Carrying the Fire

Well, this is interesting. Yesterday, The Digital Bits reported that Walt Disney Home Entertainment is licensing its physical media production to Sony, which has the potential to considerably expand the studio’s 4K and Blu-ray output. Or it might collapse it down to nothing but new releases, which wouldn’t be too far off from where Disney is nowadays anyway. (Those elaborate new special editions of James Cameron’s movies are the exception, not the rule.)

I choose to be cautiously optimistic, because that’s my default setting – and also because, having just seen once again what Sony’s disc operation is capable of producing, I have to hope they’ll approach the Disney and Fox libraries the same care and scope.

Yep, there’s a new Columbia Classics box in town.

The fourth volume of Sony’s ongoing celebration of the Columbia Pictures library – and the first to arrive during the studio’s centenary year – follows the template established with 2020's Volume 1, rolling out six features from six different decades on UHD for the very first time.

The honorees: Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940), Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), Robert Benton’s Kramer Vs. Kramer (1979), John Carpenter’s Starman (1984), Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002).

All six films are freshly restored and remastered, with remixed Dolby Atmos soundtracks on all but His Girl Friday – though the original theatrical soundtracks are also included, because this set is pitched squarely at the sort of cinematic obsessive who’d be very cross if he couldn’t listen to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in the original left-right-center 3.0 mix. (It’s me, hi, I’m the problem. It’s me.)

And you want extras? Oh, there are extras. All the supplements from Sony's previous discs are here, along with new special features and a couple of left-field bonuses. His Girl Friday and Punch-Drunk Love even fold some material produced for the previous Criterion editions of those titles, presumably in the same sort of reciprocal deal the labels made for The Last Picture Show, allowing Criterion to release its own 4K discs down the line.

But any Criterion bump-ups are a possibility, rather than a certainty – the label has yet to release 4K editions of Dr. Strangelove, Anatomy of a Murder or It Happened One Night, all of which appeared in previous Columbia Classics boxes – so if you’re looking to own any of these films in the best possible presentation short of a 35mm print, I would recommend grabbing Volume 4 at the first opportunity.

Because, wow.

I’m running out of superlatives for the luxurious treatment Sony extends to these boxes, which are unlike anything else the label puts out. Partly that’s to justify the price point, of course – it seems like each new release adds thirty or forty bucks to the SRP – but it also feels like a point of pride for the people who work on them. These things are designed as the ultimate statement on the films within, and the studios that produced them, and if they trend towards the celebratory, well … yeah, of course they do. (Here’s my review of Volume 3, which came out in the fall of 2022.) And, almost unbelievably, this set marks the first time Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has released His Girl Friday and Punch-Drunk Love on Blu-ray, having been content to let Criterion have the exclusive for years.

You can quibble about the inclusion of a given film– I raise an eyebrow at least once per press release – but if the mission statement is to offer a snapshot of where Columbia Pictures was in a given moment, either in terms of what constituted a prestige title or a popular hit or the definition of an entire genre of cinema, then yeah, Oliver! and To Sir, with Love and Sleepless in Seattle deserve a slot in their respective boxes. I remain agnostic about Annie, but I guess future academics will want to study it.

So what’s in Volume 4? A pretty great weekend at the movies, honestly.

HIS GIRL FRIDAY

The best screwball comedy ever made? It’s either this or The Philadelphia Story, I think, and this one has the edge of watching Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell loathe one another at speed. Adding a new wrinkle to Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s legendary farce The Front Page by turning the rival reporters into ex-lovers, Hawks finds the perfect engine for an ever-escalating comedy, with his heroes driven as much by personal spite as professional zeal in the race to prove a condemned man’s innocence. And by acknowledging that both Walter and Hildy are selfish, awful people, he gives us the perfect happy ending: Now that these two terrible souls have argued themselves back together, that nice Ralph Bellamy gets to live in peace.

Extras: The excellent audio commentary by Todd McCarthy, and brisk featurettes on Grant, Russell and Hawks were all produced for Columbia TriStar’s 2000 DVD release and carried over to Criterion’s Blu-ray – which was where you’d find David Bordwell’s appreciation of Russell’s performance and the half-hour study of Ben Hecht, too. Newly produced for this special edition are two featurettes, “Screwball Style: The Iconic Costumes of Robert Kalloch” and “Breaking the Speed Barrier: The Dialogue of His Girl Friday”. They’re good! 

GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER

Hardly the best movie Columbia put out in the ’60s, but one which carries inarguable historical importance – and after the inclusion of To Sir, with Love in Volume 3 it’s clear that someone at Sony is a serious Sidney Poitier fan. Stanley Kramer’s touch isn’t as light as the material needs – I found myself wondering what Sydney Pollack might have done with William Rose’s script more than once, or Sidney Lumet – but Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy bring decades of flinty warmth to their roles as New York liberals trying to deal with their daughter’s engagement to a Black man; Hepburn’s niece Katharine Houghton is appropriately bright-eyed as said daughter, and Poitier is very much enjoying himself playing a character so flawless that everyone figures he must be hiding something. It turns out, his values are pretty conservative – but then, so is the movie.

Extras: The Blu-ray offers a comprehensive suite of supplements produced for every previous release of the film: The scholarly audio commentary by Eddy Friedfeld, Lee Pfeiffer and Paul Scrabo produced for the Twilight Time BD, and the celebrity introductions and featurettes included on the 40^th anniversary DVD release and again on Sony’s 50^th anniversary Blu-ray. The only thing missing is the isolated score track that appeared on the Twilight Time disc, but we’re used to that.

KRAMER VS. KRAMER

The sexual politics are a little creaky and the ’70s fashions are … well, actually a lot of them are current again. But Robert Benton’s Oscar-winning domestic drama still plays, and that’s the only thing that matters. Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep are perfectly cast as two very self-centered people who probably never should have married one another in the first place, and now have to deal with the fallout; the story goes that Streep hated her character as written in Avery Corman’s novel, and her decision to play Joanna Kramer as depressive rather than impulsive makes all the difference in the world. Benton wrote the script for François Truffaut, only taking the director’s chair when Truffaut decided to pass; I cannot imagine a more intimidating gig, or a more rewarding outcome.

Extras: This one’s tricky. The Kramer vs. Kramer Blu-ray included here is Sony’s existing retail disc, with an earlier transfer and the excellent retrospective documentary “Finding the Truth” as the sole extra. All the new supplements – audio commentary by film professor Jennine Lanouette, five brief deleted scenes and four new featurettes – are on the 4K disc, along with a new master that puts the Blu-ray to shame. 

STARMAN

Aw, Starman. The second in John Carpenter’s trilogy of ’80s studio masterpieces – The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China being the other two – and the one that’s taken the longest to get its flowers, this sci-fi road-movie romance is a precious jewel, and a film I never expected to see get this sort of prestige treatment. But it makes perfect sense, both as an example of Columbia’s willingness to go big on unlikely auteur projects and as a way to showcase some movie-star megawattage: Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen may have done better work elsewhere, but their chemistry here is utterly magical, with Bridges’ remarkable inside-out performance serving as the frame for Allen’s wonderful emotional journey. He beholds her with wonder. So does Carpenter. So do we.

Extras: Sony one-ups Shout! Factory’s 2018 special-edition Blu-ray with nearly 20 minutes’ worth of never-before-seen deleted scenes and scene extensions, most of which are pretty brief but all of which speak to how thoroughly and thoughtfully the film was shaped in post-production. All the previously available extras – the original EPK featurette, the 2018 retrospective doc “They Came from Hollywood: Revisiting Starman” and a delightful Carpenter-Bridges audio commentary – are also included, along with trailers, two behind-the-scenes time-lapse sequences, a still gallery and the Hayden family music video for “All I Have to Do Is Dream” that’s haunted me for forty years.

And I still can’t believe Sony did this, but the complete run of ABC’s Starman TV series – starring Robert Hays as the new incarnation of the visitor, and Christopher Daniel Barnes as his and Jenny’s now-teenaged son – is here, remastered in HD. Where previous Columbia Classics sets relegated broadcast content to bonus DVDs, all 22 episodes of Starman’s sole season are collected on two 4K platters. The series was previously released on DVD over a decade ago, but I’m sure collectors will appreciate the bump up to 1080p ... even if you need a 4K player to watch them. 

SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE

Look, I hate this movie. Its dialogue is overwritten and schematic, it relies on its soundtrack to reassure boomers that everything is bouncy and happy while hanging its actors out to dry, and the screenplay includes a scene where the audience is encouraged to mock the exaggerated Goth look of a teenager because Nora Ephron can’t imagine a world in which she’s not the ultimate arbiter of what’s cool. (Punching down was totally a thing in 1993, it turns out.) It’s a romance made by a cynic, but I can respect its inclusion in this set: Sleepless in Seattle was a massive hit, minting Ephron as a hit-maker and Meg Ryan as rom-com royalty … even though she’d been making them for years. Hell, she’d already made one with Hanks! Also, this one was a TriStar release. But print the legend, I guess.

Extras: A new commentary from writers Karen Han and David Sims gives the movie its due while also offering some historical context – and if you’d rather hear Nora and Delia Ephron share their memories of the film in a 10^th-anniversary track recorded for the DVD, that’s here as well. There’s also a conversation between Ryan and producer Gary Foster, taped for the movie’s 25^th anniversary in 2018, and all the extras from Sony’s previous Blu-ray.

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE

Now, here is a picture that can’t be argued against – a stunning, immersive, almost assaultive psychodrama from Paul Thomas Anderson built around a performance of unprecedented complexity and feeling from Adam Sandler, the guy who made a fortune playing immature men who yell at the world. But there was always a menacing quality to Sandler’s goofy fury, and Anderson traps us with it – and him – to the point where it’s physically unpleasant to be in the presence of his seething Barry Egan. But Emily Watson’s Lena likes him, and he likes her back, and the connection they build is his salvation. Other stuff happens too, but none of it really matters: It’s all about Barry and Lena finding each other. Punch-Drunk Love is Anderson’s best movie, and if I hadn’t been sent a review copy of this set I would have bought it just to have this film in 4K. (Shout! will probably release a 4K of Starman down the line.) And of all the Atmos remixes included in this set, the new track – approved by the famously fussy Anderson – is a chef’s kiss wrapped in a sledgehammer.

Extras: This is the only title in the collection with no new supplemental material; in fact, Sony’s edition offers fewer extras than Criterion’s, which boasts an exclusive featurette on the artist Jeremy Blake, the film’s Cannes press conference and an NBC News interview with real-life pudding master David Phillips. You still get the deleted scenes, the Scopitones, an interview with Jon Brion and the Mattress Man commercial, and of course the “Blossoms & Blood” featurette that is the closest we’ll ever get to a proper making-of documentary. I guess one self-excoriating mega-doc was enough, huh.

Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection: Volume 4 is available now from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment wherever fine cinema is sold. Just buy it. You’ll be sorry if you don’t.

In this weekend’s paid edition: Assuming no other calamities happen, I’ll be spinning up Shout!’s new editions of Tenacious D In The Pick of Destiny and Sam Raimi’s Darkman, and Paramount's 4K renaster of Footloose because they all kind of line up, you know? Upgrade your subscription so you don't miss out!