1. The Elia Kazan Collection
He changed everything. Before Kazan, movie and stage acting occupied a realm of easy glamour. But with A Streetcar Named Desire, which he directed on Broadway in 1947 and filmed in 1951, pop culture was yanked into real life, and Marlon Brando became the stud-saint of a new acting style. Kazan's direction of Brando in On the Waterfront and James Dean in East of Eden defined and sanctified the image of the beautiful, battered outsider. Fox's 18-disc package spans Kazan's most productive two decades, from the aching family drama A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1944) to the 1963 America, America, Kazan's epic biography of his own Greek uncle. Big bonus: Martin Scorsese's A Letter to Elia, a poignant memoir-doc of a young man's love for the rough mastery of a mentor's films.
2. Frank Sinatra Concert Collection
He was a recording artist — savor both those words — and made a few movies. But for Sinatra, the true kick was "when you get to sing to a real, live, right-now, breathing type of audience." He said this in 1965, on the first of 11 TV concerts amassed here by Shout Factory. By that year, Sinatra hadn't had a top-20 hit in seven years (though he'd get to No. 1 in 1966 with a song he hated, "Strangers in the Night"). But the man kept singing on TV through the mid-'80s, and this sumptuous, enthralling, sometimes poignant (when the older Blue Eyes fudges the high notes) collection is the definitive record of a nonpareil singer in his late prime and beyond. Stick-skinny or less so, and outfitted in a tux and a knowing smile, he sometimes tries new material for "the kids today"; but you can skip his stabs at "Ode to Billie Joe" and "Goin' Out of My Head," and attend to the subtly different readings in his seven renditions of Rodgers and Hart's "The Lady Is a Tramp," or eight of Cole Porter's "I Get a Kick Out of You." Revel too in his gigs with Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie and daughter Nancy, who handed Dad his last No. 1 hit, "Something Stupid."
3. Presenting Sacha Guitry
Guitry was the very model of the charming, prolific showman: author of some 120 plays, star and impresario of 40-plus films and married five times, always to an actress from one of his productions. His lightly roguish Story of a Cheat (1936) consists of narration but virtually no dialogue. The Pearls of the Crown (1937), which leaps from the courts of Henry VIII and the Medicis to modern times, boasts dialogue in French, English, Italian and a faux-Abyssinian intoned by the French actress Arletty in dusky makeup and a live python necklace. Most of the films starred Guitry's third wife, Jacqueline Delubac, who in one Pearls scene speaks only in adverbs. This Eclipse/Criterion box, which also includes Desire and Quadrille, is a slimmed-down version of a nine-film set released in France two years ago. It's a fine introduction to the grand Guitry.
4. Clint Eastwood: 35 Films, 35 Years
Old cowhand, Oscar-winning director and our era's most enduring star, Eastwood has made most of his films for one studio: Warner Bros. Actually, this essential set covers 40-plus years, from the 1968 Where Eagles Dare to last year's Invictus, and a couple films were released by other studios. But who's going to quibble with Dirty Harry? It's a lavish package that reminds you of the tall man's scope beyond the scowl: the Charlie Parker bio-pic Bird nestles up against the monkey movies Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can, then explodes into maturity with Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby. You'll need to go elsewhere for early Eastwood — say, to the new Blu-ray edition of his and Sergio Leone's Man With No Name trilogy — but the grand bulk of the Clint legacy is in this box, plus a taste of Richard Schickel's recent docu-tribute.
5. America Lost and Found: The BBS Story
In the Vietnam years, as the nation swirled toward revolution or anarchy, a few Hollywood insiders created strong films with an anti-Hollywood streak, and the in-house indie movement was born. Producer Bert Schneider and writer-director Bob Rafelson created The Monkees, the 1966 TV show about an American Beatles-like band, then trashed the quartet's perky image with an avant-surreal movie, Head — co-written by a struggling actor named Jack Nicholson. When Nicholson joined two other actors, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, to make the dopester anthem Easy Rider, Rafelson and Schneider put up the money, and BBS was born. This Criterion set includes five other worthy BBS films, including Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces and Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, from a production company that briefly, brilliantly, showed old Hollywood how it might mature in the modern era. That the industry ignored BBS's example is a dispiriting end to a glorious story.
6. The Tom Lehrer Collection
In the '50s came a Harvard man — a math professor by trade — with a crew cut, a strangulated tenor and a way of forcing parables of antisocial behavior (e.g., incest) into jolly rhyme schemes ("I'd rather marry a duck-billed pledipus/ Than end up like old Oedipus/ Rex"). For a few years, on albums and in concerts, Lehrer was a comedy hero to the intelligentsia and other lonely people. He surfaced briefly to write songs for the TV shows That Was the Week That Was (no one, not even those who tried, can forget "National Brotherhood Week") and The Electric Company (kids hummed "Silent E" for minutes on end), then retreated to his blackboard. So the Shout Factory compilation of his collected works on CD — plus a DVD of a 1967 Lehrer concert — is cause for temperate rejoicing by word nerds of all ages. Everyone, sing a chorus of "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park."
7. Red Riding Trilogy
"This is the North, where we do what we want." Britain's Channel 4 turned David Pearce's four-novel study of corruption and heartbreak in the Yorkshire police-business establishment of the 1970s and '80s into three feature films, each with a different director and shot in a different format. Andrew Garfield (of The Social Network) is the brazen journalist of the first film in the series, which then draws other decent souls — an honest cop, an out-of-luck lawyer — into the pandemic of corruption. Grim as gruel, and must-see TV, the series is like Law and Order as seen by The Sopranos. The accents are so thick that you'll be grateful for the DVD's subtitles.
In his silent serials Fantômas, Les Vampires and Judex, French director Louis Feuillade created the prototype and apotheosis of every hurtling action film and crime caper. The first, in 1913 and '14, was the five-feature serial Fantômas, in which a mysterious arch-fiend (René Navarre) terrorizes prewar Paris. Now restored and preserved in a Kino box set, this pulp thriller epic remains as fresh, astonishing and satisfying as it was nearly a century ago.
9. Vitaphone Cavalcade of Musical Comedy Shorts Collection
Once the movies started talking, with 1927's The Jazz Singer, they also had to sing, dance and tell jokes. Studios ransacked vaudeville for any act that could make an impact in a 10-min. short. This six-disc set, from the Turner Classic Movies Vault Collection (not available on Amazon), contains 53 one- and two-reel antiques with such stars as the Nicholas Brothers, sassy Patsy Kelly and, as part of the Gumm Sisters, a very young Judy Garland. But the real kick is discovering the forgotten comedy duos, eccentric dancers and other staples of the vaudeville circuit. At times you'll wonder, "That's entertainment?" Yes, it was — and to connoisseurs of vintage showbiz oddities, it still fabulously is.
10. The Day Today
Take the best American TV comedy, make it smarter and meaner, and you have British TV satire. The form's most ruthless exponent was Chris Morris, who this year made his feature-film debut with the rollicking Islamo-terrorist comedy Four Lions but is best known in Britain as the star and co-creator of the 1994 news-burlesque The Day Today. Morris would lead off with some shouted headlines ("Exploded Cardinal Preaches Sermon from Fish Tank"), investigate some big story (a Buckingham Palace fist fight between the Queen and then-Prime Minister John Major) and broadcast a disaster video sent in by viewers ("The unnamed woman had been pierced by a shaft of frozen urine which had fallen from the toilet facility of an overhead plane"). Morris and his team, including feckless sportscaster Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan, who shortly spun the character off into several popular TV series), would also go on the street to interview prominent politicians and innocent citizens, whose comments would be aired blissfully out of context. Before The Daily Show, The Day Today mocked the news-show format and made important people look silly. You'll need an all-region DVD player for this set, but it's worth the effort.