Recent DVDs

Here are some DVDs I've been seeing recently.

MONTE WALSH:  A 1970 western with classic tough guys Lee Marvin and Jack Palance as aging cowboys facing the end of the cowboy era. (In a way, every western is about the end of the west.)

RICHARD III:  A silent film from 1912, it's the earliest surviving American feature film.

ELECTRIC EDWARDIANS:  Early films of British people in the decade before World War I. (They filmed a lot of processions.)

CHARLIE CHAN AT MONTE CARLO:  Warner Oland's Charlie Chan 1930s detective series is a guilty pleasure for me. (He was a cool actor, born in Sweden, who also translated Strindberg plays!)

LA TRAVIATA:  We've been looking at a Glyndebourne production of the Verdi opera directed by Peter Hall, but the singers are oddly dispassionate. (Moira says they sound more English than Italian.) I preferred Hall's Glyndebourne production of Rossini's Cinderella opera LA CENERENTOLA.

ANYTHING GOES:  A kinescope of a 1950s COLGATE COMEDY HOUR production of the Cole Porter musical, with Ethel Merman (who else?), Frank Sinatra and Bert Lahr.

I'll soon be seeing a French production of the Mozart opera THE MAGIC FLUTE, Fritz Lang's anti-Nazi thriller MANHUNT, and the early Russian movies OUTSKIRTS and THE GIRL WITH THE HAT BOX.