A Month's Worth of Classic Picks

Here's your roundup of great old movies and TV shows released through August that you can add to your collection.

Hardly a week goes by that there isn't a John Wayne release or a pack of his movies. The best one lately was Rio Grande on Blu-ray, which paired Duke with the regal and strong Maureen O'Hara. If you want some other westerns then look to Johnny Guitar with Joan Crawford, Santa Fe Trail with that truly classic screen couple Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, or check out the more obscure Phil Carey westerns Wyoming Renegades or the Nebraskan. A genre that really got the treatment recently was Italian produced (Spaghetti!) sword and sandal, with stuff like Damon and Pythias, Gold for the Caesars, Sandokan the Great, Hercules, Samson & Ulysses.

If you like crime, gangsters and noir then look to a handful of cool noirs, the most obscure but promising being Joan Fontaine as a naughty femme in Born to be Bad, and Southside 1-1000, which was directed by Boris Ingster who was instrumental in establishing the look of noir with his Stranger on the Third Floor. The Las Vegas Story is a light but fun one with Victor Mature, Jane Russell and Vincent Price. I highly recommend the very gritty and fast noir Private Hell 36, co-written and directed by dame of dames and very talented actress Ida Lupino; it’s about a cop who double crosses his own partner.

Tons of Hitchcock came out (and more is set to come out soon in a big box set too, so save your money if you want to really go all out with Alfred); stuff like Vertigo, which was recently voted best movie ever made in the Sight & Sound magazine readers' poll, The Birds, Rear Window, and Psycho. A lot of UK thrillers came out, including The Long Memory with John Mills and John McCallum in a story of a man out for revenge over his frame up. There's also Alan Ladd in Captain Carey, USA about a former CIA (then called OSS) agent returning to postwar Italy.

For vintage TV fans, there were further installments of Perry Mason, Gunsmoke, The Rookies and Streets of San Francisco with Michael Douglas and Karl Malden. Finally, defying any special category, Warner Archive also put out a bunch of great titles starring James Cagney (The Crowd Roars, These Wilder Years) and Humphrey Bogart (China Clipper, The Great O'Malley, Battle Circus). There’s a Universal 1930′s Rarities Collection of four movies: Million Dollar Legs with W.C. Fields, Belle of the Nineties starring Mae West, Artists and Models with Jack Benny and Ida Lupino and Souls at Sea starring Gary Cooper.

Find me at the Speakeasy for lots more classic entertainment.