The 110-disc “United Artists 90th Anniversary Prestige Collection,” out Tuesday, is the biggest and most expensive DVD set of them all – retailing for $870 and weighing in at 30 pounds
But is it anything more than part of a $20 million campaign to re-launch the once-mighty United Artists as a specialty label headed by Tom Cruise and his producing partner, Paula Wagner (whose first film, “Lions for Lambs,” has already tanked)?
A celebration of UA’s 90th anniversary in 2009, the set has the earmarks of something that was somewhat hastily conceived. All of the 90 titles are offered in previously available DVD iterations – including 20 discs of special features – and even the blurbs for each title seem to have been re-purposed from earlier DVDs.
True, they are bound in a handsome volume with vintage stills and reproductions of what the captions claim are original posters (a close look at the one for “Moby Dick” reveals that it’s from a 1970s re-issue of a film that was originally distributed by Warner Bros.)
Unlike last week’s splendid “Ford at Fox” set, there is no scholarly documentary or book on UA’s colorful corporate history, only a hype-happy paragraph in the album accompanying a photograph of the studio’s founders – Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and D.W. Griffith.
For various reasons, not a single one of their films is included in the collection, which curiously begins with “The Woman in the Window,” an excellent 1944 noir that was initially distributed by RKO, not United Artists.
More understandably, the bulk of the set is devoted to the remarkable run of films produced under the aegis of Arthur Krim and Robert Benjmin, entertainment lawyers who took over the faltering UA from Pickford and Chaplin – Griffith and Fairbanks were long gone – in the mid-1950s.
Krim and Benjamin, who had excellent taste, bankrolled movies and gave filmmakers near-total artistic control. The result was an unprecedented collection of popular, award-winning films (there are eight Best Picture winners in the set) that put United Artists at the forefront of the industry.
“I have a nice gentlemen’s agreement with United Artists,” Woody Allen (represented by “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan”) once said. “My movies don’t cost much. They leave me alone and I deliver them a finished product.”
Consider just a few of ’50s and ’60s titles in the set: “Marty,” “Night of the Hunter,” “12 Angry Men,” “Paths of Glory,” “The Defiant Ones,” “I Want to Live,” “Some Like It Hot,” “The Alamo,” “West Side Story,” “Dr. No,” “The Great Escape,” “A Fistful of Dollars” and “The Pink Panther.”
Not to mention such later entries as: “Topkapi,” “”Last Tango in Paris,” “Lenny,” “Carrie,” “Rocky,” “Coming Home,” “Raging Bull” and three foreign-language titles, “La Cage Aux Folles,” Bergman’s “Persona” and “Fellini Satyricon.”
It’s a far from comprehensive list though, as some key UA titles – “The African Queen,” “High Noon,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and the Oscar winners “Around the World in 80 Days” and “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Next” – were long ago sold to others. And for some reason MGM has chosen not to include ’30s and ’40s UA titles from producers Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick (such as the Best Picture winner “Rebecca”) that it does hold video rights to.
The films that did make the cut include a few clunkers like “Dance With Me Henry” (the last Abbott and Costello flick) and “Pocketful of Miracles” (ditto for Frank Capra). But at 9.66 a title – $6.76 at some online sites, where the set sells for as little as $610 – the set is certainly a coveted high-end collectible, considering that it all comes in a beautiful (if wildly impractical) frosted-glass box
United Artists’ glory days ended in the late 1970s, when Krim and Benjamin departed amid disputes with the studio’s then-owner, Transamerica Corporation. Their successors mounted the notorious “Heaven’s Gate” (the nearly four-hour movie is mysteriously included in a single-disc version), whose costly failure prompted the sale of UA to MGM in 1981.
The later entries in the box reflect UA’s very checkered history (Ted Turner owned it for 37 days) since then: a single blockbuster (“WarGames”) and a mixed bag of specialty releases like “Hotel Rwanda.” But taken as a whole, the set is a glorious reminder that once upon a time, United Artists was the most exciting studio in Hollywood.
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