Screen Legends Box Sets
Reviewer: Anne Wollenberg
Issue 79 July 2006
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Silver screen gold.
The Lowdown: Six of the silver screen’s greatest legends come together in a collection of seven box sets, each featuring four classic movies from these stars’ bountiful back catalogues. Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Cary Grant, Robert Redford and Orson Welles get a box set each, while James Stewart gets two, one for Westerns and another with a selection of his other films.
Review: Following the success of The Screen Goddess Collection, Universal have teamed up with Sony once again to produce a selection of box sets that celebrate some of film history’s most enduring careers. Between them, the twenty-eight films gathered here boast a bucket load of Oscar wins and nominations. From Citizen Kane to Rear Window, these are some of cinema’s greatest must have moments. That’s not to say that the Screen Legends collection offers only the most golden celluloid selections, but these stars are undoubtedly worthy of such celebration, with Cary Grant, James Stewart, Orson Welles and Fred Astaire all appearing in the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest screen legends ever.
While the Screen Goddess sets came at £50 apiece, these releases are priced at a rather more wallet-friendly £24.99, which certainly seems like a snip for the James Stewart collection. This gives you Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Henry Koster’s Harvey, along with Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life and Mr Smith Goes To Washington. James Stewart also gets his own Westerns collection, spanning almost 30 years, from 1939’s Destry Rides Again, which sees him taking on a smouldering Marlene Dietrich, to Shenandoah, in which Stewart plays a farmer who finds himself unwillingly caught up in the American Civil War. The other two Westerns featured are The Man From Laramie and John Ford’s Two Rode Together.
Whereas there’s no doubt that some of James Stewart’s most classic moments are on offer here, the Cary Grant set comes without His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story or North By Northwest. Its focus instead lies in screwball territory. Christopher Reeve is said to have taken inspiration from Grant’s performance in Bringing Up Baby in his portrayal of Clark Kent, and that film appears here alongside Holiday and The Awful Truth, a film that Grant actually asked to stop being involved with part way through production, due to his belief that it would be a flop. It was in fact a hit, while Bringing Up Baby, which was released four months later, was such a box office bomb that it got director Howard Hawks fired from his next RKO venture. Now, of course, it’s Baby that’s by far the greater classic. While these three films were all made in the 30s, the fourth selection is Father Goose, which makes its DVD debut here. This was a role for which Grant turned down the opportunity of playing Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. Released in 1964, it saw him starring alongside Gene Kelly’s protégé Leslie Caron (Audrey Hepburn was Grant’s first choice of co-star, but ironically she was busy playing Eliza Doolittle).
While the Cary Grant selections may not seem like his choicest projects, Fred Astaire’s box set is bulging with top-hatted Hollywood cream. Astaire might have been the subject of a Paramount screen test report that described him as “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Slightly balding. Also dances,” but the evidence speaks for itself here. Two of the films featured come from the legendary Fred and Ginger era, Top Hat being the most successful picture to emerge from the partnership, while Swing Time saw ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ picking up the Academy Award for Best Song, as well as soaring to the top of the US charts in 1936. The other half of the set sees Astaire starring alongside Rita Hayworth in You’ll Never Get Rich and You Were Never Lovelier. These were Hayworth’s first major film roles, and not only did You’ll Never Get Rich turn her into a star (partly thanks to her appearance on the front cover of Life Magazine), it also boosted Astaire’s career, which had hit something of a low since he and Rogers parted.
Astaire also makes an appearance in Bing Crosby’s box set, co-starring with the crooner in Holiday Inn, the movie that won Irving Berlin an Oscar for ‘White Christmas’. Pennies From Heaven was a landmark moment of a different kind, as it saw Crosby co-starring with Louis Armstrong, this being the first time that a black actor had ever shared top billing with a white actor in a major film. Crosby starred with Bob Hope in The Road to Zanzibar, while Going My Way bagged him an Oscar win for Best Actor. The first film ever to win gongs for both Best Film and Best Song, Going My Way picked up a total of seven Academy Awards.
With Robert Redford, you get the romantic tearjerker The Way We Were, along with The Sting, The Natural and Out of Africa, but no Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men or The Great Gatsby. Similarly, it’s difficult not to feel that the Orson Welles collection should really have included The Third Man, but thankfully it does come with the absolute essential that is Citizen Kane, along with The Lady From Shanghai, A Man For All Seasons and the far less impressive Waterloo.
While some of these sets offer a passable crop of extras, they’ve all been carried over from previous DVD releases. The result is that some of these films come with commentaries, featurettes and more, while others have no extras whatsoever. In most cases, there are extras provided for at least one out of four movies, but the Fred Astaire set has nothing more than a trailer, and James Stewart’s Westerns collection hasn’t fared much better. Given that the point of these box sets is to celebrate some of the greatest on-screen careers ever seen, it would have been nice to see them kitted out with a bit more in the way of bonus material. Instead you get the feeling that the individual films have simply been rounded up and bunged into box sets without a great deal of thought.
It’s also true that while The Screen Goddess Collection included plenty of films making their DVD debut, here only Father Goose can make that claim (although not available separately, Destry Rides Again was included in a previous James Stewart box set). However, with so many classic films on offer, they still make for fitting tributes to these much-loved Hollywood legends.
FILM: 8
EXTRAS: 4
DVD Info:
Certificate: U, PG
Starring: Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Cary Grant, Robert Redford, James Stewart, Orson Welles
Director: Various
Distributor: Universal/Sony Pictures
Original Release: 1935-1984
Audio: Mono, Dolby Digital 2.0 (Mono), Dolby Digital 2.0
Visuals: 4:3 Fullscreen, 1.85:1 Anamorphic Widescreen, 2.35:1 Anamorphic Widescreen, 16:9 Anamorphic Widescreen
Running Time: Fred Astaire: 377 mins
Bing Crosby: 386 mins
Cary Grant: 397 mins
Robert Redford: 523 mins
James Stewart: 464 mins
James Stewart Westerns: 394 mins
Orson Welles: 442 mins
Price: £24.99 each
Special Features:
Fred Astaire:
All include:
Scene Selection
Trailer
Bing Crosby:
All Include:
Scene Selection
Holiday Inn:
‘A Couple Of Song And Dance Men’ Featurette
‘All-Singing, All Dancing: Before And After’ Featurette
Audio Commentary With Film Historian Ken Barnes
Cast And Crew Profiles
Production Notes
Trailer
Robert Redford:
The Sting:
Scene Selection
Trailer
The Natural:
Scene Selection
‘The Heart Of The Natural’ Documentary
Trailer
The Way We Were:
Scene Selection
Audio Commentary With Director Sydney Pollack
Documentary
Filmographies
Trailer
Out Of Africa:
Scene Selection
Audio Commentary With Director Sydney Pollack
Production Notes
Cast And Crew Biographies
Trailer
James Stewart:
Harvey:
Scene Selection
Introduction By James Stewart
Trailer
Mr. Smith Goes To Washington:
Scene Selection
‘Frank Capra Jr. Remembers’ Featurette
Audio Commentary With Frank Capra Jr.
Vintage Advertising Gallery
Filmographies
Trailer
Rear Window:
Scene Selection
‘Rear Window Ethics: Remembering And Restoring A Hitchcock Classic’ Featurette
Art Gallery/Trailer Compilation
It’s A Wonderful Life:
Scene Selection
‘Making Of It’s A Wonderful Life’ Featurette
Introduction And Interview With Frank Capra Jr.
Trailer
James Stewart Westerns:
All Include:
Scene Selection
Trailers
Except The Man From Laramie:
Scene Selection
Original Theatrical Poster
Trailer
Orson Welles:
All Include:
Scene Selection
Trailer
Except The Lady From Shanghai:
Audio Commentary With Film Historian Peter Bogdanovich
Featurette
Filmographies
Photo Gallery
Scene Selection
Trailer
