Wednesday, February 25, 2015

The "What's Out-of-Primt on DVD" game, and other bizarreness

Last night I watched the TCM showing of the 1979 film A Little Romance, a story about an American girl (Diane Lane) living in Paris who meets a French boy (Thelonius Bernard) and eventually tries to run away to Venice because of a legend about true love the two learn from an old man (Laurence Olivier). The movie is for the most part quite good, although a bit too long; if only the director could have figured out a way to shave off about 10 minutes as there are a couple of scenes in the middle that drag. For some reason I thought it was available on DVD< but it seems to be out of print, as Amazon says there are only a limited number of copies left and a TCM Shop search doesn't bring up the movie. Amazon does seem to offer the film on one of their streaming download things which I can't do only having satellite internet. That's not the bizarre thing, though. When I was looking for the movie at Amazon, one of the hits was to this:

HYBRID is a documentary about Milford Beeghly, a radical farmer in the 1930's who pioneered the process of genetically enhanced crops - considered a madman, this documentary is an astonishing portrait of one man's obsessive vision with plants.

Starring: Joshua Beckett, Marcia Cross

Runtime: 1 hour, 56 minutes

Next to that blurb is a picture of a DVD box for A Little Romance, picturing Marcia Cross and mentioning Cross and Polly Draper in the cast. That's something that doesn't match the blurb, of course. Looking through the filmography of the other star, Joshua Beckett, it turns out it's for something originally called Never Say Goodbye, from 1997 (not 2008) dnd running 98 minutes, not 116. I have no idea how Amazon's database mixed up these two titles. The 2008 must also be the year the DVD was released, as the documentary Hybrid mentioned in the blurb is from 2000.

Seven Days in May is on the TCM schedule tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM. When I blogged about it during 31 Days of Oscar two years ago, I mentioned that it was availalbe on one of those Warner Archive box sets of Burt Lancaster movies. That box set must be out of print, since it doesn't show up in a TCM Shop search. In fact, the first hit in the TCM Shop search was for Best of Warner Bros.: 100 Film Collection. It's a massive, 55-DVD box set of 100 films. Only, they're not all from Warner Bros., but from the library that eventually grew together out of Ted Turner's purchases. The 100 films are listed chronologically, and as I looked sown the list, my first thought was, "Broadway Melody of 1929 is MGM, isn't it?" And then I knew that Cimarron was an RKO release. But if you don't have any of the movies, 100 films for only $280, on sale from $600, sounds like a reasonably good deal.

No comments: