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**** “Petulia.” Warner. $59.95.

Director Richard Lester was known primarily for his blithely fragmented Beatles musicals when he sprang this stunner of a romance-drama on 1968 audiences. It opens with jagged, raw images of a young Janis Joplin screaming the blues. The savage, bittersweet romance that follows--between a troubled surgeon (George C. Scott) and the wife (Julie Christie) of a rich young psychotic (Richard Chamberlain)--is one of the key movies of the late ‘60s: deceptively off-hand, mordant and powerful. It’s a vision of San Francisco, through a glass, very darkly--and Lester’s deadpan slapstick bits and inventively fractured editing only heighten the mood of poignancy and missed chances.