Retro : Cecil and Claudette : MCA/UNIVERSAL VIDEO RELEASES COLLECTIONS OF TWO LEGENDARY HOLLYWOOD FIGURES

Attention all film buffs. MCA/Universal Home Video has compiled “The Cecil B. DeMille Collection” and “The Claudette Colbert Collection.”

“The Cecil B. DeMille Collection” includes five vintage DeMille extravaganzas ($15 each): the previously released “Reap the Wild Wind” and the never-before-on-video “The Crusades,” “Sign of the Cross,” “Unconquered” and “Union Pacific.”

DeMille wasn’t subtle. For 40 years he gave audiences lavishly produced, shamelessly sentimental epics with larger-than-life characters, elaborate special effects, spectacular action, suspense sequences--and plenty of sex. One of his last films, 1952’s “The Greatest Show on Earth,” won the Oscar for best film.

Director Howard Hawks (“Red River”) once said of DeMille: “I learned an awful lot from him by doing the opposite.” His films are hokum, but marvelously entertaining hokum.

The 1935 The Crusades is DeMille’s take on the Middle Ages and the Holy Wars. Loretta Young and Henry Wilcoxon star in this sprawling tale of Richard the Lionhearted and his wife.

Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea and Robert Preston headline DeMille’s last black-and-white feature, 1939’s Union Pacific. This time around, DeMille brings to life his version of the building of the first transcontinental railroad. Brian Donlevy is at his vile best as the bad guy, McCrea makes a handsome hero and Stanwyck, speaking with an Irish brogue, plays another one of her memorable strong-willed characters. A spectacularly staged train wreck is one of the highlights.

High spots are few in 1947’s Unconquered, a run-of-DeMille Technicolor opus starring Gary Cooper, Paulette Goddard, Boris Karloff (as a Native American), Cecil Kellaway, Ward Bond and DeMille’s daughter, Katharine. Goddard plays a beautiful English convict, deported to the American colonies in the 18th Century, sold into slavery and bought by the heroic Coop. There’s several far from politically correct skirmishes between the colonists and Native Americans.

Far more entertaining is DeMille’s 1932 epic Sign of the Cross. Set in Rome during the decadent reign of Nero (Charles Laughton), this religious pre-Code drama is filled to the brim with sex, orgies and sadistic sequences. Claudette Colbert plays Nero’s hussy of a wife Poppea, who likes to takes baths in asses’ milk. Ethereal Elissa Landi is a Christian maiden who falls in love with and converts a handsome Roman officer (Fredric March). The film was re-released in 1944 with a World War II prologue and several salacious scenes excised. All the cuts have now been restored.

The final DeMille film in the collection is 1942’s colorful pirate saga Reap the Wild Wind, starring John Wayne, Paulette Goddard, Ray Milland, Robert Preston and Susan Hayward. An Oscar winner for best special effects, “Reap the Wild Wind” features an epic climax--an underwater battle between Wayne and a giant squid.

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For those who only know Claudette Colbert from her comedic roles in “It Happened One Night” or “The Egg and I,” the four-film “Colbert Collection” ($15 each) illustrates the diversity of the Parisian-born Oscar winner.

Directed by DeMille, the 1934 Cleopatra is far more entertaining--and shorter--than the 1963 Elizabeth Taylor flick. Colbert has a field day playing the manipulative, sexy queen of the Nile. The underrated Warren William plays Caesar and beefcake Henry Wilcoxon is Marc Antony. “Cleopatra” was nominated for a best film Oscar but lost out to Colbert’s other 1934 hit, “It Happened One Night.” Victor Milner earned an Academy Award for his stunning “Cleopatra” cinematography.

A definite disappointment, though, is the 1938 comedy Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, which also stars Gary Cooper, David Niven and Edward Everett Horton. Directed by the usually wonderful Ernst Lubitsch and penned by the equally marvelous team of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, “Bluebeard” is a witless farce about a much-married millionaire (Cooper) who gets his comeuppance from his latest wife (Colbert), a poor French aristocrat’s daughter.

The following year, though, Wilder and Brackett wrote the delightful Mitchell Leisen-directed romantic comedy Midnight. Colbert plays a young woman, stranded without a franc in Paris, who is hired by an aristocrat (a hilarious John Barrymore) to seduce a gigolo away from his wife. Don Ameche is in fine form as an earnest taxicab driver who falls for Colbert. Barrymore’s bit on the telephone is priceless.

Colbert goes dramatic with good results in the stirring 1943 film So Proudly We Hail!, a tribute to the nurses who were serving in the Pacific in World War II. Besides Colbert, the film features Paulette Goddard (a best supporting actress Oscar nominee), Veronica Lake, George Reeves (Superman) and Sonny Tufts. Allan Scott was Oscar-nominated for his screenplay, as was Charles Lang for his cinematography.