Edge of the City

Three Sidney Poitier dramas debut in this four-disc box. I'm particularly partial to "Edge of the City," a low-key drama about the friendship between two longshoremen (Poitier and John Cassavetes) that reaches across racial lines, a rare thing in 1957 cinema. It's the directorial debut of Martin Ritt, and co-stars Jack Warden as the corrupt foreman. "Something of Value" is Richard Brooks' adaptation of the novel set against the Mau Mau uprising of Kenya; and Poitier directs himself in "A Warm December." The set is filled out with a rerelease of "A Patch of Blue," which won an Oscar for Shelley Winters as the bigoted, domineering mother of a blind woman (Elizabeth Hartman) who falls in love with Poitier. Each disc in a thinpak case.