Comedy, drama or romance?

Three from Criterion

$30

The latest releases from the boutique DVD company include a classic screwball farce from one of America’s comedy legends, an elegant British drama and a moving love story from a titan of Italian cinema.

Unfaithfully Yours

It’s hard to believe this delightful sophisticated slapstick comedy from writer-director Preston Sturges was a flop when it was released in 1948 -- it has grown leaps and bounds in reputation over the decades.

But for whatever reason, audiences stayed away from this black farce about an egomaniacal world-famous symphony conductor (played to the hilt by Rex Harrison) who believes his lovely younger wife (a well-cast Linda Darnell) is having an affair with his assistant. During one of his concerts, Harrison’s Sir Alfred De Carter envisions elaborate plots to murder his wife, each set to one of the orchestral works he’s conducting. After the concert, he learns that it’s not so easy to dispose of one’s spouse.

The supporting cast -- Rudy Vallee, Barbara Lawrence, Lionel Stander and Edgar Kennedy as a gumshoe obsessed with classical music -- are first-rate farceurs.

“Unfaithfully Yours” proved to be the filmmaker’s last great comedy. Sturges, who began as a playwright in the late 1920s before coming west in the early 1930s as a screenwriter, was one of the most successful filmmakers of the 1940s and one of the highest-paid. As a writer-director, he made hit after hit, including “Sullivan’s Travels,” “The Palm Beach Story,” “Hail the Conquering Hero” and “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.”

Extras: A lively introduction to the film from writer-director Terry Jones of “Monty Python” fame, a gallery of stills and production notes, an interview with Sturges’ widow, Sandy Sturges, and informative, entertaining commentary with Sturges scholars James Harvey, Diane Jacobs and Brian Henderson.

*

The Browning Version

In his audio commentary, film historian Bruce Eder declares this 1951 drama the best adaptation of a play ever put on celluloid. Though Eder may be going a bit overboard, “The Browning Version” does rank as one of the most successful. Tastefully directed by Anthony Asquith (“Pygmalion,” “The Importance of Being Earnest”) from Terence Rattigan’s adaptation of his hit play, the drama revolves around a bitter, aging schoolmaster on his last day teaching at a private boys’ school in the south of England. And his well-ordered life is falling apart -- his health is diminishing, his students hate him and his duplicitous wife (Jean Kent) is having an affair.

With his world crumbling, the teacher of classics who had once shown such promise is forced to reexamine his life. Michael Redgrave, who won best actor at the Cannes Film Festival, gives one of his most complex and beautifully crafted performances. Nigel Patrick also stars as the wife’s lover, a popular, happy-go-lucky science teacher at the school.

Extras: An interview with Mike Figgis, who directed the disappointing 1994 remake, a 1958 TV interview with Redgrave, who was a man of few words, and commentary with Eder, who puts the film in historical and sociological context.

*

White Nights

(Le notti bianche)

The influential Italian director Luchino Visconti helmed this haunting 1957 adaptation of a Fyodor Dostoyevsky short story. Marcello Mastroianni plays a lonely young man, a recent transplant to a big city where he works as a clerk. One night by chance, he meets a sheltered, mysterious young woman (a luminous Maria Schell). The woman waits every evening on a canal bridge for her lover (a charismatic Jean Marais) who left town but promised to return to her on the bridge in a year.

The film was shot entirely on a soundstage, and the expressionistic, surreal sets give “White Nights” an atmospheric, dreamlike quality. Giuseppe Rotunno supplied the lush black-and-white cinematography.

Extras: A newly restored high-definition transfer supervised by the cinematographer, rare silent screen-test footage of the stars, the original theatrical trailer, a 115-minute recorded version of the Dostoyevsky short story and interviews from 2003 with the cinematographer, screenwriter Suso Cecchi and costume designer Piero Tosi.

-- Susan King