Warner Home Video has been on a roll for the past year or so, serving up helping after tasty helping of its considerable back catalogue in the form of lovingly produced DVD box sets. These sets have been pure catnip for cinephiles – lavish special editions devoted to specific films (Gone With the Wind got a four-disc box all to itself), master directors (Hitchcock, Scorsese) and movie genres (film noir, classic gangster films) – and the quality control on all of them has been nothing less than astonishing.
Warners continues to raise the bar with the Classic Comedies Collection, an eight-disc set featuring six of Hollywood's finest and funniest films: Bringing Up Baby, Philadelphia Story, Libeled Lady, Dinner at Eight, Stage Door and To Be or Not To Be. It's no coincidence that all of these films hail from the late '30s to early '40s – audiences needed to laugh more than ever during the Great Depression – and each movie is a prime example of the sizzle and savvy that defined Hollywood's Golden Era.
The two big guns in the collection, Bringing Up Baby and Philadelphia Story, both star Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, and both are presented as fabulous two-disc sets. If you were to look up the word "madcap" in the dictionary you might well discover a mention of Bringing Up Baby, a movie that raises chaos to the level of fine art. In a nutshell, this is the quintessential screwball comedy, with a gloriously convoluted and breathlessly paced plot that does all sorts of absurdly unlikely things with an absent-minded paleontologist (Grant), a ditzy heiress (Hepburn) and a runaway leopard. The DVD features an informative commentary track from Peter Bogdanovich, as well as a pair of phenomenal feature-length documentaries on director Howard Hawks (focusing on his comedies) and Grant (in which we finally get some definitive info on that rumor about him taking LSD).
Grant and Jimmy Stewart engage in a tug of war for the affections of Hepburn – who is about to get hitched to a third character – in George Cukor's perfectly calibrated and deliciously cunning Philadelphia Story. The DVD includes a somewhat dull commentary track from historian Jeannine Basinger, but the other extras are sublime, from an illuminating documentary on Cukor to a Robert Benchley short to a pair of radio adaptations of Philadelphia Story from the mid-to-late '40s, both featuring the original trio of stars. Best of all is the exclusive documentary on Hepburn featuring scads of behind-the-scenes footage, out-Aviatoring The Aviator with shots of Kate playing a few rounds of golf with Howard Hughes.
Cukor strikes again in Dinner at Eight, a film that isn't actually quite a comedy but is filled with brilliant comedic moments. Ditto for Stage Door, a beautifully written movie (based on George S. Kaufman's play) about spunky young women trying to make it in a man's world. Dinner at Eight is part character study, part clever satire on the fine art of social climbing, and the DVD features an entertaining documentary on star Jean Harlow appropriately hosted by another generation's vamp du jour, Sharon Stone. Stage Door mixes its pathos with sparkling wit, with Hepburn and Ginger Rogers starring as aspiring actresses rooming together in a boarding house for women. The DVD also includes a rare, Busby Berkeley-like musical short featuring June Allyson and Phil Silvers (Sergeant Bilko) back when he had hair.
One of the collection's lesser-known gems is the stellar screwball comedy Libeled Lady. Jean Harlow gets top billing, but the film belongs to those old Thin Man partners-in-crime William Powell and Myrna Loy, as would-be lovers involved in an elaborate dance of seduction, betrayal, blackmail and other very funny stuff. The collection is rounded out by Ernst Lubitch's masterful To Be or Not To Be, starring Jack Benny (in his best role) and Carole Lombard (in her final role) as a couple of self-absorbed actors in the Nazi-occupied Poland of the early '40s. The film is a delight from beginning to end, and ranks among the best work by its director and stars. The DVD features an amusing, rare short starring Benny as an inebriated gadfly, and a promo for war bonds.
All of the DVDs in the Classic Comedies Collection feature meticulously restored sound and image, with rich, gorgeous black-and-white pictures and clean, distortion-free audio that belies the fact that most of these films are approaching 70 years old. In case you haven't already figured it out, these are some of the best and brightest films you will ever see – witty, sophisticated, literate, filled with boundless energy, smart, snappy dialogue and movie star charisma of the highest order. The DVDs are all available individually at reasonable prices, but you can also purchase the entire eight-disc set at many online spots for less than $50, which is less than half of what the movies cost individually. That's an absolute steal, especially when you consider that what you're getting here is basically priceless.
lance.Goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Apr 13-19, 2005.