Home Entertainment : Catching Up With Classic Oscar Winners on Laser Disc

If the word Oscar is magic, then Columbia TriStar Home Video hopes to cash in on its spell with the release of several Academy Award-laden films from its vaults, some in newly restored editions.

There’s not a disappointing film in the batch and many are responsible for some of film history’s finest hours. Each is being offered individually with single-disc movies selling for $35 and double discs selling for $40--a bargain for the restored two-disc sets. Unfortunately, for all the care put into the releases, the two-disc sets are not packaged with separate sleeves for each disc, which doesn’t bode well for storage protection.

Arguably, the most welcome in the first set of releases is “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” winner of the 1957 best picture Oscar and six other Academy Awards. Offered as part of “The Studio Heritage Collection,” it represents a sizable investment in restoration, $500,000, according to the detailed liner notes.

To reconstruct the Cinemascope negative--which, letter-boxed, plays with relatively wide banding--Sony Pictures Entertainment worked from the original separations and retimed the film to re-create the rich color, which is intense, almost jumping off the screen. A new Dolby Stereo Surround score came from separate dialogue, music and effects tapes, mixed with several “newly recorded atmospheric sound effects,” since the film’s original stereo soundtrack “no longer existed.”

The end result does justice to this powerful story of Allied POWs building a strategic bridge while in a World War II Japanese prison camp in Burma. William Holden was at his best as the escaped American sailor blackmailed into returning to the camp to blow up the bridge. Alec Guinness won the best actor Oscar as the stubborn British colonel pitted against an equally proud Sessue Hayakawa. Director David Lean won an Academy Award.

The Oscar-winning screenplay by Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, who were blacklisted, was initially credited to Pierre Boulle, who wrote the fact-based novel from which the screenplay was adapted. Foreman and Wilson are here given credit on the screen. The Sam Spiegel production also won Oscars for cinematography, editing and music scoring.

The two-disc set includes two CAV (standard play) sides and two CLV (extended play) sides, with the bridge blown up in CAV, so it can be savored one frame at a time. Another powerful World War II-era film, the 1953 “From Here to Eternity,” shows how potent black-and-white movies could be in a time when color was becoming the rage. The Daniel Taradash adaptation of the James Jones novel recharged Frank Sinatra’s career and won him a best supporting actor Oscar. Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed (whose role as a prostitute won her a best supporting actress Oscar) also turned in memorable performances under Fred Zinnemann’s direction. The film won a total of eight Oscars, including best picture.

A second film in “The Studio Heritage Collection”--films restored as closely as possible to their original-release condition--is the eight-Oscar winner “On the Waterfront,” which helped propel Marlon Brando to the forefront of American actors. Elia Kazan directed the intense story of graft and corruption among New York’s longshoremen, shot in gritty black and white from an original script by Budd Schulberg, who spent a year researching and writing it.

He recalls initially showing the project to Fox’s Darryl Zanuck, whose initial reaction to the project was: “Finally Zanuck comes clean and says he doesn’t like a single thing about it. And we ask why not. And I will never forget his reply. ‘Who’s going to care about a bunch of sweaty longshoremen?’ ”

The laser disc was digitally remastered from newly restored film elements. (Other laser discs in the “Studio Heritage Collection,” currently available on VHS, will be released after this year.) Eva Marie Saint, who made her film debut in “Waterfront,” won a best supporting actress Oscar; Kazan and Schulberg were among others honored by the academy. Two vintage Frank Capra films are included in the Oscar-film laser series: the 1934 “It Happened One Night,” with the incomparable Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, and the 1938 best picture winner, “You Can’t Take It With You,” featuring Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur.

The film version of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “All the King’s Men,” inspired by the rise and fall of Louisiana’s Huey Pierce Long, brought Oscars to Broderick Crawford and supporting actress Mercedes McCambridge. The 1949 film also won for best picture.

The 1982 “Gandhi,” which won nine Academy Awards (best picture, director, actor, original screenplay, cinematography, film editing, art direction, costume design, sound) is among the more recent of the “Columbia Pictures Award Winner” series. The letter-boxed transfer, presented in the original theatrical aspect ration of 2.35:1, makes for wide banding.

Ben Kingsley’s memorable performance as the Mahatma plays against the sweep of colonial India breaking free of British rule. Director Richard Attenborough also brought in an array of strong guest stars, including Candice Bergen as photographer Margaret Bourke-White, Edward Fox, John Gielgud, Trevor Howard, John Mills and Martin Sheen.

The exuberant 1968 best picture winner, “Oliver!,” Sir Carol Reed’s stellar adaptation of the Lionel Bart musical, comes with an intense color transfer, again almost too hot, like a previous Pioneer release. The rather wide letter-box banding preserves the original theatrical aspect ratio. The film won six Academy Awards, though the liner notes fail to list them all. One of the finest stage to film adaptations of a musical ever, this full-bodied, tender tale of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist stars Mark Lester in the title role, with Jack Wild as the Artful Dodger and Ron Moody in a memorable performance as Fagin. Oliver Reed is the evil Bill Sikes and Shani Wallis the kind Nancy.