News

Warner Archive Collection 4th anniversary DVD / Blu-ray releases The Warner Archive Collection (aka Wac), which currently has a DVD / Blu-ray library consisting of approximately 1,500 titles, has just turned four. In celebration of its fourth anniversary, Wac is releasing with movies featuring the likes of Jane Powell, Eleanor Parker, and many more stars and filmmakers of yesteryear. (Pictured above: Greer Garson, Debbie Reynolds, Ricardo Montalban in the sentimental 1966 comedy / drama with music The Singing Nun.) For starters, Jane Powell and Debbie Reynolds play siblings in Richard Thorpe's Athena (1954), whose supporting cast includes Edmund Purdom, Vic Damone, frequent Jerry Lewis foil Kathleen Freeman, Citizen Kane's Ray Collins, Tyrone Power's then-wife Linda Christian, former Mr. Universe and future Hercules Steve Reeves, veteran Louis Calhern, not to mention numerology, astrology, and vegetarianism. As per Wac's newsletter, the score by Hugh Martin and Martin Blane "gets a first ever Stereophonic Sound remix for this disc,...

When Earl Baldwin died in 1970, he rated a few perfunctory lines in Variety. I'd like to rectify in some small way the injustice of it all—you see, Baldwin wrote for Hollywood when the studio system was cranking out generic masterpieces by the dozen. Today's lesson concerns the neglected scribes whose gift of gab helped put a beat behind the Depression."Kidding on the level," they used to call it, honest finger-pointing that masquerades as harmless fun.

Since the studio style more or less dictated how films moved, screenwriters found themselves not only camouflaged but pretty well subsumed. With this in mind, I'll limit my panegyric to a sad and sweet indictment wrapped in a programmer, 1933's Blondie Johnson. Baldwin wrote the original story and screenplay, which dovetail with the schematic plot one might expect from Warner Bros.—it's a picture about a decent girl who, losing her mother to poverty and illness,...