Friday, February 14, 2014

Marty apparently out of print

Marty is airing again at 10:15 PM tonight as part of TCM's look at the five men nominated for an Oscar as the Best Actor of 1955. The TCM schedule lists the other four movies nominated as being available on DVD at the TCM shop, but not Marty. You can get it at Amazon, but the listings there made it look suspiciously like a movie that's out of print.

The first listing was to a 2001 release, that looks like it was put out by MGM as part of a "Vintage Classics" line. This was well after Ted Turner bought the MGM studio films that would become part of the "Turner Library" that made up the backbone of TCM's programming, although that has since been folded into the Warner coporate entity. DVDs put out by MGM would be stuff that they got later, which I believe pretty much means stuff originally distributed by United Artists, although not everything UA distributed.

Looking it up on IMDb, sure enough Marty was produced by the Hecht-Lancaster independent production group, and originally distributed by United Artists. IMDb has an often helpful page for each movie listing the production companies, which is often useful for seeing who originally distributed a film, although there's a lot of almost trivial information about foreign distributors and the producers of video versions. But for Marty, IMDb lists a 2001 DVD put out by MGM, and a 2007 DVD, but I couldn't find any evidence of the 2007 DVD on Amazon. Any way you slice it, though, Marty is the sort of film that needs another DVD release.

(Unrelated, but normal posting should resume soon after I dig out from all the snow.)

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