Still not on DVD

Looking at today's TCM schedule, I notice that this week's Silent Sunday Nights feature is The Crowd, airing at midnight tonight. I mentioned all the way back in January 2009 when I blogged about The Crowd that it wasn't available on DVD. Surprisingly enough, even with the Warner Archive, it's still not available on DVD. So you're still going to have to catch the TCM showing, I'm sorry to say.

The Crowd is preceded at 10:00 PM by Lady in the Lake. I'm sorry to say that this is one of those movies I've never really been able to get into. Robert Montgomery directed himself in this set-at-Christmastime Philip Marlowe mystery. The problem with the movie is that it has the conceit of being told almost entirely from Marlowe's eyes. Now, I don't mean a first-person point of view in the way that something like the Humphrey Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon is. (A few scenes of The Maltese Falcon are strictly third-person, but not many.) I mean the camera angles are what the Philip Marlowe character would see. There are one or two exceptions: Marlowe has a narration in the beginning and another one halfway through the film or so. And there are a couple of mirror scenes where we see Marlowe's face. But the technique is so contrived that it makes the movie difficult to watch. Lady in the Lake, however, unlike The Crowd, has gotten a DVD release.