DVDs we'd like to see...

An inveterate, indeed incorrigible, collector has suggested that Film Alert start a list of the films that are NOT available on DVD and that SHOULD be. We define available in the broadest terms. It means not issued in Australia, the US, Britain or in France (thus obtainable in a shop locally or over the internet at the various Amazon addresses). If it's in a foreign language it has to be subtitled: thus, as far as we are concerned all those wonderful French classics issued in France by Rene Chateau without English subtitles DON'T count as having been released to us. This could get out of hand of course but we've started the list slowly. Here they are:

17 January 2005

The films of Georges Franju.

As far as we know the only Franju film that has been released on DVD, in both France (unsubtitled) and more recently the US (subtitled) is his Les Yeux Sans Visage/Eyes Without a Face (1959). Which means that the following feature films, preferably acompanied by some of his stupendous shorts, demand to be released on DVD.

• La Tete Contre les Murs (1958)
• Plein Feux Sur l'Assassin (Spotlight on Murder) (1961)
• Therese Desqueyroux (1962)
• Judex (1963)
• Thomas the Imposter (1965)
• The Sin of Abbe Mouret (1970)
• Nuits Rouges (Shadowman) (1973)
• The Last Melodrama (1978)

16 December 2004

• Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch)
• The Smiling Lieutenant (Ernst Lubitsch)
• One Hour With You (Ernst Lubitsch)
• Design For Living (Ernst Lubitsch)
• The surviving Yamanako Sadao trilogy of films
• The major extant works of Shimizu Hiroshi of ORNAMENTAL HAIRPIN fame
• Porgy and bess (Otto Preminger)
• Raining in the Mountain (King Hu)
• Un Chambre En Ville (Jacques Demy)

14th November 2004

The films of Joseph Losey not on DVD

• The Lawless
• The Prowler
• The Big Night
• M
• Stranger on the Prowl
• The Sleeping Tiger
• The Intimate Stranger
• Blind Date
• The Damned
• Secret Ceremony
• Boom
• The Roads to the South
• The Trout
• The Go-Between
• Figures in a Landscape

7 November 2004

Budd Boetticher's Ranown westerns

• Seven Men From Now ( 1956)
• The Tall T (1957)
• Decision at Sundown (1957)
• Buchanan Rides Alone (1958)
• Ride Lonesome (1959)

Nicholas Ray's fifties films

• Run For Cover (1955)
• Hot Blood (1956)
• Bigger Than Life (1956)
• The True Story of Jesse James (1957)
• Bitter Victory (1958)
• Wind Across the Everglades (1958)
• Party Girl (1958)