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By Raymond Benson

Most of the available home video options for the works of Buster Keaton consist of his classic—and brilliant—independent films of the 1920s… movies like Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr., The Navigator, The General, Steamboat Bill Jr., among other features and many shorts. These have separately been repackaged and restored recently by companies like Kino Video and Cohen Media Group.

Now The Criterion Collection is grabbing a corner of the Buster Keaton market with the release of two of his pictures from the late 1920s, after the actor/director was forced to close his indie studio and sign a contract with MGM in order to survive. That’s right, Criterion’s new Blu-ray release of The Cameraman is a double feature! You get not only The Cameraman, Keaton’s 1928 first feature with MGM, but also the second title made with the studio,...

Alec Guinness: Before Obi-Wan Kenobi, there were the eight D’Ascoyne family members (photo: Alec Guiness, Dennis Price in ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’) (See previous post: “Alec Guinness Movies: Pre-Star Wars Career.”) TCM won’t be showing The Bridge on the River Kwai on Alec Guinness day, though obviously not because the cable network programmers believe that one four-hour David Lean epic per day should be enough. After all, prior to Lawrence of Arabia TCM will be presenting the three-and-a-half-hour-long Doctor Zhivago (1965), a great-looking but never-ending romantic drama in which Guinness — quite poorly — plays a Kgb official. He’s slightly less miscast as a mere Englishman — one much too young for the then 32-year-old actor — in Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), a movie that fully belongs to boy-loving (in a chaste, fatherly manner) fugitive Finlay Currie. And finally, make sure to watch Robert Hamer’s dark comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets...