“As sure as my name is Boris Karloff, this is a thriller.” Hosted by Boris Karloff (who plays it straight with theatrical flourish grounded in easy-going dignity and knowing humor), this television horror anthology of the early 1960s began as an awkward mix of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Naked City, favoring psychological dramas and crime stories over tales of terror.

“The Twisted Image,” the first episode of the series, is in fact a pretty interesting (if a little outré) piece of genre TV, with Leslie Nielsen bringing a touch of smarmy arrogance to his role as a business executive and family man picked out by an obsessive young woman (Natalie Trundy) with piercing eyes and delusions of a relationship. As she transforms from nuisance to would-be homewrecker hounding his wife with phone call confessions, the tale gets tangled in the parallel story of a mailroom employee (George Grizzard) who is equally disconnected from reality as he passes himself off as Nielsen’s character. As a thriller it’s a bit clumsy and overworked and the climax can’t really sell the concept, but as a portrait of early sixties social culture twisted up by suspicion and psychosis it’s downright fascinating.

The show stayed with this direction for a dozen or so episodes (as evidenced by this box set) before producers at the tiller charted a more effective course through supernatural stories, classic horrors and Twilight Zone-styled twists tales of the fantastic, the episodes that eventually made its reputation as a minor classic of its era and inspired Stephen King to cite it his favorite TV horror show of all time. The show turned to stories by Edgar Allan Poe, August Derleth, Cornell Woolrich and Robert “Psycho” Bloch and scripts by Hollywood screenwriter Barre Lyndon and Twilight Zone veteran Charles Beaumont, while such screen veterans as John Brahm, Ida Lupino, John Newland, Arthur Hiller and Ray Milland directed stand-out episodes. Guest stars include the usual suspects of early sixties TV, including up-and-comers William Shatner, Richard Chamberlain, Cloris Leachman, Mary Tyler Moore, Elizabeth Montgomery, George Kennedy, Bruce Dern, Robert Vaughn and Warren Oates and former screen stars and respected character actors Mary Astor, John Carradine, Jeanette Nolan, Jocelyn Brando, J. Pat O’Malley, Patricia Medina and others. Karloff himself takes roles in a few shows too, playing a stage mind reader in “The Prediction” who is suddenly blessed—or cursed—with the ability to actually see future, but only tragedies, and of course no one will heed his warnings, and as an aging millionaire with a fear of being buried alive in an adaptation of Poe’s “The Premature Burial.”

“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” an episode from late in season one adapted from a Robert Bloch story by Barre Lyndon and directed by Ray Milland, is a series stand-out, a smartly scripted tale of a British detective (John Williams, a veteran of Alfred Hitchcock films and TV shows) with a theory that Jack the Ripper is an immortal who reappears at various time and places in history to perform ritual killings to keep his youth and immortality. New York is his next stop and his predictions lead the police to the artist underground of Greenwich Village. It’s a snappy little show with a parody of bohemian culture and a clever little surprise climax. The earlier season one episode “The Cheaters,” the show’s first Robert Bloch adaptation, which follows a pair of glasses that gives the wearer the ability to hear the truth behind the lies of others. The result is madness and murder because (to paraphrase a classic movie line) some people can’t handle the truth. “Guillotine,” a Charles Beaumont adaptation of a Cornell Woolrich, is a period thriller of murder and poetic justice with Robert Middleton as a humble man who happens to be the dreaded executioner M. de Paris, and thus the target of a condemned man whose only hope of escape is to prevent the executioner from meeting his appointment.

But the jewel in the crown is “Pigeons From Hell,” one of the creepiest horror tales ever made for television. Adapted from a story by Robert E. Howard, it’s a haunted house tale with a jolt of voodoo and southern gothic melodrama in an abandoned antebellum mansion almost reclaimed by the swamps, where two brothers lost on a road trip take refuge. The acting is a little overcharged (Brandon de Wilde proved himself much better such films as All Fall Down and Hud) but the imagery and atmosphere created by director John Newland is superb.

The series is less well known than The Twilight Zone or the The Outer Limits but it completes the triumvirate of sixties American television of the fantastic and is a minor classic of its era, as this long-awaited set finally reveals. 67 episodes on 14 discs in a box set of seven thinpak cases, with most of the episodes looking quite good. There is commentary on 27 episodes by series producers, episode stars and horror experts and aficionados (among them horror David Schow, soundtrack authority Jon Burlingame, Twilight Zone historian Marc Scott Zicree, Mario Bava historian Tim Lucas and filmmakers Jim Wynorski, Ernest Dickerson and Larry Blamire), plus isolated scores on select episodes spotlighting the music of Jerry Goldsmith and others, episode promos and still galleries.

Chris O'Donnell and LL Cool J flank Daniela Ruah in their funky NCIS:LA HQ

The series was essentially launched in a two-part NCIS story from Season Six (which ends with O’Donnell’s character in a near-fatal event) and those episodes kick off the DVD and Blu-ray release, which begins with O’Donnell’s recovery and Linda Hunt taking over the role of L.A. unit commander. O’Donnell and Cool J (or is just J?) have a fine rapport and Hunt makes her part as colorful as can be, tossing off stories of a wild past with perfect nonchalance between kick-ass and providing sage leadership, but the rest of the cast is stock: driven, eccentric, awkward, overeager, pick your mix. It’s all about the energized action, the cool tech and the momentum, all of which made this a top ten show and the number two rated scripted drama in TV (right behind the original NCIS) in its debut season. Rocky Carroll provides some continuity reprising his role as NCIS Director in numerous episodes and Pauley Perrette’s Abby (everyone’s favorite forensic tech on TV) guests on two episodes.

24 episodes on six discs (five on Blu-ray) plus the two original NCIS episodes, which makes this a pretty packed set even before the supplements. There’s the usual behind-the-production featurettes—in particular the 16-minute “Inspired Television: NCIS: LA” and the 21-minute “The L.A. Team: Meet the Cast and Crew,” both of which are informative and interesting enough—but the most enlightening is “Do You Have A Visual? Inside the Ops Center,” a ten-minute featurette that covers everything from creating the surveillance footage to showing how the interactive computer screens actually function (and yes, the actors really learned to use the screen). Also includes commentary by creator/producer Shane Bennan on the official debut episode, a set tour, a stunt featurette and a music video. The Blu-ray is BD-Live enabled.

“For over a century, I have lived in secret. Until now.” The Vampire Diaries: The Complete First Season (Warner), the buzz show on the CW for the 2009-2010 seaso,n isn’t exactly a Twilight copycat—”The Vampire Diaries” book series was around before the “Twilight” and this is decidedly Southern Gothic rather than Northwest gloom—but one tortured teen and tormented vampire melodrama certainly helped get the other on air. This one is more of a True Blood: 90120, with the One Tree Hill small town vibe. Or maybe a teen Dark Shadows. Or you can fill in your own mix-and-match comparison.

The show is about Cain and Abel vampire brothers (Paul Wesley as the good Stefan and Ian Somerhalder as the bad, darkly seductive Damon) who, despite being over 160 years old, both fall in love with high school girl Elena (Nina Dobrev) who is the spitting image of the southern belle who turned them both into bloodsuckers. I found the first few episodes insufferably bad and gave up on it back when I first checked out the series in Fall 2009. Revisiting the show on Blu-ray I stuck through the purple prose and goopy adolescent romance of longing looks and hormonal impulses until the creators calmed down and let the characters settle in and the mythology and melodrama take hold. Flashbacks give us the origins of Stefan and Damon and the legacy of Elena’s 19^th century doppelganger, while back in the present her best friend Bonnie (Katerina Graham) turns out to be descended from a long line of witches and goes all Willow on the show. And just to add some daylight to the otherwise nocturnal palette, there are all sorts of mythological additions that allow our undead heroes and villains to walk in the sunlight (and without sparkling!). By the end of the season, broody heroine Elena discovers a deep, dark legacy and a Buffy-sized army of ancient undead ready to take their revenge on a town with a lot of secrets behind the shadows.

It’s still pure teen soap opera, with all the pretty young kids and jealous boyfriends and girlfriends you can shake a stake at, with the added bonus of supernatural players and gothic depths of atmosphere and vampire seduction. And a body count. This is one young adult romance where giving in can have fatal consequences. But I still have one question: what is so romantic about men who are over a hundred years old crushing on teenage girls?

22 episodes on five discs, plus the very good 25-minute featurette “Into Mystic Falls,” which delves into the inspiration, creation and development of the series with author L.J. Smith, producers/creators Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec, supervising director Marcos Siega and the stars. Also includes commentary on the pilot episode, featurettes on the casting and the popularity of vampires in popular culture, webisodes, gag reel and a downloadable audiobook reading of the original novel.

It’s always been a tricky balance to keep House interesting while hewing to what has become a familiar formula: medical mystery, failed attempts at diagnosis and cure followed by inspiration, insight and cure, flavored by the House blend of insults and sarcasm. House: Season Six (Universal) opens with TV’s favorite Vicadin-popping, soap opera-addicted, misanthrope medical genius (Hugh Laurie) in rehab, or rather in a psychiatric hospital, where he duels with his doctor (Andre Braugher) and plays mind-games with the staff and patients. He’s in as a voluntary patient but his medical license is at stake, which gives Braugher’s doctor leverage to get beyond the physical addiction and give House the tools to manage the rest of his life.

Suffice it to say that, after initial resistance, he returns to his old position a changed man… but not too changed. Some addictions can’t be conquered, like his addiction to solving medical mysteries (which is about the only thing that distracts him from the pain in his leg), and to sarcasm, manipulation and raging arrogance. Once he gets his medical license back, he proceeds to hound his old crew members, all of whom initially refuse to come back and work for him, so mercilessly that he eventually reunites his old team (well, almost everyone) and breaks up a marriage in the process. Which for House, even the “clean” House, is two for two. 21 episodes on five discs, plus an original short featuring Laurie, commentary on three episodes and new featurettes, plus exclusive supplements and BD-Live features for the Blu-ray edition.

The Middle of The Middle: Season 1 (Warner) doesn’t refer to the middle child but the middle of nowhere: Orson, Indiana, home of the world’s largest polyurethane cow and the Hecks, a sitcom family barely squeaking by on credit and shenanigans. Patricia Heaton stars as the overtaxed mom and narrates the tales of parenting challenges in the modern world of working parents and weird kids, but otherwise is plays like a warmed over version of Malcolm in the Middle, with its cartoonish humor and contradictory narration. Neil Flynn (the janitor from Scrubs) is the blithely honest but unendingly supportive dad, playing straight man to Heaton’s cheerfully overworked shenanigans, and Chris Kattan co-stars as Heaton’s buddy at the used car lot. 24 episodes on three discs in a standard case, plus two featurettes, deleted scenes and a gag reel.

I review Thriller: The Complete Series on the blog here.

Also new this week: Parenthood: Season 1 (Universal), the second TV series based on the Ron Howard family comedy, Flashforward: The Complete Series (Disney), Brothers and Sisters: The Complete Fourth Season (Disney), The Simpsons: The Thirteenth Season (Fox) and Agatha Christie’s Marple: Series 5 (Acorn).

For more DVD releases, see my picks for the week at my blog and my DVD column at MSN.

Andrew Garfield investigates in "Red Riding 1974"

A different director takes each film and gives it a quality and style and atmosphere unique to that story: Julian Jarrold (shooting on 16mm film) evoking American cinema of the seventies like Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon with 1974, James Marsh using 35mm widescreen to create an intimate procedural with an almost suffocating atmosphere in 1980 and Anand Tucker using HD digital video for a different quality of clarity that he purposely obscures with a camera that seems to be either looking from behind or obscured by the glare in 1983. They were produced for British television with such a cinematic richness and density of detail that they played in theaters in both Britain and the United States.

While each film has a unity of style and a different protagonist unique to that story, the trilogy is unified through a single screenwriter (Tony Grisoni) and production team, an extensive cast of characters that winds through the films and the murders that continue to terrorize the populace of West Yorkshire like a plague. The films build on one another until the institutional corruption doesn’t even bother to disguise itself in 1983, creating a devastating epic that refuses to grant absolution to the viewers. It only seems like the mysteries are centered on the hunt for murderers. The brutality of the police and the scale of abuse of power is if anything more unnerving and terrifying than the mysterious killers on the loose. In this world, we take what small triumphs we can. I review the box set in my DVD for MSN here, with a more in-depth piece to follow.

It seems unfair to put something like Harry Brown (Sony), another British crime film, against something as unique as Red Riding, just by virtue of release proximity. Suffice it to say that, Michael Caine aside, this bloody revenge film is a disappointment by any measure. Caine plays a newly-widowed pensioner in a crime-ridden neighborhood who turns creaky vigilante, bringing a weary dignity to an otherwise improbable crime drama. Director Daniel Barber strains to make some commentary on crime in the low-income projects and the frustrating helplessness of men like Harry, an ex-Marine who served his country only to become the target of hooligans and wild youth, but his rampage is pure fantasy, a cathartic house-cleaning with a satchel of guns and an old soldier’s drive. By the end, it’s turned from a geriatric Death Wish into a one-dimensional Taxi Driver with only a lone well-meaning detective (a singularly unconvincing Emily Mortimer) hip to the truth and a splattery spectacle of CGI sprays of blood for flourish. Caine almost makes it worth the unpleasantness. Features commentary and deleted scenes. The Blu-ray also features the usual interactive BD-Live functions.

OSS 117: Lost in Rio (Music Box) – The insufferably smug French secret agent and arrogant cold warrior Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath (Jean Dujardin), aka OSS 1117, is back in the satirical sequel to the hilarious secret agent spoof OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, this one moved up to the swinging sixties. Dujardin adds Matt Helm swagger to Hubert’s womanizing ways and director Michel Hazanavicius jazzes up the action with era-perfect split screens and snazzy graphics. The rest of the film, which has something to do with Nazis hiding out in South America, masked wrestler bodyguards, a morally suspect CIA agent and a female Mossad operative (Dolorès Koulechov) that Hubert mistakes for a secretary, is more wacky than clever. But true to form, 117 proves himself a shamelessly reflexive bigot, chauvinist and fervent nationalist who would sort of admire the Nazis if he didn’t despise them so much as enemies of France. And when all else fails, Dujardin’s smug grin and oblivious conviction in his every knee-jerk prejudice makes the character work. Includes a behind-the-scenes featurette. In French with English subtitles.

It’s a stretch to call 9^th Company (Well Go USA) an epic, but this 2005 war drama set in the final year of the Soviet Afghanistan conflict essentially aspired to be the Russian equivalent to Platoon and Full Metal Jacket rolled into one. The script, based on real events, follows a platoon from basic training through the deployment in “mountain patrols,” where they are whittled down by the Mujahideen guerillas. For all the grim reality of death and danger, it’s mostly a paean to brotherhood, loyalty and honor in a lost cause, with a stock company of character types bonding under fire, and without a hint of criticism of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Grandly executed but otherwise a conventional platoon film with a blindly patriotic streak, which didn’t stop it from becoming the biggest box-office success in Russia in 2005. Both the DVD and Blu-ray include a bonus DVD of supplements, including the 38-minute “Making the Movie” and half-hour “20 Years Later,” featuring interviews with real 9th Company veterans. In Russian with English subtitles, with an optional English dub soundtrack.

Legends of the Canyon (Image) – Photographer Henry Diltz, whose images of Buffalo Springfield, The Doors, Crosby, Stills and Nash and Joni Mitchell and many others helped define their image, narrates and illustrates this documentary portrait of the folk rock culture that flowered in Laurel Canyon. It’s rich with interviews with musicians, producers and others recalling the era and filled with familiar classics, but its less about the music than the community of artists and inspirations. It’s also somewhat disorganized, rattling around remembrances without much focus, which may in itself be an insight to the culture. Feature bonus silent film footage shot by Deltz, extended interviews (including David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Van Dyke Parks) and bonus scenes, plus a 20-page booklet featuring Diltz’s photography.

MVD has been doing a great service to the music culture with their releases of the films and documentaries of Tony Palmer, whose interests spanned from rock to classical music, folk to opera. Shot during his 1972 European tour, Leonard Cohen: Bird On A Wire (MVD) is Tony Palmer’s portrait of Cohen and his music and poetry, featuring the artist in concert, in interviews, connecting with audiences on and off stage and in transit across Britain and Europe. The film that emerged in 1974 was massively re-edited and then disappeared. Palmer has reconstructed his original version from recently uncovered materials, including the complete soundtrack, for this release. It’s a loving and respectful portrait of a modest artist, with 17 live performances and 4 poems from Cohen, and the DVD (in a paperboard digipak) includes a booklet and mini-reproductions of Cohen posters.

I review Agnes Varda’s Cinevardaphoto (Cinema Guild) in another post in my blog.

Also new this week: American indies Made for Each Other (IFC) and A Quiet Little Marriage (IFC), British indie romantic comedy French Film (IFC), Tormented (IFC) and Marmaduke (Fox).

For TV on DVD for the week, see my wrap-up here. For the rest of the highlights, visit my weekly column, which goes live every Tuesday on MSN Entertainment.

Salut le Cubains

Salut le Cubains (1963), constructed entirely of still photos from Varda’s 1962 trip to Cuba a few years after the revolution, is a joyous and idealized celebration of this socialist ideal from a young artist intoxicated by the best of what she saw, and while it is organized and presented with the sensibility of an artist, it lacks the reflection of her later films. Ulysse (1982) is more introspective and contemplative, a rumination on a photo she took in 1954 that invites the remembrances of her models and the interpretations of others to mingle with her inspirations, intentions and working methods. It becomes a free association montage that weaves its portrait out of personal inspiration, reflection of the young artist by the older self, material revisits to the scene of the art and the commentary from the perspective of other eyes and sensibilities.

Ydess, Les Ours et Etc… (2004), a documentary on the Ydessa Hendeles-curated exhibition “The Teddy Bear Project,” is the closest the set has to a ttraditional documentary, and conversely it presents Varda at her most curious and creative. Hendeles, a Canadian artist and art collector and the child of Holocaust survivors, created this project after seeing a photo of a Jewish child during the Holocaust holding a teddy bear. The exhibit is constructed entirely of archival family photos from years past thematically linked only by the inclusion of a teddy bear in the image. The film is a portrait of the artist and her inspiration with Varda’s own imagination leading her journey through the thousands of photos, making connections and asking questions that the photos leave open to interpretation.

The films are presented in reverse chronology. The DVD makes this feature the foundation of a celebration of Varda’s short films, and includes six additional shorts as supplements: Elsa la Rose (1965), Reponse de Femmes (1975), Plaisir d’amour en Iran (1976), Les dites Cariatides (1984), 7 P., cuis., s. de b. (1984) and T’as de beaux escaliers, tu sais (1986). Also features “From the Rooster to the Donkey (Hands and Objects),” a 20-minute documentary on her short films, which she made in between her features all through her career, and a booklet with brief production notes.

Cinema Guild also recently released Abbas Kiarostami’s 2008 Shirin (Cinema Guild) on a disc that also includes his short films Roads of Kiarostami (2005) and Rug (2006) plus the 27-minute documentary “Taste of Shirin” by Hamideh Razavi and an accompanying essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Josef von Sternberg is the great stylist of the thirties, a Hollywood maverick with a taste for visual exoticism and baroque flourishes (which prompted David Thomson to dub him “the first poet of underground cinema”). That’s the cliché, anyway, based largely on his collaborations with Marlene Dietrich, a tremendous body of work that charts the evolution of the director into increasing narrative abstraction and emotional dislocation.

Sternberg Before Sound (and Dietrich)

But step back into his silent work and you’ll find a storyteller of unparalleled talent and one of the great directors of silent cinema. The three films in Criterion’s magnificent box set Three Silent Classics by Josef Von Sternberg may be all the evidence we have to this era (most of his silent films are lost and his directorial debut, the 1925 The Salvation Hunters, is unavailable on home video, though clips are included in the set supplements) but they are more than enough to show his mastery of the medium and the rapid evolution of his style, both a visual sculptor and as a cinematic storyteller. The “von” of his name (an affectation that didn’t originate with him but one he embraced who-heartedly) suggests an a European émigré and technically that’s accurate—he was born in Vienna and came the United State an early age—but Sternberg is an American, with European tastes perhaps but an American storytelling sensibility.

These films also showcase his often overlooked genius as a director of actors. While Sternberg fills the frame with light and shadow and layers of texture, he strips the performances down to the elemental base, their entire approach to life in their faces, their walk, the way they lean in for a comment or drop their eyes when they catch another’s gaze. In such carefully orchestrated performances, the smallest gestures, a lift of an eyebrow, a shift in body language communicates everything.

Underworld (1927), his third feature, has been called both the original gangster film and the proto-gangster film. And while it doesn’t look or play much like the films that blasted through the throes of the early sound era—Bull Weed (George Bancroft), the (anti-)hero of this piece, is no gangleader but a solo artist pulling heists with nothing but brazen confidence—this atmospheric classic certainly created some of the conventions and even images that were taken up in the sound era. Bull Weed staring up at the neon sign “The City Is Yours” and the gangland ball in the middle of the film, with thugs in tuxedos and streamers coating the floor, are echoed in Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932), which was also scripted by Ben Hecht (Sternberg rewrote Hecht’s story to the point that Hecht disavowed the script… until it won an Oscar). That’s where it really anticipates the classic gangster story: the underworld network of criminals, the attitude, and especially the cast of street thugs in society dress, appropriating the dress of the upper class while twisting the manners and mores into a warped reflection of high society.

But Underworld is no rise and fall tale of a street hood with Tommy gun and a Shakespearean story arc but a nocturnal fantasy of the urban criminal underworld, in part informed by Hecht’s references to real Chicago crime history (the murder of a rival gangster in a flower shop is right out of Capone’s rise) but transformed into a tale of loyalty and love in a violent world. Bancroft plays Bull as a self-made criminal legend and his street thug manners are on display throughout, crude and rough (you can practically hear the guffaws as he opens his mouth to laugh like a braying donkey) but also staunchly protective of his friends and a man with the courage of his convictions. The film opens in the middle of heist, which Sternberg presents in a montage so precise and informative and efficient that it communicates everything we need to know about the crime and Bull’s talents as a robber. His character is outlined in the next few scenes when he grabs a street drunk who witnesses his escape and takes him up to his hide-out. Clive Brook (later to reappear in Sternberg’s Shanghai Express) is all soused elegance and rumpled dignity as Rolls Royce Wensel, who may be a bum but is no squealer. It’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship—Bull’s confidence in this drop-out inspires him to clean up and dry out and Wensel returns the favor by with his unflagging loyalty, to the point that he denies his attraction to Bull’s girl, the elegant jazz baby Feathers (Evelyn Brent).

Aside from the quintessentially Sternbergian textures of the party scene—the streamers littering the tables and floors and filling the screen like nets—it’s a film that strips detail from the imagery in most scenes. The opening nighttime robbery is on a street swept clear of crowds, cars and debris, with two figures are alone in a deserted set that carries the silence of the night in its imagery. There’s not an extraneous object in Bull’s apartment or a prop that isn’t used in the basement bar, where the stray feather that floats down from the entrance, announcing the arrival of Feathers, commands all the attention on the screen. The performances are similarly stripped down to the essentials, even Bancroft, whose rowdy play in public is contrasted by his control in private. By contrast, Brook is reserved, a man who has seen most everything and gotten drunk to forget but can’t. Where Bancroft’s emotions pour out of his entire body, Brook holds himself in check at all times, his every move deliberate and measured. He bows ever so simply to offer his thanks and his respect and he just barely cracks a smile to signal his affirmation and appreciation. And then there is Evelyn Brent as Feathers, a woman whose outward being is as much a performance as any Dietrich character, but in her case it’s a carefully constructed show of nonchalant confidence and apathy. In this world, to let your emotions slip is to make yourself vulnerable and these are all survivors. So much is communicated in the gazes (both direct and averted) from one character or another but it’s the austerity of the performances and the mask-like faces that conceal emotions behind a stony resolve that gives them such power.

Evelyn Brent was a veteran of dozens of low-budget features but no star when she was cast. Sternberg brought out a strength and a poise (not to mention a bumped-around beauty that starts out hard and brassy and softens over the course of her story) that would make any modern audience think she’s a top-rank star of the era. On the strength of this and of The Last Command (1928), she should have been.

The Last Command was Sternberg’s promotion, in light of the unanticipated success of Underworld and his uncredited assignments “salvaging” such troubled productions as It (1927) and Children of Divorce (1927), on which he reportedly reshot a significant part of the picture, and editing down the work of another obsessive maverick, Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (1928). It came with a bigger budget and a bona-fide international superstar, German import Emil Jannings, cast as a frail, broken old émigré with a palsied nod reduced to extra work in Hollywood but once the proud and arrogant leader of the Czar’s armies. In the conventions of Hollywood melodrama, it wasn’t the loss to the Bolsheviks that broke Sergius Alexander. It was love, as the flashbacks reveal.

In classic Sternberg style, the entire film appears to be created in the studio, exteriors and interiors. Sergius at the studio gates shows only throngs of desperate men pushing against the bars of a gate, as much of an establishing shot as we’re going to get. Sternberg and his set designer, the great art director Hans Drier, present the dream factory of Hollywood as just another assembly line in sets that suggest realism in carefully controlled details. For the scenes in Russia, however, this backstage “realism” gives way to expressionist exaggeration and exotic flourish: a snow-covered town created at what must be half-scale, the better to make the lines of soldiers marching down streets and pouring out of arriving trains look like armies massing at the frontier.

Emil Jannings in "The Last Command"

Down this street (really no wider than an alley) arrives Grand Duke Sergius Alexander in a command car that looks like a millionaire’s limousine, Jannings is all aristocratic dignity and privilege, impeccably dressed and groomed, his appearance as carefully sculpted as his manner. He gives off an arrogance of power in his very carriage, a sharp contrast to the broken, humiliated old man in the framing sequence that he’s channeled from The Last Laugh. It’s a commanding and very effective theatricality that earned Jannings the first Academy Award for Best Actor and ostentatious a performance you’ll find in these silents, standing in contrast to the restraint, the masked glances and still stares of William Powell and especially Evelyn Brent, but it’s more than just old school skills versus modern film acting. Sternberg uses the contrast to differentiate the sides of the battle, emphasize the class difference and create a dynamic of old Europe and new. When we first see Powell, he’s the director in the framing sequence choosing his ideal face for the Russian General and finding it in Jannings’ Sergius Alexander, and he’s as dapper and crisply American as can be, with changes of expression writ small and body language intimate. Even Brent feels more American than European in her scenes in 1917 Russia, concealing all her feelings and emotions behind a hard mask.

Sternberg doesn’t deify or sentimentalize Czarist Russia (the Czar himself is presented as a capricious fool, oblivious to the demands and realities of war while he struts through meaningless inspections playing commander in chief) but the film has little respect for the “revolutionists,” who are portrayed either drunken mobs or scheming backroom plotters. Yet in Powell and Brent Sterberg finds dignity and drive, people motivated by a cause. And in Brent, Sternberg offers a sleek, modern actress, her tragedy radiating from within rather than worn like a costume, her emotional truth communicated in what she doesn’t show, in the way she doesn’t do follow expectations. When those glaring eyes that have witnessed so much suffering drop, it’s not just the softening of resolve in the face of unexpected affection for her enemy, it’s guilt in her betrayal of her mission. The jewels and furs and lavish wardrobe that adorn her in the company of Sergius are like the scarlet letter of her treason. Love doesn’t conquer all here, it conquers the lovers.

The Docks of New York (1928) is the simplest, most delicately visualized and most perfect film of the set, a turn-of-the-century bowery answer to Sunrise, with a romantic idealism fighting its way out of hard-scrabble lives and resigned characters of the waterfront culture. Where Sunrise is a European inflected American fairy tale, Docks is an American romance of bruised lives told with exquisite grace from a script as simple as a fable and as resonant as a novel.

George Bancroft in "The Docks of New York"

The first image of Bill (George Bancroft again), a brawny stoker shoveling coal in the bowels of a steam ship, is a veritable painting in action: the eternal laborer at work, outlined by the fires of the furnace like some abstract portrait of muscle and effort blackened with soot and sweat. The film follows his escape brief escape from this state, a night of shore leave where he plans to add to the gallery of beauties tattooed across his body and scribbled in chalk across the commons, and the hope he brings to rumpled beauty Mae (Betty Compson), who he saves from drowning (suicide attempt most likely, though never explicitly confirmed) and coaxes back to life by the sheer force of his will and his live-for-the-day philosophy, which is what allows him to marry her in the barroom where he shows her how he lives.

No one takes the marriage seriously, Bill least of all (he has no marriage license and his promise to get one “First thing in the morning” is accepted with the same conviction with which he gave it), but waterfront missionary Hymn Book Harry (Gustav von Seyffertitz) looks at the hurt and need in Mae’s eyes and brings a dignity and gravity to what was a parody of a sacred ceremony, hushing the rowdy bar and even bringing a shuffling discomfort to Bill as he repeats vows he never intended to keep. O’Brien moves like he owns the world, deliberate, strong and direct, worrying about no one but himself, but in this moment he is acutely aware of just how much his actions will reverberate in the life of this girl.

But Mae is no naïf. Both pessimistic and the biggest optimist in the film, her belief in this fantasy is willful and temporary, using this game to escape her sorrow at least for the moment. When Mae promise “I’ll be a good wife, Bill,” it’s not out of belief that this is a real marriage, but an offer made without any real expectations. The dissolve to morning, with Bill quietly getting dressed to sidle out before Mae wakes up, is perhaps the least hidden announcement of sex in silent movie history, and his final gesture—leaving a chunk of his pay on her table like a he’s paying off a hooker—should be the final blow of reality upon the fantasy marriage. But circumstances, including a beautifully staged murder seen (signaled by startled pigeons and two puffs of smoke that drift over the window), bring them back for the morning after talk Bill tried to avoid, a beautifully modulated scene with another lovely and evocative effect (a POV shot that clouds over as the viewer tears up), and that tender scene sets up the perfect end of the film.

This the film where Sternberg really perfected his sculpting of screen space in depth through light, shadow, scrims, smoke and fog, but it’s also his most evocative direction of actors. Bancroft is more measured and restrained than in Underworld but no less direct; his Bill is a man who acts upon his impulses with no reflection or restraint. He’ll grab a beer from a nearby patron because he’s thirsty, knock the guy flat when he makes a fuss, and then pick him up with brotherly concern and hand the beer back without blinking. Betty Compson makes Mae yet another of Sternberg’s magnificent women, a bruised romantic who has learned not to give in to her dreams, but continues to dream regardless, and under her rag doll looks is a young woman who has been kicked around, body and soul, so long that she hasn’t much hope left. It’s another performance in the eyes and body language, from the resigned posture recovering from her near-drowning to the bar girl affectation she puts on to distract Bill from yet another fight and play his date. Watching Compson’s Mae slip back and forth from the practiced poses of fawning bar girl and adoring date to little girl lost both afraid and eager to give in to Bill’s sweet talk and put her hope on line once more is what gives the film its heart. Watching them blur together gives it its soul.

Betty Compson and George Bancroft

The three-disc box set presents each disc in a separate paperboard digipak and each film is offered with two scores. Robert Israel composes and orchestrates dramatic original scores for small combo and small orchestra, very satisfying and the closest to an “authentic” score that the set offers (the original scores no longer exist but Israel consulted cue sheets) for each film. (Israel writes a brief essay on his scoring The Docks of New York here.) The Alloy Orchestra offers original compositions for Underworld (both moodier and jauntier than Israel’s) and The Last Command, and Donald Sosin creates a lovely score for piano and voice (soprano Joanna Seaton) for The Docks of New York, including an original lyric that serves as Mae’s theme.

Visual essays, a relatively recent form of DVD supplement that combines lecture, documentary and commentary (the earliest I recall was Janet Bergstrom on Murnau’s lost film Four Devils, presented on the Sunrise DVD), have become some of the most interesting and richly informative contributions to DVDs. The two essays on this collection are of the same high caliber we’ve come to expect, and far more interesting and informative than the large majority of documentaries and featurettes that are regularly attached to such special editions. Janet Bergstrom’s 36-minute “Underworld: How It Came to Be” chronicles Sternberg’s early career and explores the way he shaped Underworld through production details (film clips, production stills and art) and film analysis. If Bergsrtom is the creator and grand dame of the visual essay, Tag Gallagher is the master poet of the form. His 35-minute “Von Sternberg till ‘29″ explores his visual style through all three films with perceptive observations and a critical analyses that are as poetic as they are probing. “Smoke photographs wonderfully and brings alive the dense space between the camera and the model,” he remarks in a sequence that conpares the meaning of cigarettes through each film. “Life itself seems passing. Similarly, light and shadow wakes up the meaningless blankness of walls and doors. So does mist.”

Also features an archival 40-minute interview with Josef von Sternberg conducted in 1968 for Swedish television, where the director is articulate and intent, very relaxed and seemingly forthcoming about his early career. Also includes a 96-page booklet with essays on each film, Ben Hecht’s original story for “Underworld” and an excerpt from Sternberg’s autobiography on working with Emil Jannings.

For more on what Dave Kehr describes as “self-evidently one of the most important releases of the year” on his blog, read Dave Kehr at NYTimes, Daniel Kasman’s visual appreciation at Mubi and Guy Maddin at Criterion Current (as essay that reportedly was originally commissioned for the booklet but left out for reasons of space).

Mark Harmon tells his team how it is in "NCIS"

NCIS: The Seventh Season (Paramount) – The seventh season of the top-rated drama on TV, the JAG spin-off from creator Donald P. Bellesario that become even more popular than it original show and a lively investigative procedural set in the military world opens with the squad’s search for Ziva (Cote de Pablo). The team’s Mossad contact went missing under suspicious circumstances at the end of the last season and the seventh season opener is showcases both the quirky character drama and the military sensibility of the show.

Mark Harmon anchors the show as Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs, a tough maverick investigator who leads an elite team of special agents who work outside the military chain of command to investigate crimes connected to armed forces personnel, and the team is filled out by streetwise (and movie-mad) agent Michael Weatherly, somewhat more nerdy agent Sean S. Murray, forensics specialist Pauley Perrette and crotchety medical examiner David McCallum. The season follows Ziva’s personal story as she makes a major choice about her future when she rejoins the team and decides to become a U.S. citizen (which, of course, is more fodder for team banter) while flinty team leader Gibbs gets involved in a drug cartel case that turns personal (watch for the cliffhanger ending). Robert Wagner guest stars as Michael Weatherly’s dad in the 150^th episode. The comic rapport between the actors gives the otherwise serious subject matter a light touch, and it’s frankly more fun to watch than the dark (visually and thematically) and self-serious CSI.

24 episodes on six discs in a box set of three thinpak cases, plus a generous selection of supplements: commentary on two episodes (including Wagner and Weatherly on episode 150), a 25-minute roundtable discussion with the entire featured case (on the set of Gibbs’ house) and seven featurettes.

Gossip Girl: The Complete Third Season (Warner) – “Oh please. I know what you did this summer. And who.” The East Side preppies go to college and discover that all the status from high school has no meaning in the real world in the third season of shenanigans featuring the spoiled offspring of the fabulously wealthy of Manhattan’s elite. Otherwise it’s another season of self-absorbed, status-conscious tormented teens: Serena (Blake Lively) has become a tabloid celebrity, Blair (Leighton Meester) is appalled that they don’t play by her rules at NYU and Nate (Chace Crawford) tries to find his identity outside of the family, while Kristin Bell provides running commentary as the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-texting and tweeting Gossip Girl. 22 episodes on five discs in a standard case with hinged trays, along with a “Gossip Girl Mode” interactive function for one episode, a featurette, deleted scenes, a gag reel and two music videos.

Flight of the Conchords: The Complete Collection (HBO) – The HBO comedy series about the New Zealand folk duo Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, aka “Flight of the Conchords” (the “4^th Most Popular Folk Parody Duo” in New Zealand), trying to make it in Manhattan with a fan base of one, only ran two short season. But the offbeat humor, hilarious songs and superb tongue-in-cheek music videos earned the show a small but dedicated following. This box set collects all 22 episodes plus featurettes and other supplements previously released on DVD, as well as something new. Exclusive to this set is a bonus disc with their 30-minute “One Night Stand” concert special from 2005, where Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie perform their loopy acoustic set of self-consciously awkward songs.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles Forever (Paramount) – It’s Turtles in Time once again in this 2009 made-for-TV animated feature, and this time they meet themselves. The wisecracking, pizza-scarfing quartet from the eighties animated series are propelled into the 21^st century and meet the sleeker, darker, more serious 2003 animated incarnations of themselves and join forces as friends and enemies from both shows come together. No supplements.

Also new this week: the British documentary series The Incredible Human Journey (BBC), 90210: The Second Season (Paramount), The Patty Duke Show: Season Three (Shout! Factory) and Pawn Stars: Season Two (A&E).

For more DVD releases, see my picks for the week at my blog and my DVD column at MSN.

The very definition of high-concept television, this addictive survival series turned metaphysical mystery is arguably the most successful and certainly the most richly and deeply woven show of its kind. What began as an exotic Gilligan’s Island through The Twilight Zone turned into a mind-bending show with supernatural echoes and conspiratorial hints and a web of flashbacks that ingeniously turned into flashforwards and, in the final season, “flash sideways” story of characters lives in a world where the island never existed. But first, a little backstory.

Lost: The Last Season

Season One opens in the aftermath of a plane crash on a deserted tropical island where (we come to discover) a polar bear lives, a rumbling monster crashes through the jungle, a distress signal emanates from the hills, and person or persons unknown continue to keep their presence hidden… for the time being. Matthew Fox is the ostensible star as Jack, the doctor who steps up as group leader in the first episode, but it quickly settles in as a dense ensemble show with characters who have vivid backstories: tough, raven-haired beauty Kate, whose fair looks hide a rough outlaw past (Evangeline Lilly), con man Sawyer (Josh Holloway) who hides his bitterness under a country-boy voice and a suspicious smile, Iraqi communications specialist and Gulf war veteran (he fought on the other side) Sayid (Naveen Andrews), steely survivalist John Locke (Terry O’Quinn), who has a mystic, one might say miraculous, connection to the island, pregnant single mother-to-be Claire (Emilie de Ravin) running from a fortune-teller’s prophecy, washed-up rock star and heroine addict Charlie (Dominic Monaghan), Korean couple Jin and Sun Kwon (Daniel Dae Kim and Yoon-jin Kim) with mob connections and no English skills (or do they?), easy-going Hurley (Jorge Garcia) and others: spoiled Shannon (Maggie Grace) and her protective brother Boone (Ian Somerhalder), single dad Michael (Harold Perrineau Jr.) and his son Walt (Malcolm David Kelley). That doesn’t count the passengers who come and go, pass away, or simply suddenly appear (beware islanders who aren’t on the ship’s manifest!).

The journeys of key passengers are wrapped in the island mysteries: a prophecy, a “lucky” code with unlucky aftershocks, a crippling condition cured. Co-creator and show godfather JJ Abrams uses these supernatural echoes and conspiratorial hints to keep the show shrouded in a tantalizing mystery, but he finds the most interesting mysteries among the marvelously sculpted characters themselves and he spends the season exploring their pasts in flashbacks.

Season Two begins with the opening of the hatch and the introduction of a whole new mythology involving “The Dharma Initiative,” but that’s just the beginning of the complications. The rescue mission scuttled at sea washes ashore and discovers more crash survivors on the other side of the island, barely alive after being picked off by “the Others,” who continue their raids and infiltrations. It’s not just a matter of loading in mysteries and twists in each episode, though there is plenty of that. There is a resonance to the personal stories revealed in the flashbacks of each episode and a fascinating layering of wonders and terrors that give the unexplained phenomenon an elemental quality. Season Three revolves around weird tale of “The Dharma Initiative” and the cult that has been fostered and controlled by the manipulative Ben (Michael Emerson), and the battle for survival that pits the two groups against each other, and sometimes against themselves. It’s still strangely addictive, but by this point it’s lost the freshness of that first season and started losing fans as well as viewers became impatient waiting for producers/writers/showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse to start knitting these threads into a coherent pattern before long.

Season Four opens with the arrival of a rescue ship (with its own sinister agenda, of course), and closes with the most dramatic twist in the series to date. In between, the tangled show that drifted off course in season three gets back on track with dynamic shifts in character alliances (did anyone foresee Sawyer’s reluctant rise to leadership?) and a dramatic change in style: the defining flashbacks are replaced by flash-forwards, which tease us with glimpses of the characters who make it off the island yet are still inexorably tied to it. And after spending four seasons trying to get off the island, Season Five find the few souls who made it back to civilization spending their energy trying to get back while those left behind get tossed through time and manipulated in a power struggle that reaches beyond our mortal coil and we are brought closer to the Cain-and-Abel mythology of immortals/gods/mythic watchers Jacob (Mark Pellegrino) and his brother, referred to only as Man in Black (Titus Welliver, and subsequently morphed into various different actors), who have been pulling the metaphysical strings of fate and chance to bring our heroes to the island and struggle over their souls and their allegiances.

And thus we come to Lost: The Complete Sixth and Final Season, debuting on DVD and Blu-ray, both as an individual volume or as part of the epic Lost: The Complete Collection. And here the story finally does come together as a modern myth, complete with a search for the next hero at the heart of the world and a “Last Temptation” offshoot (the aforementioned “flash-sideways”) that explores what-if lives of the Oceanic passengers and other characters tangled in the Lost mythology if the island had never existed. Dead characters returns and some active characters have completely different lives—Sawyer, for instance, is no con man but a Los Angeles police detective and Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies) is a musician, not a physicist. Is it a dimensional rift caused by the nuclear explosion, sending the characters off into a different reality, or something different? (You’ll have to watch it yourself for that explanation.) Meanwhile, in the island prime they fumble for meaning and direction, with Jack giving up leadership out of frustration for his failures, Sawyer filling the void and Hurley proving he has the strength of his convictions. Characters are tempted to their worst instincts while given opportunities for selfless action and heroes arise even as they fall.

Taken as a whole, stumbles aside, this is the most satisfying epic tale of its kind on TV (and no, The Wire is not “of its kind,” by which I mean fantasy/science fiction/metaphysical epic). Battlestar Galactica didn’t have a lot of strength to its final season, Babylon 5 landed victim to a cancellation scare that completely threw off its pacing, Farscape crammed a final season into a far-too-short mini-series and The X-Files unraveled years before it stumbled to a close with a last-ditch effort to knit together the conspiratorial threads that had long since frayed. The explanations of the final season could never meet expectations created in the first five, but the character journeys and dramatic payoffs and opportunities for redemption give us (mostly) satisfying character closure as well as narrative neatness, while still leaving plenty of mystery to the powers behind the players and the moves of this marvelous narrative construct. Metaphor aside, it’s no chess game (though the narrative architecture does suggest some kind of elaborate role-playing fantasy at times, as well as a secular mythology). It’s a story, and these guys were able to tell it the way they wanted to. Which is rare enough on network television.

Disney really knows how to put together a special edition DVD for the show and Lost: The Complete Sixth and Final Season is no different. Along with the 16 episodes (including the super-sized finale) on five discs are a number of well-made featurettes—”Crafting the Final Season,” a 33-minute piece with guest creators Shawn Ryan, James Brooks and Stephen J. Cannell (among others) joining the Lost writers and producers on discussing closure on TV shows in general and Lost in particular, plus the 9-minute “A Hero’s Journey” (discussing the characters in relation to Joseph Campbell’s conception of the hero through myth and religious stories), the 8-minute “See You In  Another Life, Brotha” (exploring the “flash sideways” narrative of the final season) and “Lost on Location” (28 minutes of behind-the-scenes featurettes specific scenes and settings, like the Temple, the Los Angeles of the alternate reality, the Black Rock ship and the sinking submarine). But the most anticipated supplement is the new 12-minute “The New Man In Charge,” not so much a new chapter as a coda to the finale created by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and featuring Michael Emerson, Jorge Garcia and a few surprises (including more Dharma Initiative training film).

The deluxe Lost: The Complete Collection features the entire run of the show on 35 discs (organized by season, each in a simple but handsome paperboard folder) with all of the original supplements (and they are a substantial collection of extras through the seasons) in a hefty box, plus a new episode guide and some cool collectibles, including a ‘Senet’ game board and pieces (but no instruction sheet; you’ll have to rewatch the Season Six episode it was introduced in to get the rules), a relief island map on the underside of the case lid, a collectible Ankh, and a black light penlight. An exclusive bonus disc hidden in the package (I’m not allowed to say where, but it’s pretty cleverly hidden—the publicists were even forbidden to tell the reviewers where it was and it took me some time to crack the packaging puzzle box) features the 40-minutes”Letting Go: Reflections Of a Six-Year Journey” (with cast members revisiting the locations and discussing their long, strange trip) and a collection of featurettes with cast and crew remembrances, behind-the-scenes footage, a tour through the prop museum (squirrel baby!) and 40-some minutes of “Lost Slapdowns,” comic confrontations between fans/cast members and creative godfathers Lindelof and Cuse, with questions about the show’s mysteries and characters paths in the final season answered with tongue-in-cheek retorts.

John Cassavetes was doing his Orson Welles thing—by that I mean acting in whatever movie paid well so he could finance his own, personal productions—when he took the lead in an Italian mob picture/heist movie hybrid shot in large part on location in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. His presence in the film is defining, or perhaps redefining. Strolling out of prison with not so much a swagger as a comfortable amble, giving his farewells to inmates and guards alike and bantering with an estranged, slickly outfitted son who arranged for his early release, we immediately face a singularly independent operator about to bump up against the conformity and command of the syndicate.

John Cassavetes: Hank McCain sizes up the situation

Cassavetes is Hank McCain, an old-school criminal in the new order, sprung specifically to rob a Vegas casino that West Coast mob honcho Charlie Adamo (Peter Falk) is trying to muscle his way into, but McCain is not really a team player. Which really complicates things when Adamo gets called on the carpet by the New York godfathers. It’s not just that Vegas is out of Adamo’s territory. The casino that he’s putting the squeeze on is secretly owned by the East Coast mob. When Adamo tries to call it off in typical mob fashion (by putting a hit out on McCain), it just makes the lone wolf McCain determined to go it alone.

The 1969 production from director Giuliano Montaldo (who previously made the very entertaining caper Grand Slam and went on to direct the 1971 Sacco & Vanzetti) wasn’t necessarily a thoroughly conventional production before Cassavetes came along but his distinctive presence gives the film an entirely unexpected rhythm and personality. On his first night of liberty in Vegas, he wanders the streets in his oddly shuffling and shrugging way, slipping into clubs and tweaking a pair of obnoxious barflies hitting on a hooker (Britt Ekland) put off by their dull persistence.

The script skips the classic backstories and motivations you usually get with these kind of films. There’s little explication of the job that landed him in stir, no sense of history between McCain and the mob players, and even his son ending up a casualty of the mob schemes draws little more than a brief but solemn silent farewell (he may have been a two-bit loser but he was blood) before he continues on his own maverick way. Cassavetes surely has an entire backstory for McCain’s motivations and they have nothing to do with Montaldo’s film, but Montaldo lets Cassavetes go with his instincts and adds his free form improvisations to the structured melody of the script. Watching McCain cagily set up a meeting with the “partners” who are coming to kill him or put together his tools for the Vegas heist (complete with outfitting a sedan) and plant bombs for his cover is more like watching a dance than a caper film and Cassavetes moves to his own rhythms. By the end of the film, that breezy attitude turns to desperation and Cassavetes (now armed with the machine gun that gives the film its name) switches gears without letting McCain lose his focus. This crime vet is the strangest pro you’ve ever seen, executing a heist as if it was all about giving the finger to the mob but following through each step with consummate precision and timing and bravado.

Britt Ekland doesn’t add much more than window dressing and the film never explains why this luscious girl so quickly and eagerly becomes his partner in crime, but Falk makes his character work as an ambitious, restless New York hood trying to expand his West Coast reach. With his gravel voice and street-thug diction and twitchy body language, he’s the eternal small-timer trying to fill out his position with big-time moves, but his street smarts are poor preparation for the politics of power at the top, and it never occurs to him that he’s been put there because he hasn’t the intelligence to challenge the bosses. Falk and Cassavetes share no scenes sadly (though offscreen they were batting ideas around for their upcoming collaboration on Cassavetes’ Husbands) but in the third act, Cassavetes connects with Gena Rowlands, who plays his long-time love. And I do mean connects: their rapport is sweet and sour, passionate but reproving, an affair interrupted by twelve years and too long gone to rekindle, but the embers still burn hot and deep. Rowland’s exit is a shock but it’s also an act of loyalty and resignation as dramatic (if not quite so affecting) as Thelma Ritter in Pickup on South Street.

You’d never call it great and it’s almost a stretch to even call it good, so little of it actually makes any sense. But this Italian-American crime movie cocktail has some great flavors in the mix, thanks to Cassavetes and to the unraveling chaos that director Montaldo follows to the bitter end. That the script leaves so much unexplained works to its benefit in the final scenes, as it’s a given that everyone from taxi drivers, store owners and news venders to beat cops and police patrol cars are given photos of the mob fugitives and that all of them are reporting directly to the mob.

Gabriele Ferzetti (legendary as the railroad baron in Once Upon a Time in the West and Draco in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) headlines the Italian side of the cast as the New York Don come west to sort through the confusion and clean house when the tangles get worse, and he’s appropriately dapper and authoritative but not exactly bursting with personality. Florinda Bolkan (Flavia in Flavia the Heretic and Lola Montez in Royal Flash) is Adamo’s traitorous wife and Tony Kendall (The Whip and the Body) is anonymously efficient as the assassin called in to hunt McCain down.

Blue Underground’s new DVD and Blu-ray looks great and shows off the location shooting well (the interiors were all done back in Rome). The sole supplement (apart from trailers) is a new 23-minute “Interview with Giuliano Mataldo,” a career survey of the director, including some details on his entertaining South American-set caper Grand Slam, plus plenty of stories about the production and the shoot, including his take on Cassavetes. “He was a difficult man,” he says, but also helpful with his advice on getting locations and local casting.

A brief moment of hope in Ajami

Set in the volatile Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa, where Israelis, Arabs and Palestinians live in a wary détente surrounded by crime, mistrust and retribution, Ajami follows five separate stories of the families caught up in the web of violence, each finally entwining with the others until every life—and every act of violence—reverberates through the reluctant community. This searing drama film begins as with a ferocious act of violence (the drive-by shooting of an innocent bystander mistaken by Bedouin gangsters for their real target) that, effective as it is, unwinds as a familiar story of the criminal world’s violence hurting everyone in its blast radius. The difference—at first anyway—is the setting and culture that informs the characters and the story.

But as each chapter winds us back to the starting point to follow a different character—Omar, a teenager targeted for death unless a small fortune to the Bedouin gangsters; Malek, a Muslim illegal working in the restaurant of an Arab Christian; Dando, an Israeli cop whose student brother has gone missing; and Binj (co-director Scandar Copti), an affluent Palestinian dragged into the mess when his brother goes on the run for murder—we see events (notably confrontations between men from different cultural or religious communities that escalate into violence) that repeat themselves in different forms. We also are invited into the lives and perspectives of characters whose lives and experiences couldn’t more different.

Ajami is acutely insightful about the social divisions within Israel, but it examines them without scolding or sentimentality. The filmmaking team—Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab, and Yaron Shani, and Israeli Jew—bring us into each character with equal compassion and desire to understand. And while we see that so much of the violence arises from miscommunication (or no communication whatsoever), more of it arises from distrust, prejudice, anger and retribution. No matter that in most cases it’s aimed at the ethnic identity rather than the person. But it’s also a way to bring us into the different communities and individual plights. The journeys are brief but each of them present lives far different from any of the other characters, and certainly from our own, and it sees not individual villains (apart from a few gangsters) but a culture that fans the flames of divisiveness every day. I was gripped, I was moved, and by the final chapter, as we see all the threads finally woven into the big picture, I was knotted up in anxiety as I watched bad choices rack up and the story spiral into one more unnecessary violent collision and the conflict chalk up more victims. The DVD features the half-hour documentary “Ajami: The Story of the Actors” and deleted scenes. In Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles.

Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg (Docurama) – Gertrude Berg is the most important and influential television pioneer you’ve never heard of: the creator, writer and star of the groundbreaking sitcom The Goldbergs (originally a radio show that ran from 1929-1946, and then moved to TV for a run that lasted from 1949 to 1956) and the first recipient of the Emmy for Best Actress and the original first lady of television. In an era of growing anti-Semitism, this proud and politically liberal Jewish woman was one of the most popular and influential women in America (behind only Eleanor Roosevelt, according to surveys) her stories of a fictional Jewish family in Brooklyn became a defining portrait of the American experience of family and community on radio and TV.

Aviva Kempner’s documentary is a real eye-opener on an influential woman whose once central place in American popular has been mostly forgotten. She introduced Jewish culture to mainstream American audiences and took pride in her identity, but ethnic culture aside, it was her portrait of urban life, the culture of neighbors and the Americanization of immigrant communities that captured its fans. And as an artist and a producer, she took on the blacklist when her co-star, union promoter and Actor’s Equity activist Philip Loeb, was labeled a communist. Her show was of the air for more than a year while she fought the good fight (she lost and was forced to replace him, but the fight was more than anyone else dared, and Loeb’s story was one of the inspirations for Zero Mostel’s character in The Front). The two-disc set includes commentary by Kempner, three episodes of The Goldbergs, Gertrude Berg’s appearances with Edward R. Murrow and Ed Sullivan, bonus scenes and interviews and a Gertrude Berg recipe among the supplements.

The Square (Sony), a sunbaked modern noir from director Nash Edgerton and screenwriter/actor Joel Edgerton, plays out like an Australian Blood Simple, tracking the complications in a marital affair when the criminal schemes they unleash to finance their getaway unravel with fatal consequences. The script neatly works out the unpredictable threads of stray characters and unforeseen circumstances, but there’s no heat in the affair and no emotional dimension to the characters, which leaves it an excellent plan for a bloodless film. More satisfying is the accompanying award-winning short film, Spider, a savagely, grimly funny portrait of a childish boyfriend whose thoughtless practical jokes has violent consequences. Also includes the 30-minute “Inside the Square,” plus two more brief featurettes, deleted scenes and a music video.

I also review Machine Gun McCain (Blue Underground), an Italian gangster film with a unique sensibility thanks to the casting of John Cassavetes, Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands, elsewhere on this blog.

It was a big week and I’m sorry I didn’t have more time to explore some of the other releases, like The Age Of Stupid (Docurama) or City Island (Anchor Bay) with Andy Garcia and Julianna Margulies. Also new this week: Abandoned (Anchor Bay), the last screen appearance by Brittany Murphy, $5 A Day (Image) with Christopher Walken and Sharon Stone, Addicted to Her Love (aka Love Is the Drug) (E1) with Lizzy Caplan, Dorian Gray (E1/NEM) with Colin Firth, The Bad Mother’s Handbook (Lionsgate) with Robert Pattinson and The Least Among You (Lionsgate).

For TV on DVD for the week, see my wrap-up here. For the rest of the highlights, visit my weekly column, which goes live every Tuesday on MSN Entertainment.

Meyrick Clifton James is General Bernard Montgomery's double

While James is the subject of the film I Was Monty’s Double, John Mills takes the leading role as British Intelligence officer Major Harvey. Mills first made his name as a British everyman in such wartime films as In Which We Serve and solidified his reputation in David Lean’s Great Expectations as one of the class acts of British filmmaking. By 1958 he had aged into tougher, more varied character parts, and he brought confident bravado and a sly sense of humor to Harvey, who enters the film dodging agents and hitting on girls. Charged with hatching a scheme to draw the attention of the German High Command to Africa, he observes James successfully fool a British theater audience (including himself) into thinking he’s the real General Montgomery making a surprise appearance and is struck with an inspiration. With the blessing of his commanding officer (Cecil Parker), Harvey has James transferred, under the guise of working for the army’s film unit, and offers him a part in the biggest show of his career. He studied Montgomery’s speech and mannerisms as a temporary member of his staff, drilled names and events, rehearsed his presentation and was finally sent to Gibraltar and Algiers to play the part for his most demanding audience: Allied officers and soldiers and the network of spies and informants swarming around the bases. With his real identity hidden from all but a few key co-conspirators, James had to keep up the performance at almost all times until the plan was complete, and while the film shows a stalwart James holding up ably under the stress, it was considerably more difficult for the real James.

See the complete feature at TCM here. I Was Monty’s Double (which is not on DVD) plays on Sunday, August 22 as part of a day-long tribute to John Mills.