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Special Releases

'The Big Heat'/Sony/Everett Collection
Fritz Lang's "The Big Heat" (1953) headlines the fourth collaboration between Sony and Martin Scorsese's nonprofit film preservation organization, the Film Foundation, but this masterpiece of film noir has been on DVD before. Not so the other four Columbia crime dramas in the set, all making their respective DVD debut. Like "The Big Heat," "5 Against the House" (1955) is a shadowy studio film, but it leaves the urban corruption for the crowded energy of a Reno casino and an impulsive heist scheme led by an unstable Brian Keith. The remaining three films showcase a very different strain of '50s film noir. "The Sniper" (1952), produced by Stanley Kramer and directed on location in San Francisco by Edward Dmytryk, has a much edgier atmosphere and modern feel, in part because of the seeming randomness of the killing. The low-budget location shooting gives it an immediacy, and Dmytryk punctuates the violence with vivid explosions of brutal force without showing a drop of blood. Don Siegel's "The Lineup" (1958), also shot on location in San Francisco, stars Eli Wallach as a killer on the trail of smuggled heroin shipments, and Siegel's matter-of-fact violence gives the film a startling dynamic. "Murder by Contract" (1958), by contrast, is almost laconic in its story of a self-made assassin-for-hire (Vince Edwards). Director Irving Lerner matches the deliberation of his killer with his meticulous direction: Every murder is so carefully set up that we never need to see the follow through. There are introductions to four of the films (three of them by Scorsese) and commentary on two of them. Film noir historian Eddie Muller is more focused on "The Sniper" but is more lively trying to keep James Ellroy in check on "The Lineup" (Ellroy's colorful language is not censored in this track).
©Warner Archive
The Tall Target / Film Noir on the Warner Archive Collection
The tall target of Anthony Mann's 19th century thriller is Abraham Lincoln, and a lone police detective (Dick Powell) is out to stop a plot to assassinate the president-elect on his journey to the inauguration. Period aside, this is a terrific little film noir set largely on a midnight train to Baltimore, filled with soldiers, Southerners, secessionists and cutthroats, and shot with an eye for defining detail and ominous atmosphere. It's one of the best looking classics from the Warner Archive Collection and just one of the cool minor noirs recently released. Jacques Tourneur's "Berlin Express" (1948) is a more romantic noir on a train, and "The Fallen Sparrow" (1943) is a handsome wartime thriller starring John Garfield, while "Highway 301" (1950) is a much grittier specimen with Steve Cochran as a brutal thug and brazen bank robber. Also released: "Suspense" (1946) and "Lightning Strikes Twice" (1951).
©Lionsgate
The Dead
The final film from John Huston is one of his most exquisite, a perfect cinematic short story adapted from James Joyce and directed with an unforced attention to the nuances of family and friends glancing off one another during a holiday dinner party. Anjelica Huston plays a wistful wife whose regrets are dredged up during the evening. Huston's direction is pure grace but the disc quality is a major disappointment: not merely a poorly mastered edition with hazy colors but actually cut by ten minutes. It's appalling treatment for John Huston's sublime swan song. No supplements.
 ©Universal
The Claudette Colbert Collection
Six films by the versatile Claudette Colbert are collected in this six-disc set, including "Bluebeard's Eighth Wife" (1938), a romantic battle of wills with Gary Cooper and directed by Ernst Lubitsch, and "The Egg and I" (1947), the comedy that introduced Ma and Pa Kettle to the world. Also features the early screwball comedy "Three-Cornered Moon" (1933), the romantic drama "I Met Him in Paris" (1937), the drama "Maid of Salem" (1937) and the comedy "No Time for Love" (1943). Six films on three discs in a foldout digipak that could have been much more efficiently designed.
©Warner
March of the Penguins Limited Edition Giftset
The Oscar-winning documentary about the epic life cycle of the emperor penguin, which annually walks (or, perhaps more accurately, waddles) 70 miles in single file across the harsh Antarctic desert of snow and ice to mate, gets a new edition in time for the holidays. This two-disc set includes the new feature-length documentary, "On the Wings of a Penguin," about the warm-weather African penguin, as well as the previously available making-of documentary "Of Penguins and Men" and a Bugs Bunny cartoon. The "Giftset" features a collection of eight penguin postcards and a plush penguin toy.

Sean Axmaker is a film critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a DVD columnist for MSN Entertainment and a contributing writer for GreenCine.com, Turner Classic Movies Online, Parallax View and Asian Cult Cinema, among other publications. Find links to all of this and more on his shamelessly self-promoting blog.

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