“Whoopee” (1930), Eddie Cantor musical that’s one of the best surviving examples of two-strip Technicolor, will be making its DVD debut as part of a 50 title, 61-disc “Hollywood Musicals Collection” being released Nov. 11 by Fox and MGM. With a whopping $500 suggested retail price, it’s a followup to last year’s 90-title tribute to the 90th anniversary of United Artists, which MGM seems to have prematurely stopped celebrating. The disappointing news is that almost all the titles, which span seven decades ending with “Moulin Rouge” (the one with Nicole Kidman, not the 1934 version with Constance Bennett) are already available on DVD, and many in existing box sets from Fox (Marilyn Monroe, Shirley Temple, Elvis, Rogers & Hammerstein) and MGM, which put out two collections of musicals just last year. As Warners controls all of the pre-1986 MGM musicals, MGM’s offerings are mostly those released by United Artists (post-1952 except for “Hallelujah I’m a Bum,” a delightful Rogers and Hart curiosity with Al Jolson) plus a few leased from the Goldwyn library (like the Hal Roach-produced “Babes in Toyland” with Laurel and Hardy, which was in an MGM Christmas set last year). The Goldwyn library is also the source for the other two DVD debuts in the set: “Kid Millions” with Cantor, and the appalling bad three-strip Technicolored “Goldwyn Follies” (1938) with Adolphe Menjou, Andrea Leeds, Kenny Baker, Edgar Bergen, the Ritz Brothers and Vera Zorina. Meanwhile, Classic Flix reports the Frank Borzage set I wrote about last week — a followup to their John Ford blockbuster last year — will be coming out from Fox on Dec. 9 and will also include titles by his contemporary F.W. Murnau, most notably a new two-disc special edition of “Sunrise,” the only film to win an Oscar for “artistic achievement.” Classic Flix cites a list price of $239 and says the other titles are mostly ones I alluded to: “Lucky Star,” “Liliom,” “They Had to See Paris,” “Seventh Heaven,” “Bad Girl,” “Song O’ My Heart,” “Lazy Bones,” “Street Angel” and “City Girl.” DVD Empire insists the set will also include a couple more Borzages, “After Tomorrow” and “Young America.” Get ready to break open your piggie banks, cinephiles.



