"One of the conditions that I had before I would do War and Remembrance, was that ABC would have to give me carte blanche," recalls director/executive producer/co-screenwriter Dan Curtis. "I would not be edited in terms of pulling no punches because I thought to show the Holocaust in anything but its most brutal form would be a crime and I didn't want to be part of that."

In the follow-up to his highly successful miniseries The Winds of War, Curtis completed his saga of the Henry family and their journey through the history of World War II in War and Remembrance. As massive as its predecessor was — Curtis shot 1,000,000 ft (185 hours) of film from a 1,785-scene/962-page script that he edited down to 81,000 ft (15 hours) air time for Winds — Remembrance was even larger with a 2,079 scene/1,492-page script that resulted in 1,852,739 ft of raw footage that Curtis had to edit down to the 29-hour-plus final running time. In addition, there were 358 speaking parts, 30,310 extras, 263 sets in the U.S. part of the shoot and 757 additional sets in eight European countries. The filming took two years to complete and ABC split the project into two parts with War and Remembrance parts 1-7 debuting in November of 1988 and the conclusion, War and Remembrance: The Final Chapter airing in May of 1989.

The six-disc set of War and Remembrance: The Final Chapter from MPI Media Group encompasses the events surrounding the Henrys, a family of naval officers, from November 1943 through August of 1945 when the war was finally over. So careful were the researchers on this project that the backdrop story of the war could easily be used as a history primer. With bonus materials like Curtis' commentary on key scenes, a spotlight on composer Robert Cobert who created what was then the longest motion picture score of all time, and the documentary War and Remembrance — Behind the Scenes, this box set holds more than 12 hours of content and a CD of Cobert's haunting music.

- Darrell Hope

In a Lonely Place (1950)
Directed by Nicholas Ray

Humphrey Bogart plays Dixson Steele, a disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter with a violent temper in director Nicholas Ray's noir classic murder mystery, In a Lonely Place. As director Curtis Hanson says in the documentary In a Lonely Place: Revisited, accompanying the recent Columbia/TriStar Home Video release, "In a Lonely Place is a title that works on several levels. First there's the lonely place of any man, any human struggling with their internal demons. Then there's the lonely place that an artist exists in. Then, of course, it's the lonely place of a world without love. One of the things that is unique about the film is that it is about a murder. Who killed Mildred Atkinson? Yet, as the movie unfolds, that is a question that is not of great interest to the key characters or in fact to us except in how it impacts the key characters."

Hanson has long admired the film and says that when he became a filmmaker he developed a new appreciation for it. "What I came to realize is that you're not just seeing a great performance by an actor [Bogart], but you're seeing the essence of that actor and, in fact, you're seeing the essence of the filmmaker himself. This kind of collaboration between actor and director is, for me, the highest thing to aspire to. I think every really good actor longs for that kind of collaboration, but you can only have it if you have trust, if you have a director who is out there with them creating a movie that supports that kind of performance. When a collaboration works that way, there is a kind of marriage of acting and style that is staggering."

Hanson covers many aspects of the film, visiting actual shooting locations, pointing out that while Ray studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright, he isn't certain how much this consciously influenced the director. He does, however, feel that with In a Lonely Place, Ray was able to flawlessly capture a sense of geography both in his selection and design of locations. Also included in this DVD package is a very informative short documentary on Sony Pictures digital restoration of the film.

-Ted Elrick

Anchor Bay Entertainment's esoteric forays into the nostalgic arcana of British cinema's forgotten past, continues with a super gathering of six films starring Peter Sellers, perhaps that most peculiar of hybrids; parochial English comedian, turned international jet-setting movie star. The Smallest Show on Earth (1957) directed by Basil Dearden, features the comic as Percy Quill, drunken-old-sot projectionist of a crumbling neighborhood theatre; Carlton Browne of the F.O. (1958) directed by Roy Boulting and Jeffrey Dell, is the funny alternative to The Quiet American or The Tailor of Panama, with Sellers as the bumbling Foreign Office cove who inadvertently sparks a revolution and the possibility of nuclear meltdown — I'm Alright Jack (1959) directed by John Boulting, presents the character of Fred Kite, rabid mad-dog trade union shop steward, with a fondness for industrial strikes and the communist lifestyle; Two-Way Stretch (1960) directed by Robert Day, finds cheeky cockney Sellers as Dodger Lane, petty criminal and wide-boy; Heavens Above! (1963) directed by John Boulting and Roy Boulting, gives the comedian an early "stretch" as a charming, cheerful priest, struggling for equality in an unequal world — and Hoffman (1970) directed by Alvin Rakoff, which finds Sellers in "international" actor mode, serious, streamlined, polished — a far cry from the innocent fun of the earlier works. Watching these films back-to-back is to witness a strange transformation; In his 30s the star is a jovial, saucy, portly chap — a clown clearly enjoying donning different wigs and makeup and clothes, but by his 40s, and following a life-threatening heart attack, his subsequent weight loss, physical streamlining and leading-man/lover-boy image, is one of the more startling makeovers in movie history. This collection is short on extras, but you sort of don't need any. Peter Sellers, in his various incarnations, dominates the landscape totally. He is the box set.

In Barbet Schroeder's La Vallée (Obscured by Clouds) (1972) from Home Vision Entertainment, Michael Gothard (unforgettable as the Inquisitor in Ken Russell's The Devils), gets to play a character Peter Sellers might have coveted — that of a bonkers hippie living in a New Guinea commune, smoking dope, seeking enlightenment as well as some sacred bird's feathers and who is inspired to strip naked and jump on beautiful Bulle Ogier five minutes after meeting her. Set to the dreamy music of Pink Floyd, the flower children get to wander in the forests, tumble in the jungles, rub shoulders with the natives and have a lot of sex while spouting various philosophical doctrines in French. Finally when they reach the vaunted valley of myth, they fall to the ground and presumably become obscured by clouds. Reaching further back into the mists of impenetrable French artistry, Criterion brings us Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), un film de Robert Bresson, which inspired hatred from the populace upon its initial release, but is now retroactively regarded as a head-scratching work of art. Bresson has never made easy pictures, but this mordant tale of love and scandal must have had post-WWII audiences sitting in stupefied silence. Trusty scribe David Thomson makes an admirable case for the movie in his (as always) eloquent booklet essay. Credited as dialogue writer on Les Dames is Jean Cocteau, who made his own memorable splash a year later with La Belle et La Bete (1946), just issued by Criterion in a splendiferous special edition. Cocteau's directorial debut is masterly, and remains one of the most haunting fantasies in all filmdom. Criterion's lovely transfer is supplemented by knowledgeable commentaries from Arthur Knight and Christopher Frayling, as well as a 1995 documentary on its creation.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) from directors Volker Schlondorff and Margarethe Von Trotta, (a married couple at the time), is remarkably prescient with its story, based on a novel by Heinrich Boll, of counter-terrorism tactics in the Germany post-1972 Munich disaster. Katharina Blum's life is destroyed when she is accused of harboring a suspected terrorist by the excessive zealousness of authorities whose sense of democracy and fairness has been undermined by fear and outrage. Amy Taubin's smart, sharp, liner notes draw taut parallels with contemporary society, as well as placing Schlondorff and Von Trotta's work in its proper context. There are also video interviews with both directors as well as one with cinematographer Jost Vacano.

Sticking with Criterion, the double bill of both versions of The Killers is a knockout package. The first, directed by Robert Siodmak in 1946, presents the movie in its most glorious home-video form ever. The striking black-and-white imagery glows luminously, as the short story by Ernest Hemingway is brought to vivid noir-life. This was Burt Lancaster's debut, and although he occupies little screen time, his stardom was clearly assured. Edmond O'Brien is terrific as the insurance investigator who struggles to uncover the mystery, and it's interesting that in the remake, directed for television by Don Siegel in 1964, the O'Brien character is dropped in favor of "the Killers" themselves trying to solve the plot instead. Played by Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager, these killers are cool, jazzy thugs, and likewise with Lancaster (as the Swede) in the earlier film, Lee Marvin cements his place as an A-list star. Criterion gives us a wealth of extras in this double-disc set and two really stand out: the inclusion of a student short based on the same source material directed by legendary Russian helmer Andrei Tarkovsky, which is primitive and over-artified but still a priceless piece of cinema history, and a video interview with Clu Gulager about the remake's production, which has to be seen to be believed. Partially masked by artfully placed shrubbery, his head shot from various angles, Clu proceeds to give us a lesson in the "method," torturously explaining his role in the proceedings across 20 or so minutes, he emotes, strains, pauses, reaches and searches among the leaves for the answers to life's vagaries. You half expect Lee Strasberg to emerge from somewhere, giving pointers on the performance and, worst of all, asking old Clu to stop, go back to the top, and begin the damn thing all over again.

For a different look at thugs and crime, one can't do better than the BBC Home Video three-disc set of director Jon Amiel's 1986 miniseries The Singing Detective. Actor Michael Gambon plays a mystery writer suffering a torturous bout of psoriatic arthritis in a British hospital, where he is a victim of both his disease and the national health plan. Unable to move without pain, he escapes into his imagination, plotting out a murder tale in which he is both a big-band singer and a private eye. The exhaustive audio commentary by Amiel and producer Kenneth Trodd covers every aspect of the series, ranging from casting, stylistic choices, Gambon's extensive body makeup, staging musical numbers as well as the collaboration with writer Dennis Potter. Glimpses into British television production are all too rare, and with the audio commentary, numerous "point of view" articles, critical analysis by David Bianculli and a rare filmed interview with Potter, this DVD package is a welcome addition, providing many hours of insight into a remarkable television production.

Italian science fiction flicks are thin on the ground, but Blue Underground has dug up a doozy here with Luigi Cozzi's Contamination (1980), a cheesy rip-off of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979). The plot is irrelevant except that stuff bursts out of people's heads and chests with alarming frequency. Cozzi's film is certainly in a league by itself, and the director describes his movie in the "making of" documentary with the solemnity of someone who's been given custody of the dead sea scrolls. Mr. Cozzi's head though doesn't explode, it merely expands. The film has been mastered in 6.1 DTS-ES, which is important, as regular 5.1 just wouldn't have done it justice.

Having the last word or laugh, this month is Martin Scorsese, whose startling The King of Comedy (1982) ages as well as anything over its two-decade lifespan. Robert De Niro's turn as Rupert Pupkin now seems like a documentary in our age of reality TV and 15-minute celebrities being manufactured on a daily basis. What was dismissed as merely freakish is now disturbingly commonplace, and the terrifying stalker-turned-talk-show-host narrative crackles with freshly minted venom. Fox Home Entertainment's release is short on supplementals, one really misses a Scorsese commentary, but it's good to have it in your hands where it's a crisp reminder of what artists can do at the top of their game.

It's not often that a studio does a complete turnaround in support for a motion picture within a matter of weeks. One such occasion was the 1976 release of The First Nudie Musical. In an hour-long documentary, From Dollars to Donuts: An Undressing of the First Nudie Musical, which, by the way, also features an audio commentary, found on the recent Image Entertainment release of the film, co-director, writer and actor Bruce Kimmel explains the controversy.

Originally Paramount was impressed with the film, likening Kimmel to Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. The studio was so enthused about the first cut, they put up an additional $75,000, half the film's original budget, to shoot one more musical number. Unfortunately, one of the film's stars, Cindy Williams, who plays a director's assistant and doesn't appear nude in the film, had just worked on the first few episodes of Paramount's Laverne and Shirley. It dawned on Paramount that their new family-hour television star was in a film called The First Nudie Musical.

"Suddenly, I stopped hearing, 'Bruce, there's Mel, there's Woody, and there's you,' " Kimmel says. "They had to contractually release it in a certain number of theaters, but they were petrified." According to Kimmel, Paramount then embarked on a number of strategies to bury the movie — not arranging for any critics screenings and waiting to put ads out until the day the film opened. "Interestingly it worked in our favor, because suddenly the critics began wondering, 'Why is Paramount trying to sneak this one over on us?' So they paid to go see the film." Gradually, favorable reviews and word-of-mouth, as well as a personal campaign by Kimmel led to The First Nudie Musical reaching number four on the top box-office list just behind Star Wars, You Light Up My Life and The Spy Who Loved Me, playing at one New York theater for more than three months. In addition to the documentary, this extensive DVD package features a restored version of the film, two running audio commentaries with Kimmel, Williams and actor Stephen Nathan, deleted scenes, and a CD of the film's musical numbers.

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