890s and 1940s" -- roughly, the period from Thomas Edison to WWII. And so we have everything from home movies to lavish production numbers; wispy dance performances to strident union propaganda; gothic horror to languid studies of life on a farm. Many of these films have not been seen in decades and some were never screened for the public. Others, surprisingly, were products of the Hollywood studios.

The best of the early works are triumphs of the imagination over technical limits and creaky acting -- in quite a few, the wow factor remains potent. Watching the many bits of fantasy and cinematic sleights of hand, it's easy to draw a loopy line to the works of cinematic descendants such as Ray Harryhausen, Tim Burton and George Lucas.

Plenty of big names are represented in "Unseen" -- Welles, Sergei Eisnenstein, Ernst Lubitsch, Charles Vidor, Victor Fleming, Douglas Fairbanks, Busby Berkeley, Elia Kazan -- but the set shows that much of the heavy lifting in cinema's toddling years was done by inspired amateurs and free-thinking artists known for their work in other media.

The individual discs are arranged by theme, with titles such as "The Devil's Plaything" (surrealism and fantasy), "The Amateur as Auteur" (home movies) and "Inverted Narratives" (storytelling). New York City merits its own disc, with 29 films set in the metropolis (this fascinating time capsule is available separately, retail $24.99).

For orientation, there are informal but to-the-point on-screen notes before the films. The lack of commentaries undercuts the set's many obvious academic applications -- even so, it's a mind-expanding film course in a box. For extra credit, filmographies and biographical information can be accessed via DVD-ROM.

Some of the 155 shorts and excerpts have new recordings of their original music, some have newly written scores and others remain totally silent. In the case of the mind-bending "Ballet mecanique" (1923-24) the complex original score wasn't recorded as the filmmaker intended until five years ago. The DVD set's audio tracks sound as if they came from the same shop, cutting down on jarring transitions and smoothing the way for extended viewing.

The source materials -- rounded up from 60 or so archival collections around the globe -- were restored from 35mm and 16mm prints. The full-screen images are often surprisingly good but quality proves case-by-case, of course.

Massive Art-exhibition-in-a-box Collecfion of Avant-garde titles.......2005-11-03

The contents below are from unseen-cinema; they include the contents of a 160-page softcover Series Catalog, which is sold separately, but I think you would want. This is clearly a labor of love; though I can't imagine trying to watch all this in a month of Sundays, I could see dipping into it from time to time.

=====================================

Disk 1: THE MECHANIZED EYE
Experiments in Technique and Form

The dynamic qualities of motion pictures are explored by cameramen and filmmakers through novel experiments in technique and form. Early cinematographers James White, "Billy" Bitzer, and Frederick Armitage display experimental shooting styles that wowed audiences. Other independent companies further image manipulation through creative staging, editing, and printing, such as a stunning three-screen film that predates Gance's Napoleon. Experiments by photographer Walker Evans, painter Emlen Etting, musician Jerome Hill, and the film collectives Nykino and Artkino record the world in a continual process of flux. A most extreme approach is realized by Henwar Rodakiewicz with Portrait of a Young Man (1925-31), a monumental study of natural and abstract motions.

18 FILMS:
5 Paris Exposition Films (1900)-James White
Eiffel Tower from Trocadero Palace (1900)
Palace of Electricity (1900)
Champs de Mars (1900)
Panorama of Eiffel Tower (1900)
Scene from Elevator Ascending Eiffel Tower (1900)
Captain Nissen Going through Whirpool Rapids, Niagra Falls (1901)-creators unknown
Down the Hudson (1903)-Frederick Armitage & A.E. Weed
The Ghost Train (1903)-creators unknown
Westinghouse Works, Panorama View Street Car Motor Room (1904)-G.W. "Billy" Bitzer
In Youth, Beside the Lonely Sea (c. 1924-25)-creators unknown
Melody on Parade (c. 1936)-creators unknown
La Cartomancienne (The Fortune Teller) (1932)-Jerome Hill
Pie in the Sky (1934-35)-Nykino: Elia Kazan, Ralph Steiner & Irving Lerner
Travel Notes (1932)-Walker Evans
Oil: A Symphony in Motion (1930-33)-Artkino: M.G. MacPherson & Jean Michelson
Poem 8 (1932-33)-Emlen Etting
Storm (1941-43)-Paul Burnford
Portrait of a Young Man (1925-31)-Henwar Rodakiewicz

Disk 2: THE DEVIL'S PLAYTHING
American Surrealism

Edwin S. Porter and other early filmmakers used bizarre sets, fantastic costumes, and magic lantern tricks to illuminate their fantasy films. American parody supplied Douglas Fairbanks with enough unusual material to produce the truly surreal When the Clouds Roll By (1919). The expressionistic Cabinet of Dr. Calagari (1919) influenced American sensibilities throughout the 1920s as seen in Beggar of Horseback (1925), The Life and Death of 9413-A Hollywood Extra (1927) and The Telltale Heart (1928). The emphasis shifted when amateurs J.S. Watson, Jr., Joseph Cornell, and Orson Welles crafted a unique variety of American surrealism on film unfettered by European concerns.

17 FILMS:
Jack and the Beanstalk (1902)-Edwin S. Porter
Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906)-Edwin S. Porter
The Thieving Hand (1907)-creator unknown, Vitagraph
Impossible Convicts (1905)-G.W. "Billy" Bitzer
When the Clouds Roll By (1919)-Douglas Fairbanks & Victor Fleming (excerpt)
Beggar on Horseback (1925)-James Cruze (excerpt)
The Fall of the House of Usher (1926-27)-J.S. Watson, Jr. & Melville Webber
The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (1927)- Robert Florey & Slavko Vorkapich
The Love of Zero (1928)-Robert Florey & William Cameron Menzies
The Telltale Heart (1928)-Charles Klein
Tomatos Another Day (1930/1933)-J.S. Watson, Jr. & Alec Wilder
The Hearts of Age (1934)- William Vance & Orson Welles
Unreal News Reels (c. 1926)-Weiss Artclass Comedies (excerpt)
The Children's Jury (c. 1938)-attributed Joseph Cornell
Thimble Theater (c. 1938)-Joseph Cornell
Carousel: Animal Opera (c. 1938)-Joseph Cornell
Jack's Dream (c. 1938)-Joseph Cornell

Disk 3: LIGHT RHYTHMS
Music and Abstraction

The rhythmic elements of cinema are explored by artists and filmmakers fascinated by the abstract qualities of light. The American authors of avant-garde classics Le Retour á la raison (1923), Ballet mécanique (1923-24), Anémic cinéma (1926), and Une Nuit sur le Mont Chauve (1934), are finally acknowledged for their seminal artistic achievements made in Europe. Pioneer abstract films by Ralph Steiner, Mary Ellen Bute, Douglass Crockwell, Dwinnell Grant, and George Morris are compared and contrasted with Hollywood montages created by Ernst Lubitsch, Slavko Vorkapich, and Busby Berkeley. For the first time on video, composer George Antheil's original 1924 score accompanies Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy's film Ballet mécanique, a truly avant-garde cacophony of image and sound.

29 FILMS:
Le Retour à la raison (1923)-Man Ray
Ballet mécanique (1923-24)-Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy
Anémic cinéma (1924-26)-Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp)
Looney Lens: Anamorphic People (1927)-Al Brick
Out of the Melting Pot (1927)-W.J. Ganz Studio
H20 (1929)-Ralph Steiner
Surf and Seaweed (1929-30)-Ralph Steiner
7 Vorkapich Montage Sequences (1928-37)-Slavko Vorkapich
The Furies (1934)
Skyline Dance (1928)
Money Machine (1929)
Prohibition (1929)
The Firefly- Vorkapich edit (1937)
The Firefly-MGM release version (1937)
Maytime (1937)
So This Is Paris (1926)-Ernst Lubitsch (excerpt)
Light Rhythms (1930)-Francis Bruguière & Oswell Blakeston
Une Nuit sur le Mont Chauve (Night on Bald Mountain) (1934)-Alexandre Alexeieff & Claire Parker
Rhythm in Light (1934)-Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth & Melville Webber
Synchromy No. 2 (1936)-Mary Ellen Bute & Ted Nemeth
Parabola (1937)-Mary Ellen Bute & Ted Nemeth
Footlight Parade - "By a Waterfall" (1933)-Busby Berkeley
Glen Falls Sequence (1937-46)-Douglass Crockwell
Simple Destiny Abstractions (1937-40)-Douglass Crockwell
Abstract Movies (1937-47)-George L.K. Morris
Scherzo (1939)-Norman McLaren
Themis (1940)-Dwinell Grant
Contrathemis (1941)-Dwinell Grant
1941 (1941)-Francis Lee
Moods of the Sea (1940-42)-Slavko Vorkapich & John Hoffman

Disk 4: INVERTED NARRATIVES
New Directions in Story-Telling

Early directors D.W. Griffith and Lois Weber develop the radical language of cinema narrative through audience-friendly melodramas made for nickelodeon theaters. Experimental fantasies are depicted in such independent productions as Moonland (c. 1926), Lullaby (1929), and The Bridge (1929-30). Depression era films by socially-conscious filmmakers reshape drama as demonstrated in Josef Berne's brooding Black Dawn (1933) and Strand and Hurwitz's biting Native Land (1937-41): each pictures a raw reality. Parody and satire find their mark in Theodore Huff's Little Geezer (1932) and Barlow, Hay and Le Roy's Even as You and I (1937). David Bradley's Sredni Vashtar by Saki (1940-43) boasts an inadvertent post-modern attitude.

12 FILMS:
The House with Closed Shutters (1910)-D.W. Griffith & G.W. "Billy" Bitzer
Suspense (1913)-Lois Weber & Philips Smalley
Moonland (c. 1926)-Neil McQuire & William A. O'Connor
Lullaby (1929)-Boris Deutsch
The Bridge (1929-30)-Charles Vidor
Little Geezer (1932)-Theodore Huff
Black Dawn (1933)-Josef Berne & Seymour Stern
Native Land (1937-41)-Frontier Films: Leo Hurwitz & Paul Strand (excerpt)
Black Legion (1936-7)-Nykino: Ralph Steiner & Willard Van Dyke
Even As You and I (1937)-Roger Barlow, Harry Hay & Le Roy Robbins
Object Lesson (1941)-Christoher Young
"Sredni Vashtar" by Saki (1940-43)-David Bradley

Disk 5: PICTURING A METROPOLIS
New York City Unveiled
Only Unseen Cinema DVD released as a SINGLE

The DVD depicts dynamic images of New York City and scenes of New Yorkers among the skyscrapers, streets, and night life of America's greatest city during a half century of progress, while at the same time showing changes in film style and the history of cinema experiments. Avant-garde moments pop up in the most unlikely of places including turn-of-the-twentieth-century actualities, commercial and radical newsreels, and Busby Berkeley's "Lullaby of Broadway" from Gold Diggers of 1935. Included are spectacular prints of Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's Manhatta (1921), Robert Flaherty's Twenty-four-Dollar Island (c. 1926), Robert Florey's Skyscraper Symphony (1929), Jay Leyda's A Bronx Morning (1931), and Rudy Burckhardt's Pursuit of Happiness (1940).

26 FILMS:
The Blizzard (1899)-creators unknown
Lower Broadway (1902)-Robert K. Bonine
Beginning of a Skyscraper (1902)-Robert K. Bonine
Panorama from Times Building, New York (1905)-Wallace McCutcheon
Skyscrapers of NYC from North River (1903)-J.B. Smith
Panorama from Tower of the Brooklyn Bridge (1903)-G.W. "Billy" Bitzer
Building Up and Demolishing the Star Theatre (1902)-Frederick Armitage
Coney Island at Night (1905)-Edwin S. Porter
Interior New York Subway 14th Street to 42nd Street (1905)-G.W. "Billy" Bitzer
Seeing New York by Yacht (1902)-Frederick Armitage & A.E. Weed
2 Looney Lens: Split Skyscrapers (1924) and Tenth Avenue, NYC (1924)-Al Brick
4 Scenes from Ford Educational Weekly (1916-24)-creators unknown
Manhatta (1921)-Charles Sheeler & Paul Strand
Twentyfour-Dollar Island (c. 1926)-Robert Flaherty
Skyscraper Symphony (1929)-Robert Florey
Manhattan Medley (1931)-Bonney Powell
A Bronx Morning (1931)-Jay Leyda
Footnote to Fact (1933)-Lewis Jacobs
Seeing the World (1937)-Rudy Burckhardt
Pursuit of Hapiness (1940)-Rudy Burckhardt
Gold Diggers of 1935 - "Lullaby of Broadway" (1935)-Busby Berkeley (excerpt)
Autumn Fire (1930-33)-Herman Weinberg

Disk 6: THE AMATEUR AS AUTEUR
Discovering Paradise in Pictures

These home-made films incorporate avant-garde strategies and techniques to achieve a true sense of cinematic intimacy. Glimpses of life caught unawares are found in the home movies of Elizabeth Woodman Wright, Archie Stewart, Frank Stauffacher, and John C. Hecker. Poetic lyricism finds a voice in city symphonies: Lynn Riggs and James Hughes' A Day in Santa Fe (1931) and Rudy Burckhardt's Haiti (1938). Professionally minded films, like Theodore Case's sound tests (c. 1925) and Lewis Jacobs' Tree Trunk to Head (1938), operate from a similar home-spun perspective of sincerity. Joseph Cornell offers an enigmatic but lovely homage to childhood with Children's Trilogy (c. 1938).

20 FILMS:
7 Case Sound Tests (c. 1924-25)-Theodore Case & Earl Sponable
Windy Ledge Farm (c. 1929-34)-Elizabeth Woodman Wright
A Day in Santa Fe (1931)-Lynn Riggs & James Hughes
4 Stewart Family Home Movies (c. 1935-39)-Archie Stewart
Children's Party (c. 1938)-Joseph Cornell
Cotillion (c. 1938)-Joseph Cornell
The Midnight Party (c. 1938)-Joseph Cornell
Haiti (1938)-Rudy Burckhardt
Tree Trunk to Head (1938)-Lewis Jacobs
Bicycle Polo at San Mateo (1940-42)-Frank Stauffacher
1126 Dewey Avenue, Apt. 207 (1939)-John C. Hecker

Disk 7: VIVA LA DANCE
The Beginnings of Ciné-Dance

Dance and film have shared the aspiration to creatively sculpt motion and time. Some of the first films ever made featured Annabelle's skirt dance, hand-painted in glowing colors. Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis' innovations found their way into Diana the Huntress (1916) and The Soul of the Cypress (1920). Highly cinematic renditions of dance evolved in Stella Simon's Hände (1928), Hector Hoppin's Joie de vivre (1934), and Busby Berkeley's "Don't Say Goodnight" from Wonder Bar (1934). In counterpoint, ciné-dances by Mary Ellen Bute, Douglass Crockwell, Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren, Ralph Steiner, and Slavko Vorkapich dispensed with actual dancers in favor of color, shape, line, and form choreographed into abstract light-play.

33 FILMS:
7 Annabelle Dances and Dances (1894-1897)-W.K.L. Dickson, William Heise & James White
Davy Jones' Locker (1900)-Frederick Armitage
Neptune's Daughters (1900)-Frederick Armitage
A Nymph of the Waves (1900)-Frederick Armitage
Diana the Huntress (1916)-Charles Allen & Francis Trevelyan Miller (excerpt)
The Soul of the Cypress (1920)-Dudley Murphy
Looney Lens: Pas de deux (1924)-Al Brick
Hände: Das Leben und die Liebe eines Zärtlichen Geschlechts (Hands: The Life and Loves of the Gentler Sex) (1928)-Stella Simon & Miklos Bandy
Mechanical Principles (1930)-Ralph Steiner
Tilly Losch in Her Dance of the Hands (c. 1930-33)-Norman Bel Geddes
2 Eisenstein's Mexican Footage (1931)-Sergei Eisenstein (excerpts)
Oramunde (1933)-Emlen Etting
Hands (1934)-Ralph Steiner & Willard Van Dyke
Joie de vivre (1934)-Anthony Gross & Hector Hoppin
Wonder Bar: "Don't Say Goodnight" (1934)-Busby Berkeley (excerpt)
Dada (1936)-Mary Ellen Bute & Ted Nemeth
Escape (1938)-Mary Ellen Bute & Ted Nemeth
An Optical Poem (1938)-Oskar Fischinger
Abstract Experiment in Kodachrome (c. 1940s)-Slavko Vorpapich
NBC Valentine Greeting (1939-40)-Norman McLaren
Stars and Stripes (1940)-Norman McLaren
Tarantella (1940)-Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth & Norman McLaren
Spook Sport (1940)-Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth & Norman McLaren
Danse Macabre (1922)-Dudley Murphy
Peer Gynt (1941)-David Bradley, starring Charlton Heston (excerpt)
Introspection (1941/46)-Sara Kathryn Arledge

SERIES CATALOG
"Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941"

Unseen Cinema catalog features 30 essays, articles, and documents and 65 annotated photographs. Authors are scholars, critics, and filmmakers whose knowledge of the early avant-garde derives from either direct experience as a participant or years of scholarly research. Many hard-to-find photographs and sources detail the first decades of American experimental cinema in the United States and abroad.

Table of Contents
Foreword-Jan-Christopher Horak
Words and Pictures-annotated photographs
1. The Grand Experiment-Bruce Posner
2. Hollywood Extras: One Tradition of `Avant-Garde' Film in Los Angeles- David James
3. Emlen Etting: Three Films-R. Bruce Elder
4. The Attraction of Nature in Early Cinema-Scott MacDonald
5. "Le Retour á la raison": Hidden Meaning-Deke Dusinberre
6. Music for "Ballet Mécanique": 90s Technology Realizes a 20s Vision-Paul D. Lehrman
7. Sara Kathryn Arledge: "Introspection"-Terry Cannon
8. Busby Berkeley and America's Pioneer Abstract Filmmakers-Cecile Starr
9. Joseph Cornell: An Exploration of Sources-Lynda Roscoe Hartigan
10. Discussing D.W. Griffith-Jay Leyda
11. Maurice Tourneur and "The Bluebird"-Jan-Christopher Horak
12. Diva of Decadence: "Salome"-Kenneth Anger
13. W.K.L. Dickson: Pioneer Filmmaker-Paul Spehr
14. Elizabeth Woodman Wright: "Windy Ledge Farm"-Karan Sheldon & Bruce Posner
15. Robert Florey and the Hollywood Avant-Garde-Brian Taves
16. Working on "The City"-Henwar Rodakiewicz
17. Warren Newcombe: "The Enchanted City"-Stephen J. Schneider
18. My Films-J.S. Watson, Jr.
19. J.S. Watson, Jr.: "Nass River Indians"-Lynda Jessup
20. ...And Melville Webber-Dale Davis
21. Making "Twenty-four Dollar Island"-Robert Flaherty
22. Avant-Garde Production in America-Lewis Jacobs (excerpts)
23. Rutherford Boyd and "Parabola"-Douglas Dreishpoon
24. Notes on New Cinema of 1929 and 1930-Harry Alan Potamkin
25. Herman G. Weinberg: "Autumn Fire"-Robert A. Haller
26. Unanswered Questions: Eisenstein's "Qué Viva México!"-Herman G. Weinberg
27. My First Movie and "The Hearts of Age"-Orson Welles interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich
28. Highway 66: Montage Notes for a Documentary Film-Lewis Jacobs
29. The American Vanguard: Flux and Experience-R. Bruce Elder
30. New Artistic Process-Claire Parker and Alexandre Alexeieff

Average customer rating:

Your money's worth
classic crime is a bargain
For the price, this is one great set
On a 1 to 10 scale, this collection is rated: 5.6
A Great Deal for the Price!

Crime Classics 50 Movie Pack (12pc)
Starring: Edward G. Robinson , and Frank Sinatra
Manufacturer: Mill Creek Entertainment
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Action & Adventure | Genres | DVD | Video

Mystery | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

Action & Adventure | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

Mystery & Suspense | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

Deals Over $10 | DVD Blowouts | Stores | DVD | Video

All Blowouts | DVD Blowouts | Stores | DVD | Video

Movie Packs Under $20 | DVD Blowouts | Stores | DVD | Video
Similar Items:

Mystery & Murder - 25 Killer Crime Classics
Dark Crimes Collection: 50 Movie Pack
Suspense Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection
Mystery Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection
Nightmare Worlds 50 Movie Pack Collection

ASIN: B000NVIGDE
Release Date: 2007-04-10

Customer Reviews:

Your money's worth.......2007-06-08

I have purchased several 50 packs in this series, and while this is not 5 starworthy, it's still a good value for the money.

classic crime is a bargain.......2007-05-14

A great collection of crime thrillers from the 30's and 40's. These haven't been remastered so you get that great late night t.v. feeling when you watch them. I really enjoy these old films,especially the stars that got their early roles in them.My favorite movie in this set is Blonde Ice, probably one of the best femme fatale movies I've ever seen.
Sit back,pop some popcorn and enjoy some great movies.

For the price, this is one great set.......2007-05-09

I have bought many of these sets of 50 movies and for the most part have liked them all. Sure the transfers are not the best, but for the price what are you expecting to find. The movies run from good to bad and all points in between, but you'll find more than a few "Gems" in this one,so if you aren't hung up on great transfers check this one out

On a 1 to 10 scale, this collection is rated: 5.6.......2007-04-16

The CRIME CLASSICS 50 MOVIE PACK has one film in it that features 17 famous actors. Almost without exception though, this collection presents movies starring the no-name performers of the 'B' picture industry. These low-budget, quickly shot, edited and released three and four-reelers were once-upon-a-time the bread and butter of many a small and independent company. Even some of the bigger outfits, like RKO and UNIVERSAL, released their share of 'B's.

If you are unfamiliar with the likes of Frankie Darro, Kane Richmond, Jameson Thomas or Vivienne Osborn, the CRIME CLASSICS box set is a perfect opportunity for you to see how "the other half" kept themselves busy during Hollywood's Golden Era. And lest you think these forgotten titles aren't worthwhile-- look again. A good number of these are VERY well done!

Recommended for all fans of vintage motion pictures.

The 1 to 10 rating for CRIME CLASSICS was determined by averaging out user polling numbers maintained by a web-based film data site. The current average for this package is: 5.6.

This following alphabetized program list includes individual poll scores, years of release and primary actors.

(5.9) Big Town After Dark (1947) - Phillip Reed/Hillary Brooke/Richard Travis

(5.6) Black Gold (1936) - Frankie Darro/LeRoy Mason/Gloria Shea

(6.1) Blonde Ice (1948) - Robert Paige/Leslie Brooks/Russ Vincent

(6.1) Borderline (1950) - Fred MacMurray/Claire Trevor/Raymond Burr

(5.1) Born To Fight (1936) - Frankie Darro/Kane Richmond/Jack LaRue

(6.4) Bridge Of Sighs (1936) - Onslow Stevens/Dorothy Tree/Jack LaRue

(5.6) Circumstantial Evidence (1935) - Chick Chandler/Shirley Grey/Arthur Vinton

(3.9) Convicted (1931) - Aileen Pringle/Richard Tucker/Jameson Thomas

(2.2) Convicts At Large (1938) - Ralph Forbes/Paula Stone/William Royle

(5.5) The Dark Hour (1936) - Ray Walker/Berton Churchill/Irene Ware

(6.9) Death From A Distance (1935) - Russell Hopton/Lola Lane/George F. Marion

(5.3) Death In The Shadows (Netherlands-1985) - Maayke Bouten

(5.8) The Devil Diamond (1937) - Kane Richmond/Joan Gale/Frankie Darro

(5.9) Dick Tracy's Dilemma (1947) - Ralph Byrd/Lyle Latell/Kay Christopher

(5.3) Double Cross (1941) - Kane Richmond/Pauline Moore/Wynne Gibson

(6.1) Dr. Kildare's Strange Case (1940) - Lrw Ayres/Lionel Barrymore/Laraine Day

(5.8) Ellis Island (1936) - Donald Cook/Peggy Shannon/Jack LaRue

(5.9) Exile Express (1939) - Anna Sten/Alan Marshal/Jerome Cowan

(1.8) The Girl In Lover's Lane (1959) - Brett Halsey/Joyce Meadows/Jack Elam

(5.1) Hold That Woman! (1940) - James Dunn/Frances Gifford/George Douglas

(6.5) Hollywood Stadium Mystery (1938) - Neil Hamilton/Evelyn Venable/Smiley Burnette (bit part)

(6.3) The Hoodlum (1951) - Lawrence Tierney

(5.9) The King Murder (1932) - Conway Tearle/Natalie Moorhead/Marceline Day

(7.7) The Lady Confesses (1945) - Mary Beth Hughes/Hugh Beaumont/Edmund MacDonald

(6.5) The Lady In Scarlet (1935) - Reginald Denny/Patricia Farr/Jameson Thomas

(6.7) The Last Alarm (1940) - J. Farrell MacDonald/Polly Ann Young/Warren Hull

(5.2) Midnight Limited (1940) - John 'Dusty' King/Marjorie Reynolds/George Cleveland

(5.7) Murder At Dawn (1932) - Jack MulhallJosephine Dunn/Mischa Auer

(6.1) Murder At Glen Athol (1936) - John Miljan/Irene Ware/Iris Adrian

(6.4) Murder By Invitation (1941) - Wallace Ford/Marian Marsh/Sarah Padden

The Murder In The Museum (1934) - Henry B. Walthall/John Harron/Phyllis Barrington

(5.9) Murder On The Campus (1933) - Shirley Grey/Charles Starrett/J. Farrell MacDonald

(5.2) Night Life In Reno (1931) - Virginia Valli/Jameson Thomas/Dixie Lee

(4.5) The Opium Connection ("Poppies Are Also Flowers") - Senta Berger/Stephen Boyd/Yul Brynner/Angie Dickenson/Hugh Griffith/Jack Hawkins/Rita Hayworth/Trevor Howard/Trini Lopez/E.G. Marshall/Marcello Mastroianni/Anthony Quayle/Gilbert Roland/Omar Sharif/Barry Sullivan/Eli Wallach/Grace Kelly

(6.4) The Panther's Claw (1942) - Sidney Blackmer/Rick Vallin/Byron Foulger

(5.0) The Phantom Broadcast (1933) - Ralph Forbes/Vivienne Osborne/George 'Gabby' Hayes

(6.7) The President's Mystery (1936) - Henry Wilcoxon/Betty Furness/Sidney Blackmer

(6.3) Prison Train (1938) - Fred Keating/Dorothy Comingore/Clarence Muse

(???) Racing Blood - Frankie Darro/Kane Richmond/Gladys Blake

(7.0) The Red House (1947) - Edward G. Robinson/Judith Anderson

(5.2) Rogue's Gallery (1944) - Frank Jenks/Robin Raymond/H.B. Warner

(6.7) The Invisible Avenger (1958) - Richard Derr/Jeanne Neher/Dan Mullin

(5.2) Shadows On The Stairs (1941) - Frieda Inescort/Paul Cavanagh/Heather Angel

(6.2) Shoot To Kill (1947) - Russell Wade/Edmund MacDonald/Vince Barnett

(5.7) Sinister Hands (1932) - Jack Mulhall/Phyllis Barrington/Crauford Kent

(7.0) Suddenly (1954) - Frank Sinatra/Sterling Hayden

(5.2) They Never Come Back (1932) - Regis Toomey/Dorothy Sebastian/Edward Woods

(6.5) Tomorrow At Seven - Chester Morris/Vivienne Osborne/Frank McHugh

(6.0) Tough To Handle (1937) - Frankie Darro/Kane Richmond/Phyllis Cerf

(5.9) Whistle Stop (1946) - George Raft/Ava Gardner/Victor McLaglen

A Great Deal for the Price!.......2007-04-05

I have yet to see/purchase this but the titles are:

1. Big Town After Dark
2. Black Gold
3. Blonde Ice
4. Borderline
5. Born To Fight
6. Bridge of Sighs
7. Circumstantial Evidence
8. Convicted
9. Convicts At Large
10. Dark Hour, The
11. Death from a Distance
12. Death in the Shadows
13. Devil Diamond, The
14. Dick Tracy's Dilemma
15. Double Cross
16. Dr. Kildare's Strange Case
17. Ellis Island
18. Exile Express
19. Girl in Lover's Lane, The
20. Hold That Woman
21. Hollywood Stadium Mystery
22. Hoodlum, The
23. King Murder, The
24. Lady Confesses, The
25. Lady in Scarlet, The
26. Last Alarm, The
27. Midnight Limited
28. Murder At Dawn
29. Murder At Glen Athol
30. Murder By Invitation
31. Murder in the Museum
32. Murder on the Campus
33. Night Life in Reno
34. Opium Connection, The
35. Panther's Claw, The
36. Phantom Broadcast, The
37. President's Mystery, The
38. Prison Train
39. Racing Blood
40. Red House, The
41. Rogue's Gallery
42. Shadow, The: Invisible Avenger
43. Shadows on the Stairs
44. Shoot to Kill
45. Sinister Hands
46. Suddenly
47. They Never Come Back
48. Tomorrow at Seven
49. Tough to Handle
50. Whistle Stop

Reservoir Dogs: 10th Anniversary Special Edition (Digitally Mastered 2 DVDs Set)

Average customer rating:

Still a classic.

Reservoir Dogs: 10th Anniversary Special Edition (Digitally Mastered 2 DVDs Set)
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Manufacturer: Artisan Home Entertainment, Miramax Film
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Action & Adventure | Genres | DVD | Video

DVDs Under $7.49 | Today's Deals in DVD | Special Features | DVD | Video

Special Editions | Fully Loaded DVDs | Features | DVD | Video
Similar Items:

Pulp Fiction (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)
Kill Bill, Volume 1
GoodFellas (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Jackie Brown (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)
Carlito's Way

Product Features:

2 DVDs Set, Newly remastered 2.35:1 Widescreen enhanced 16:9 and 4:3 Full Screen Versions
22 Chapters, 100 minutes
Digitally Mastered/Interactive Menus/Scene Index/Special Features with never-before-seen Deleted Scenes and much more
Spanish Subtitles/English Closed Captioning
DTS Digital Surround Sound/5.1 Dolby Digital Audio/2.0 Dolby Digital Audio

ASIN: B000MGZVWY

Product Description

FOUR PERFECT KILLERS. ONE PERFECT CRIME. Critically acclaimed for its raw power and breathtaking ferocity, it's the brilliant American gangster movie classic from writer-director Quentin Tarantino. They were perfect strangers, assembled to pull off the perfect crime. Then their simple robbery explodes into a bloody ambush, and the ruthless killers realize one of them is a police informer. But which one? SPECIAL FEATURES INCLUDE: *Deleted Scenes (Included two never-before-seen alternate angles of the infamous "EAR" scene.) *All New Interviews with Quentin Tarantino, Lawrence Bender, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Michael Madsen, Eddie Bunker, Kirk Baltz and others! *A Tribute to Lawrence Tierney. *Reservoir Dogs Director Tribute: A focus on the filmmakers who influenced Quentin Tarantino's indie masterpiece. *The Class of '92: A retrospective look at the Indie films and filmmakers at the '92 Sundance Film Festival were Reservoir Dogs were introduced. *Small Dogs: Action Figure development Documentary. *Film Noir Web: The Writers and Directors behind the legacy and this classic genre. *Select Scene Audio Commentary featuring the Cast, the Crew and the Critics. *K-BILLY Interactive Radio, push the buttons to listen to some Super Sounds! Featuring surprise guests! *Reservoir Dogs Style Guide. *Securing the Shot: Location Scounting with Billy Fox. *Original Theatrical Trailer. *Poster Gallery. *And More!

Customer Reviews:

Still a classic........2007-06-23

Tarintino classic. What else needs to be said. This is the remastered version with special features, commentaries, etc. etc.,...great gangster/robber/bad cop/undercover cop movie. Cult classic.

The Most Dangerous Game/And Then There Were None

Average customer rating:

Oh come ON, my man GODFREY!!!
Oh, come ON, Mike !
MARENGO SHINES ON TWO GORGEOUS TRANSFERS
Finally, a decent transfer of these films...

The Most Dangerous Game/And Then There Were None
Starring: Most Dangerous Game , and Then There Were None
Manufacturer: Marengo Films
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

Suspense | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

Mystery | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

DVDs Under $9.99 | Today's Deals in DVD | Special Features | DVD | Video

( M ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video