Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) is released from prison and returns home to find a town spookily deserted. Turns out the bulldozers arrived one day like a cavalcade of tanks to drive Oklahomans from their farms and make way for mechanized agriculture--sometimes pitting neighbour against neighbour, as illustrated by a provocative, harrowing flashback in which an easily-seduced landowner is shown steering the instrument of destruction with newfound contempt for the proletariat. Eventually Tom and an ex-preacher, Jim Casy (John Carradine, whose character's initials were somewhat belaboured for their emblematical value in the text), locate the Joads, who are preparing to make a pilgrimage in a cramped jalopy at the urging of a flyer assuring wealth and prosper in sunny California. Tragedy strikes the family on the road on occasion but they persevere, only to arrive at their destination and discover that labour camps, most of them thriving in squalor and preying on insolvent scabs, have sprouted up like dandelions in a country ploughed and sown by The Man.

Fonda appears young for the last time here, although it's still impossible to imagine him in any kind of natal state. Wizened by a Navy stint in the second World War, five failed marriages, and the social burden of embodying what David Thomson called "Hollywood's Statue of Liberty," Fonda nevertheless always seemed an old soul, one shocked into deterioration when confronted with the prophet's responsibility of starring in The Grapes of Wrath; Tom Joad wasn't a part, it was Fonda's destiny, and we sense that he senses it. (He signed a seven-picture contract for the chance to be in this one.) Tom's departure is the most powerful in all of Ford, heralded as it is by a monologue that transformed him into a beacon of hope undimmed by the house lights, yet this is the anomalous film from the Golden Age (let alone from Ford) with a protracted denouement, which some people remember better than Tom's goodbye. "For a while," offers Ma Joad (deserved Academy Award honouree Jane Darwell), "it looked as though we was beat...Looked like we didn't have nobody in the whole wide world but enemies. Like we was lost and nobody cared. Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But we keep a-comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out. They can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa, 'cause we're the people." Distinguished from her co-stars by a generous frame, Darwell's casting gains resonance as Ford transforms Ma Joad into a fertility idol of sorts--the physical correlative, if not manifestation, of Tom's pregnant wish for greener pastures proverbial and literal. With her parting words, she trains a vital ray of hope on a pre-emptive and perpetual elegy.

In preparing a DVD release of The Grapes of Wrath, Fox overcame the significant hurdle of a nonexistent negative with utter aplomb. The fullscreen transfer, derived from a digitally restored nitrate dupe, looks exquisite throughout, although blacks are chalkily inconsistent in the dark first act. Grain is fine--never intrusive--and the level of detail generally wows, and the restored audio, presented in either its original mono configuration or a stereo upgrade, has enough vivacity to encourage a participatory hum-along during the many reprises of "Red River Valley." Side A of the flipper platter hosts two versions of the film, one of which restores (via seamless branching) the "UK Prologue," a written passage that trails Ford's director credit with a "once upon a time" explanation of the Dust Bowl for the sake of unversed international viewers. (Interestingly, many British critics took Ford and especially Johnson to task for downplaying America's liability in its own Depression with this preface, but it remained unseen in the U.S. until recently.) Also joining The Grapes of Wrath is a feature-length commentary courtesy of Ford historian Joseph McBride and Steinbeck historian Susan Shillinglaw that ranks as the best for a Studio Classics title to date. Dense with information, the track documents parallel lives that are occasional mirror images: each man underwent an unceremonious FBI investigation for openly sympathizing with the poor, for example. Cleared up is a persistent rumour that Steinbeck was displeased with the finished film (he was, in fact, pleasantly surprised by what he saw), while neither commentator demurs from taking a critical view of its sentimental slant.

Turn the disc over to find the 45-minute "Biography: Darryl F. Zanuck, 20^th Century Film Legend". As with the majority of the A&E program's instalments, hagiography is more like it, but the piece sports precious outtakes (such as Tyrone Power scratching the initials "DZ" into upholstery as The Mark of Zorro's Zorro) and contributions from a diverse crop of interviewees, among whom the late Roddy McDowall is featured prominently. A restoration comparison leads with preamble that diminishes the amount of effort exerted in repairing The Grapes of Wrath for DVD simply because we have no practical perspective: that it took a whole 26 hours to refurbish the film in the HD realm just doesn't sound that impressive. Finally, a set of posterity-minded Movietone newsreels (from 1934, "Worst Drought in Many Years Hits Middle West;" 1934: "Drought Distress is Increasing in the Mid-West;" 1934: "Mid-West Drought Distress Becomes National Disaster;" 1934: "Outtakes" (unused footage of the starving class); and 1941: "Roosevelt Lauds Motion Pictures at Academy Fete"), a gallery of noirish stills for The Grapes of Wrath, and trailers for The Grapes of Wrath, All About Eve, An Affair to Remember, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and My Darling Clementine round out this indispensable DVD. Image: A, Sound: A-, Extras: A+ English Stereo, English Mono, Spanish Mono English and Spanish subtitles DVD-14 129 minutes -Bill Chambers

I haven't seen a better docudrama about Wyatt Earp than John Ford's My Darling Clementine, but on the other hand, the venerated lawman has yet to be the subject of a masterpiece. My Darling Clementine is a love story in which the romance is peripheral at best and a movie in which a supporting player's story overshadows the lead's not by accident, but by design. Though it's really too compromised to entertain consideration as Ford's best western (besides which, I'm an old-school sucker for The Searchers), it's impossible to dismiss, and it leaves you wishing that it were a fiction whole--My Darling Clementine is beset by the same crucible that has impeded the drama of other biopics on Earp, who lived so long that he outpaced his narrative usefulness. While Ford couldn't care a continental when it comes to historical accuracy (producer Daryl F. Zanuck couldn't, either, for that matter: he'd re-christen reality-based characters to provide them with more genre-appropriate names), it would be laughably irresponsible to alter the fate of Earp, and so the build-up to the climactic gunfight at the OK Corral in My Darling Clementine registers not so much like suspense as procrastination. Ford's solution is to dwell on Earp's doomed compatriot Doc Holliday, which results in Henry Fonda (Earp) deferring to the dancing bear that is Victor Mature (Holliday).

One of the more effectively simple credits sequences opens Desk Set, with a telegraph situated on a Mondrian-inspired backdrop spitting out the names of cast and crew. This, it turns out, is the movie reduced to symbols. Modernities clash as Spencer Tracy's ironically oafish efficiency expert is deposited in the environment of Katharine Hepburn, who thinks and dresses geometrically but brings a splash of colour to the room. They're hip and as hip as each other, even if she's a Luddite and he pimps a supercomputer for IBM, because career comes first for both. Counterbalancing a general mistrust of the electronics revolution (and the typical politically incorrect trappings of fifties cinema), the movie embraces a progressive quality in its power-couple leads, who still seem remarkably contemporary because neither assumed aggressively gender-specific roles--they always played equals of different temperaments.

Probably the most notable film scripted by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, Desk Set illuminates the DNA of daughter Nora's screenplays. You have an aloof man, Sumner (Tracy), and a well-read spinster with a babyish name, Bunny (Hepburn), gently butting heads in the journalism-friendly setting of the FBC Network's research department. The two engage in endless compatibility tests disguised as brainteasers, and some air finally escapes from their mutually suppressed attraction at a Christmas party, where Sumner heartbreakingly ventures to Bunny, "I'll bet you write wonderful letters." But where Nora often expedites the central flirtation in her films, the elder Ephrons use our sophisticated viewing habits to their unique advantage in Desk Set, choosing not to classify Sumner and Bunny by their feelings for one another. It's amazing how much we've regressed as a moviegoing culture--you'd never find a backer for a rom-com with this little relationship anxiety now. Not to say that Desk Set isn't cinematically archaic: director Walter Lang buys into the CinemaScope propaganda that widescreen master shots do the work of multiple cameras and editors; his camera is so rigid that even when he does cut to a close-up, he's just zoomed in from his spot on the axis of action. Posterity's gain-- Lang's visual austerity is perfect for conveying the absurd magnitude of primitive data banks such as Sumner's EMMARAC (or "Emmy" (the screen's first anthropomorphized computer?))--is Desk Set's loss, as the film seems like it's concealing lost coverage.

Presented anamorphically at 2.35:1, Desk Set isn't in as wide an aspect ratio as those CinemaScope productions previously issued on DVD under the Fox Classics banner. This may cause some controversy, as the LaserDisc contained a 2.50:1 transfer, but the frame never feels cramped and compositions don't appear compromised. Purists will either be aggravated or assuaged by the clarity of the image and cleanliness of the source print; grain is the tamest it's ever been, while the various shades of green have a lot of snap. Both the Dolby Digital monaural and stereo remixes are unnoteworthy compared to the video. Extras include a serviceable feature-length commentary with actress Dina Merrill ("Sylvia Blair") moderated by someone named John Lee (filling in for absent-but-advertised participant Neva Patterson), the former trailing off on eccentric and egotistical tangents, the latter airing a list of grievances about the hazards of CinemaScope in place of criticizing the film or Lang directly. For what it's worth, Ms. Merrill's chronology is off: Desk Set preceded "Leave It to Beaver" for co-star Sue Randall. A gallery of b&w stills, trailers for Desk Set, All About Eve, An Affair to Remember, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and The Seven Year Itch, and a 1-minute Movietone newsreel wherein Vyvyan Donner "describes" a runway exhibit of Charles Le Maire's costumes round out the disc. Image: A-, Sound: B-, Extras: C+ English Stereo, English Mono, Spanish Mono English and Spanish subtitles DVD-9 103 minutes -Bill Chambers

William A. Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident is so brave and piercing that you can overlook its gawky title. That the film's star Henry Fonda had a knack for picking westerns goes without saying, but The Ox-Bow Incident has more gothic qualities than do most oaters made prior to the dawn of Europe staking its genre claim--it's the scene in cowboy flicks where a bunch of guys cheer on an unceremonious hanging expanded to feature-length; the movie says such definitive things about mob mentality--the sour side of fraternity--that the Navy-enlisted Fonda deferred his tour of duty in order to take part in it. What makes this doubly noble is that, despite his lead billing, he's really not the star of The Ox-Bow Incident: with a cast of dozens granted comparable screen time, no one is.

Gentleman's Agreement is a painful film to sit through. Not only is its construction long-winded and lopsided, not only is its look only marginally more attractive than life insurance fine-print, but it is part of that horrible genre of liberal "message" movies that haunts us to this day. I'd like to say that post-post-modern cynicism has rendered it obsolete, and thus quaint and unthreatening, but what angered me most about it was that its particular strain of self-satisfaction continues to ravage the Hollywood corpus. Rather than depict the cruelty of prejudice, the film is determined to give the audience untouched by prejudice something over which to feel superior, and it acts as a model for all the cynical do-gooding fools who have followed in its wake.

The film is not, as advertised, about the horrors of anti-Semitism, but about Gregory Peck acting as a heroic proxy for the non-Jewish audience. Peck plays Philip Green, a journalist wrestling with whether or not he should do an article on the problem for a liberal Harper's-style monthly. And how he wrestles! A full forty minutes of running time are committed to his struggling with the pros and cons, and how he should go about the job; the dead air gives us plenty of time to wonder what, exactly, is being taught through the spectacle of a Gentile journalist niggling over methodology. At last, after the movement of several glaciers, he hits upon the brilliant idea to "pass" as Jewish in order to feel what it's really like, setting the would-be shocking events into motion.

Only there are hardly any real Jews to offset him. Aside from one self-hater Green (now "Greenberg") meets at a party, it takes an hour and ten minutes to get a solid Jewish speaking part into the film--and it turns out that war buddy Dave Goldman (John Garfield) is largely there to offer support to the super-goy martyr hero. Sure, he throws the odd punch at the odd trash-talking drunk, but his purpose is to bolster Green's cause, and seem sad and stoic so that Green can have a plight to expose. And so Green hogs the spotlight as he suffers one indignity after another, causing second thoughts about his betrothed Kathy (Dorothy McGuire), who tacitly accepts the anti-Semitism that goes on under her nose.

It's not just a matter of bad dramaturgy. True, Moss Hart's screenplay gets low marks for economy, dragging everything out in tired exchanges and statements of the obvious. And yes, director Elia Kazan creates zero ambience with his low-contrast cinematography and its grey-on-grey boredom. But the film is thematically unsound for the reason that it never comes to terms with the people it's supposed to be defending. According to Gentleman's Agreement, Jewishness is largely a matter of not being Gentile, and being ostracized; under such circumstances, Gregory Peck can "pass" as a Jew and be equal to the real thing. But Judaism has a long and vibrant cultural history that the movie never gets around to acknowledging, because Jews have to be "just like us" in order to be given pity privileges. And in the end, it winds up suppressing the things that make a Jew a Jew so that they might be more acceptable to a Gentile audience--not, you'll agree, a satisfactory shortcut to tolerance and goodwill.

Maybe I'm coming at this from the wrong angle; maybe it was good that this was the first Hollywood film to deal with the subject, and maybe it's churlish to attack a "classic" film for not learning modern lessons. But the fact remains that first doesn't necessarily mean best, or even good, and that current films haven't learned those lessons, either. If anything, its smug self-satisfaction is more rampant than ever, explaining how a limp noodle like Driving Miss Daisy became the life of the party while Do the Right Thing was left wanting for mainstream awards. Hollywood can't be racist, they say--didn't Halle Berry win an Oscar? And so we have to see Gentleman's Agreement as we see Berry's Oscar: as crumbs from the table, an indulgence paid for by those with guilty consciences so that they might sin all the more in the future.-Travis Hoover

There seems to be an ironic rule of thumb: the more stale the picture, the better it has kept. With half the restoration effort, Gentleman's Agreement looks twice as good in Fox's Studio Classics reissue as this month's DVD release of Nicholas Ray's timeless 1950 melodrama In a Lonely Place. The full-frame image is crisp like a pressed suit and absent of most age-related artifacts such as ground-in dirt. The remixed stereo audio doesn't sound reprocessed. Extras include a film-length commentary headlined by TIME reviewer Richard Schickel (author of a self-described "book on Elia Kazan") but also featuring actresses June Havoc and Celeste Holm, the latter an Academy Award winner for her work in Gentleman's Agreement.

All involved do more watching than talking, and Schickel's observations--few of which you couldn't make on your own--suggest he's suppressing his critical facilities out of polite posterity: he invites appreciation of Kazan's tendency to attenuate every entrance and exit a character makes without calling it on its staginess. AMC's "Backstory: Gentleman's Agreement" (24 mins.) substitutes a discussion of the anti-Semitic climate surrounding the release of the film with one about the HUAC witch hunt (any old form of oppression will do)--there's nothing here you haven't heard a thousand times elsewhere. "Movietone" segments cover Gentleman's Agreement's Oscar reception and, separately, studio head Darryl F. Zanuck's victory speech at the ceremony. Trailers for Gentleman's Agreement, How Green Was My Valley, and All About Eve round out the disc. Image: A, Sound: B+, Extras: C English Stereo, English Mono, French Mono, Spanish Mono English and Spanish subtitles DVD-9 118 minutes -Bill Chambers

Just before the talkie supplanted the silent movie, the latter reached a new level of pictorial sophistication with F.W. Murnau's tender, sanguine Sunrise - A Song of Two Humans. The 1927 film--which won Oscars at the very first Academy Awards for Best Unique and Artistic Picture (a category abandoned thereafter), Best Actress (Janet Gaynor, who split the prize three ways with herself, honoured also for her performances in Seventh Heaven and Angel), and Best Cinematography (by Charles Rosher and Karl Struss)--is the epitomizing mergence of German Expressionism and Hollywood narrative, as ripe a piece of cinema for all-time as Citizen Kane.

Sunrise, one of the earliest pictures to link infidelity and socio-economics, tells a simple tale elegantly and an elegantly simple tale: an urban gal (Margaret Livingston) vacations in the country and seduces a farmer (George O'Brien, a Stanislavskian brooder) who subsequently loses interest in everything but his mistress. The two plot to drown the farmer's wife (honey-haired Gaynor) and leave the simple life behind for the glitz and glamour of metropolis, yet when it comes time, the husband can't bring himself to do the deed, and instead spends a day in the city falling for his wife all over again. Murnau conveys the intensity of their rekindled affection in a mesmerizing sequence (of which there are many, including one pig-run-amuck episode that pre-figures Babe: Pig in the City's show-stopping finale) that uses a rudimentary though appropriately dreamlike form of bluescreen to place the married couple in the centre of a traffic jam they have caused through their heedless absorption in the poetry of each other's faces.

Armond White recently debated, albeit unconvincingly, that there will never be a decent comic-book adaptation because the form is a square peg to the round hole of film language. Murnau, a key Weimar director best known for his weakest picture, Nosferatu, seems to succeed at deploying comics conventions to enhance the emotionalism of non-verbal cinema beyond the abilities of his exceptional cast. In other words, he uses the intertitles to communicate in the often heightened way of word balloons: the mistress' black-hearted question "Couldn't she drown?", for instance, pops up in stammered fragments, only to start to drip once fully posed--its impact is galvanizing and unlike anything you'll find in talkies. With its innumerable technical accomplishments--an influential opening match-dissolve, beautiful double-exposures, a torrential rainstorm (among the most persuasive ever staged), and so on and so forth--and a soulfulness that keeps these visual embellishments from overpowering the elemental love story at the picture's core, Sunrise was built to last.

Fox means it when they label Sunrise a "limited edition" DVD: the disc is only available through a special offer that necessitates the purchase of three other "Studio Classics" releases. It's worth it. Restored from a surviving Movietone print, the fullscreen 1.20:1 transfer will look miraculous to those familiar with Sunrise but perhaps less so to newcomers; the image is scratched, of course, but contrast and detail are marvellous. (The film's camera negative disintegrated in a fire in 1937.) Projection speed appears to be spot-on. Both the original Movietone soundtrack (in clean mono), featuring tremendous music by Hugo Riesenfeld and synch sound effects (sometimes Riesenfeld's cues function as the foley), and a new, anodyne score (in stereo)--composed and conducted by Timothy Brock of the Olympic Chamber Orchestra--that drops the foley altogether, are offered up as soundtrack options alongside a feature-length commentary from cinematographer John Bailey (The Anniversary Party).

Not surprisingly, Bailey's priority is a discussion of lighting and shot choices. While an additional full-fledged analysis from a historian might have been the ticket, Bailey is able to identify locations and provides ample backstory on the production. The DP returns in a 10-minute selection of intriguing outtakes, during the latter half of which a silhouetted hair intrudes; Bailey says the telecine operator is at fault and not the footage itself, so it's too bad that, in the name of posterity, they didn't retransfer it--even if it's shoddy to begin with. These outtakes, which run the gamut from full master shots to a failed attempt at the famous marsh sequence, are alternatively presented in a version with title cards identifying the various trims. Elsewhere, Carl Mayer's evocative scenario/screenplay appears in two forms: as black on white text with Murnau's annotations, and in its proper format as white on black text.

A fascinating, if not entirely compelling reconstruction of Four Devils ("Traces of a Lost Film"), Murnau's second film for Fox (missing for decades, archivists continue to hold out hope that it will turn up someday, somewhere), shuffles script notes, chiaroscuro storyboards by Robert Herlth, and sepia-toned stills in an effort to convey this dark portrait of circus life with shades of the Stromboli section of Disney's Pinocchio. The treatment and screenplay for Four Devils append the 39-minute piece; a gallery of photos from the set of Sunrise plus its mute theatrical trailer and notes on its restoration round out this year's worthiest DVD thus far. Image: A, Sound: A-, Extras: A English Mono (Movietone), English Stereo (Olympic Chamber Orchestra) DVD-9 95 minutes -Bill Chambers

With all due respect (which is to say, very little), F-U Nora Ephron. In Sleepless in Seattle, Ephron gives Rosie O'Donnell the line "Men just don't get this movie" in reference to Leo McCarey's An Affair to Remember, as if a Cary Grant film could ever be an emasculating experience--Ephron co-opting McCarey's remake of his own Love Affair has unfairly branded an appealing work a guy repellent. (If you're going to underestimate my emotional intelligence, especially don't do it through the Cheerio-shaped mouth of O'Donnell, who is more man than I'll ever be.) Ephron's only, flimsy recourse is that An Affair to Remember was shot in CinemaScope, engendering much visual humour that must have been lost for years to the evils of pan-and-scan--it's very possible the picture plays more purely sentimental with its sides lopped off.

Michael Rennie stars as Klaatu, an alien who travels to Earth bearing important news for us, but no sooner does he exit his flying saucer than the army literally shoots the messenger. Begging the leaders of the free world to put aside their "stupidity" so that he may hold a global press conference, a healed Klaatu's request is denied, so he breaks out of the military facility in which he's being kept prisoner and embarks on a fish-out-of-water scenario, assuming the name "Mr. Carpenter" and landing in the home of single mother Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) and her enthusiastic son, Bobby (Billy Gray). Old-fashioned American jealousy jeopardizes Klaatu's revised mission--to receive assistance in spreading his word from the Einstein-like Prof. Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe)--as Helen's boyfriend (Hugh Marlowe) gets wise to the new border's true identity.

Time--moreover, the evolution of greed--has blunted the edge of this last of the champagne satires, which opens with ingénue Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) accepting what is, for all intents and purposes, a Tony. A-flashbacking we go to Eve's humble beginnings as an obsessed fan of Margo Channing (Bette Davis), a middle-aged diva who takes pity on poor Eve, the widow with no real home but the playhouse. Once she has been installed in Margo's residence and as a member her inner circle, Eve starts butting into more personal affairs; by the time Margo gets wise, Eve is her understudy and irrevocably entrenched in the theatre scene. George Sanders, in the film's best performance, insinuates himself into the situation to tinker with Eve's mind as a sharp-tongued critic with a butter-knife voice--Brooks Atkinson reborn as Machiavelli, he's the only element of All About Eve that remains acerbic some fifty years later.