The Archive is Open

I’ve written about the Warner Archive Collection before, and the top-tier restorations being produced for the imprint by George Feltenstein and his team. In fact, they’ve been doing this long enough that there’s now a considerable catalogue of Archive titles – so many, in fact, that people might not know where to start.

Well, here’s one solution. The imprint has launched a series of themed sets, assembling existing Archive editions of a given actor, or in some cases a given theme. Three such collections were released in 2020 covering film noir, Hitchcock and ’80s and ’90s cult horror, but this year Warner Archive is really going for it, putting out four-film sets for Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Elizabeth Taylor in June and ramping up operations even further for the fall.

Last week saw the release of a four-film set of Greta Garbo pictures and a six-film Errol Flynn set, as well as a 50’s Sci-Fi Collection. October’s schedule includes sets for Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Judy Garland, as well as a “Hollywood Legends of Horror” collection dedicated to the ’30s creepers like Doctor X and The Devil-Doll. And all of these sets are priced considerably lower than the combined SRPs of the individual discs within.

Sure, you might have one or two titles from any given set, but you probably don’t have all of them. And this is your chance at a volume discount.

These collections aren’t full filmographies of their respective subjects, being constructed from existing releases. (Warner’s Signature Collection line of DVD boxed sets tried to be a little more comprehensive.) But the six-disc Flynn set, for example, feels like a good representation of one decade in the actor’s career, bookended with the Technicolor costume pictures The Adventures of Robin Hood and Adventures of Don Juan, with The Sea Hawk, Santa Fe Trail, Edge of Darkness and Objective, Burma! in between.

I hadn’t even thought about most of these films since their DVD release, and was delighted to see how good they look here; Feltenstein and his people are cinematic archaeologists, and they’ve dug up the best materials from which to restore each picture.

The five Archive releases in this set seem freshly struck; the swashbuckling opening battle of Michael Curtiz’ The Sea Hawk – as well as its mid-film sepia sequence and expressionistic tribunal scenes – has never looked this good, and the moody tones of Lewis Milestone’s Edge of Darkness, with Norwegian resistance fighters sneaking around their little village avoiding Nazis, are faithfully rendered.

The merciless intensity of the sun in Raoul Walsh’s Objective, Burma! gives that movie an almost bleached quality in certain scenes, while Curtiz’ Santa Fe Trail – in which Warner courted Southern audiences with a pre-Civil War fantasy about Jeb Stuart (Flynn) and George Custer (Ronald Reagan!) in a love triangle with railroad heiress Kit Carson Holliday (Flynn’s frequent co-star Olivia de Havilland, also represented here in Robin Hood) – looks like a million bucks.

In fact, the restorations are so good that they made me wish the Archive team had been given a shot at remastering The Adventures of Robin Hood. Warner’s 2008 Blu-ray release – which is the one in this set – was a considerable improvement on the earlier DVD but its 1080p/24 master is almost twenty years old, and the bright, warm Technicolor palette and grain structure on the far fresher restoration of Vincent Sherman’s Don Juan show us what the advances in scanning and encoding technology can do for these films.

This is not to take anything away from the picture, mind you. Kate had never seen Robin Hood, so we watched it together, and it remains a total delight, with Curtiz and co-director William Keighley pulling out all the stops for a rousing adventure yarn. Flynn bounces around shooting arrows and clashing swords with that bellowing laugh, thumbing his nose at dukes and princes while winning the heart of de Havilland’s Marian.

It should be corny – and I suppose it is – but it plays, and it’s always fun to revisit this and see contract players like Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, Una O’Connor and Alan Hale (who made 13 movies with Flynn, four of which are included in this set) turning up in exactly the right roles. I’m hoping the lack of a new transfer means a 4K disc is in the works; the 90^th anniversary is coming up, after all.

The Garbo set is a little more consistent, since Warner didn’t bring Ninotchka to Blu-ray until 2015, with the Archive discs of Anna Christie, Camille and Queen Christina following in 2023. The quality of the presentation is great-to-excellent, with Clarence Brown’s Anna Christie being a particular marvel since it offers both the English and German versions of the film in different states of restoration.

The German version – shot on the same sets, but with Garbo surrounded by a German-speaking cast (including this version’s director, Jacques Feyder) – uses what looks like a salvaged interpositive or possibly a well-preserved print, while the English version is virtually pristine, only showing its age through the rough-sounding audio of an early talkie. The soundtracks on the other three titles are much cleaner; Queen Christina sounds like it was recorded yesterday.

The four films similarly span a decade in Garbo’s career, from 1930 to 1939, and while her stardom was of rather a different nature than Flynn’s, we still get a sense of her range. Anna Christie lets her inhabit the despair and nobility of Eugene O’Neill’s protagonist-with-a-secret, while Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina lets her have a little fun with the regal costume drama, playing a Swedish monarch who dresses as a boy to have some time away from the throne and falls for a Spanish noble (John Gilbert).

George Cukor’s Camille is a swanky melodrama about a tubercular socialite determined to live in the moment, and of course Ninotchka – directed by Ernst Lubitsch and co-written by Billy Wilder – is a sparkling romantic comedy with Garbo and Melvyn Douglas as rival Russians in Paris, chasing the same set of confiscated Romanov jewels.

Again, I hadn’t seen most of these since their DVD days and was delighted to find them in such good condition here.

Same goes for the Sci-Fi set, which celebrates the 1950s trend of very large things stomping around while frightened people try to run in the opposite direction. It’s a fun mix, packaging the Archive discs of Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman and World Without End with the earlier Warner releases of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Them! There aren’t that many colossi in World Without End – just some oversized spiders, really – but the heart wants what it wants, right?

I cannot exactly argue for the enduring cinematic quality of Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, a very silly B-movie with Allison Hayes as an angry heiress who gets super-sized after a UFO encounter, and uses her new stature to rampage through the Hollywood Hills in search of her no-good husband (William Archer) and his girlfriend (Yvette Vickers). Barely an hour long, it was clearly designed as the bottom half of a drive-in double bill, with a poster promising a far more impressive rampage than director Nathan Hertz could actually mount. But there’s something to its bargain-basement empowerment allegory that keeps it bouncing around the zeitgeist; Daryl Hannah and Christopher Guest (!) remade it for HBO in the ’90s, and Tim Burton and Margot Robbie are apparently working on a new version. Godspeed, I guess.

World Without End is somehow sillier for taking itself so seriously, with a crew of contemporary astronauts time-warped to the 26^th century, where they find a post-nuclear Earth divided between high-minded humans and brutal “mutates” – as close to the plot of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine as legally possible. Co-star Rod Taylor would topline an official adaptation of the novel just four years later, making the resemblances even more awkward. It’s pretty forgettable, notable now mostly for Ellsworth Fredericks’ ambitious CinemaScope and Technicolor vistas – and for having Sam Peckinpah on board as a dialogue director. Peckinpah and Fredericks had the same roles on Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers that year, if you’re taking notes or planning to host a trivia night.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Them! are the highlights, their monster-movie energy juiced up with classic Atomic Age themes. Made in 1953, Eugene Lourie’s early kaiju picture uses Ray Bradbury’s atmospheric short story “The Fog Horn” as a jumping-off point for its tale of an ancient rhedosaur, freshly defrosted by bomb tests in the Arctic Circle, making its way towards New York City. Though it can’t compete with modern dinosaur effects, Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion creature was dazzling at the time – and the film around it still works pretty well, especially when viewed at 24fps as intended rather than the 30fps of its DVD or broadcast incarnations. And viewed in context as the film Ishiro Honda credits as an inspiration for the following year’s Gojira, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is an essential piece of giant-monster history, perhaps as important to the genre as the original King Kong.

Them! is ambitious in a different way. One of the first movies to play the Radiation Make Big card, Gordon Douglas’ procedural follows a handful of cops and scientists investigating a violent death in New Mexico – to which the only witness is a traumatized child. Gradually, our heroes deduce that a colony of ants, embiggened by nuclear testing, is responsible – and that the monsters are working their way towards Los Angeles. Like 20,000 Fathoms, the effects have dated and the performances aren’t exactly electrifying, but it’s fun to see the creature-feature template take shape as you watch. And both titles come with the featurettes and behind-the-scenes footage that first appeared on Warner’s DVD editions.

Oh, right: I haven’t even mentioned the supplements in these sets, which go from decent to voluminous depending on the title. On the Garbo set, Anna Christie isn’t the only platter with a bonus feature; Camille also includes the 1921 silent version, starring Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino and directed by Ray C. Smallwood. And Anna Christie and Queen Christina each offer an episode of the 1950s M-G-M Parade television show; the former covering the early years of Garbo’s career with the studio, and the latter tackling her later work.

A number of the Flynn discs include the full Warner Night at the Movies treatment, with an option to watch a curated selection of newsreels, trailers and shorts in front of the feature – as was the style at the time of their release. Robin Hood has all that, and all the other extras produced for its two-disc DVD special edition, with Chuck Jones’ animated shorts “Rabbit Hood” and “Robin Hood Daffy” upgraded to HD.

Warner historian Rudy Behlmer provides audio commentaries for Robin Hood and Don Juan – accompanied on the latter by director Vincent Sherman – and Edge of Darkness approximates the Night at the Movies gimmick with a Looney Tunes short (“To Duck or Not to Duck,” with Daffy and Porky boxing each other) and the 1944 Don Diego one-reeler “Gun to Gun.” Finally, Objective, Burma! offers a pair of propaganda shorts, 1941’s “The Tanks are Coming” and 1943’s “The Rear Gunner,” the latter starring a young Burgess Meredith. Treasures everywhere, I tell you.

The Errol Flynn 6-Film Collection, the Greta Garbo 4-Film Collection and the ’50s Sci-Fi Collection are available now from Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment. They’re pretty swell.

Up next: More contemporary genre pictures arrive on the new-release shelves, and Criterion brings an underground classic back to furious life. See you soon!