2 Oscar Winners on DVD

The gripping drug thriller “Traffic” may have won four Oscars--including best director (Steven Soderbergh), adapted screenplay (Stephen Gaghan) and supporting actor (Benicio Del Toro)--but the DVD version (USA, $27) certainly won’t be collecting any awards.

Perhaps because Soderbergh has been busy making “Ocean’s Eleven,” he didn’t supply an audio commentary for this digital edition. So the DVD is pretty skimpy. Besides the wide-screen version of the ensemble drama (which also stars Michael Douglas, Dennis Quaid, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Don Cheadle), the DVD offers only a theatrical trailer, a photo gallery and a standard behind-the-scenes featurette that had been shown on Showtime.

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Far superior is Columbia TriStar’s digital edition of Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” ($25), which also won four Academy Awards, including best foreign-language film. This terrific, magical, Mandarin-language martial arts fantasy is the highest grossing foreign film ever released in the United States.

The digital edition includes a lovely wide-screen transfer, production notes, theatrical trailers, a photo montage, talent files and a nice “making-of” documentary that was shown on Bravo. The featurette includes interviews with director Lee, writer and executive producer James Schamus and stars Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-Fat.

In the documentary, Lee refers to “Crouching Tiger” as a martial arts version of “Sense & Sensibility.” Lee directed the Oscar-winning 1995 version of Jane Austen’s classic British novel.

Chow discusses the fact that after making Hong Kong action films for more than 20 years, “Crouching Tiger” marks his first martial arts film and the first time he had to shave his head for a role. Lee points out that Chow spent months rehearsing the fancy sword work.

Lee, who is a real charmer, and Schamus also provide an entertaining and insightful commentary track.

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Willem Dafoe received a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for his deliciously morbid turn as the Dracula-esque Max Schreck in “Shadow of the Vampire” (Universal, $27). This dark comedy, set during the making of the F.W. Murnau silent classic “Nosferatu,” proposes that Murnau (John Malkovich) actually cast a real vampire in the part of the bloodsucking Court Orlock.

The digital edition includes an average featurette, the wide-screen edition of the film, the trailer and short interviews with producer Nicolas Cage, Dafoe and director E. Elias Merhige. The director also supplies rather dense, esoteric commentary that will probably have most viewers grabbing their dictionaries to understand what the heck he’s talking about.

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Two of Murnau’s great German silent films are being released this week by Kino on Video ($30 each): 1924’s “The Last Laugh” and 1926’s “Faust.”

In the heartbreaking expressionistic drama “Last Laugh,” star Emil Jannings gives an incredibly moving performance as an elderly but proud doorman of a fancy hotel who is suddenly demoted to washroom attendant. Karl Freund supplied the poetic cinematography. The DVD includes a great new score by Timothy Brock and a photo gallery.

Jannings also excels as Satan in the evocative fantasy “Faust.” Not as involving or humanistic as “Last Laugh,” “Faust” nevertheless is brilliantly directed, designed and photographed.

Rounding out the new Kino collection of German silent films is the rare 1927 G.W. Pabst drama, “The Love of Jeanne Ney” ($30).

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Veteran director Roger Corman supplies low-key but highly compelling commentary on three of the great ‘60s horror films he made for American International Pictures (MGM, $15 each): 1960’s “House of Usher,” 1961’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” and 1963’s “X--The Man With the X-Ray Eyes.”

Each disc includes a nice wide-screen transfer of the movie and theatrical trailer. In the case of “Pit” and “X,” the DVDs also feature rare--and weird--prologues that were cut (for good reason!).

Prior to “House of Usher,” Corman says, the indie AIP made its shoestring-budget teen flicks on a 10-day schedule. The studio then paired its movies as double bills for the drive-ins. But with “Usher,” which was the first of several films AIP produced based on Edgar Allan Poe stories, Corman was given a whopping 15 days to make the film. “Usher” was also the first AIP production shot in color and the first not included as a double bill.

On each disc, Corman gives what best could be described as a lecture on the art of filmmaking, talking about everything from the Freudian aspects of the Poe pictures to how he liked to frame each scene and the methods he employed to introduce characters.

Corman talks extensively about working with such veteran actors as Vincent Price (“Usher” and “Pit”) and Ray Milland (“X”) and what these men brought to the projects. In fact, Corman says with pride, Milland stated that the only films he was really proud of were “The Lost Weekend,” for which he won the Oscar, and “X.”

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Fans of Robert Downey Jr. will probably want to check out the DVD release of the 1997 film, “Two Girls and a Guy” (Fox, $23). Downey gives one of his best performances in this slight comedy-drama as an egotistical, struggling actor who is confronted by the two women in his life (Natasha Gregson Wagner, Heather Graham).

The digital edition features the wide-screen version of the film, the trailer and so-so commentary from writer-director James Toback, Downey and Gregson Wagner. Toback, who worked with Downey in the 1987 film “The Pick-Up Artist,” wrote this film for Downey after the actor’s first run-in with the law over his drug problems in 1996. Toback wrote it in just one week and filmed “Two Girls” in 11 days.