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Othello [VHS]

Othello [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Orson Welles , Nicholas Bruce , Suzanne Cloutier , Fay Compton , Robert Coote
Director: Orson Welles
Filmed as a classical tragedy, Orson Welles's Othello is a tale of passion, jealousy, and murder. Welles used his earnings from several performances to finance the production, which was shot over several years across multiple locations including Italy and Morocco. The footage was well matched photographically, resulting in an artistically brave compression of a great play. In the title role, Welles shows us a man who has fought many wars but still maintains a princely disposition. As Desdemona, Suzanne Cloutier is guileless but strong enough to have wanted and pursued the Moor. In a rare filmed role, Micheál MacLiammóir excels as the diabolical Iago, a master of manipulating appearances and devoid of any motive save pure evil. The financial constraints appear to have ignited an even higher level of creativity within Welles, who never takes the expected angle and directs the film with a vertiginous, exhibitionist energy. This Othello won the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes in April 1952. --Kevin Mulhall
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A Damsel in Distress [VHS]

A Damsel in Distress [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Fred Astaire , George Burns , Gracie Allen , Joan Fontaine , Reginald Gardiner
Director: George Stevens
Astaire teams up with Burns & Allen to bring some good ol' American music and mayhem to stately England. There, lovely Joan Fontaine pines for a husband and finds Astaire. Naturally, A Damsel in Distress becomes a lady in love. Enjoy George Gershwin's last completed score, including the pensive "A Foggy Day" amd "Nice Work If You Can Get It" plus the famed Astaire-Burns-Allen fun house dance and other inspired stepping-out that earned dance director Hermes Pan an Academy Award(R). Renowned "Jeeves" humorist P.G Wodehouse writes and George Stevens (Giant, Shane) directs. Year: 1937 Director: George Stevens Starring: Fred Astaire, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Joan Fontaine, Reginald Gardner, Ray Noble
List Price: $14.98 Our Price: $29.99
Rebecca [VHS]

Rebecca [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Judith Anderson , Florence Bates , Nigel Bruce , Leonard Carey , Leo G. Carroll
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Rebecca is an ageless, timeless adult movie about a woman who marries a widower but fears she lives in the shadow of her predecessor. This was Hitchcock's first American feature, and it garnered the Best Picture statue at the 1941 Academy Awards. In today's films, most twists and surprises are ridiculous or just gratuitous, so it's sobering to look back on this film where every revelation not only shocks, but makes organic sense with the story line. Laurence Olivier is dashing and weak, fierce and cowed. Joan Fontaine is strong yet submissive, defiant yet accommodating. There isn't a false moment or misstep, but the film must have killed the employment outlook of any women named Danvers for about 20 years. Brilliant stuff. --Keith Simanton
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A Damsel in Distress [VHS]

A Damsel in Distress [VHS]

Staring: Fred Astaire , George Burns , Gracie Allen , Joan Fontaine , Reginald Gardiner
Director: George Stevens
A Damsel in Distress is a lighthearted romp to showcase the classic comedy team of George Burns and Gracie Allen, the classic songwriting team of George and Ira Gershwin, and the classic dance team of Fred Astaire and... Joan Fontaine? Damsel was filmed in 1937 when Astaire was taking a break after his seventh film with Ginger Rogers, so the 19-year-old Fontaine plays Lady Alyce Marshmorton, a young British woman whose scandalous love life leads to a mistaken-identity problem with American Jerry Halliday (Astaire). OK, so the romance falls flat and Fontaine can't really dance, but Burns and Allen provide their usual screwball comedy (especially in a funhouse sequence) and Astaire is as charming as ever, such as his dance with a drum set (an idea he revisited in Easter Parade) to "Nice Work if You Can Get It" and his rendition of "A Foggy Day," which set the standard for all singers to follow. Those songs are among the finest film songs the Gershwins ever wrote, and they're complemented by "I Can't Be Bothered Now" and "Things Are Looking Up." Fontaine, incidentally, got out of the musical-comedy business and over the next few years landed some pretty fair gi...
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Jane Eyre [VHS]

Jane Eyre [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Orson Welles , Joan Fontaine , Margaret O'Brien , Peggy Ann Garner , John Sutton
Director: Robert Stevenson
Made two years after Citizen Kane, this 1943 version of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre sure looks like star Orson Welles muscled his way behind the camera much of the time. (In fact, costar Joan Fontaine--who plays the title character--has maintained that Welles methodically did just that every day on the set.) Not that the film's official director was a hack: Robert Stevenson, who later had a busy career at Disney making numerous live-action hits for the studio, such as Mary Poppins, gets the credit. But there's no mistaking Welles's masterful hand in the film's bold and creative look, and there's no getting away from his enigmatic charisma as Rochester, the widower who takes in Jane as a governess to his daughter. An engrossing, gorgeous film, there's even a small role for Elizabeth Taylor at the beginning as Jane's unlucky, doomed friend at a cruel boarding school. --Tom Keogh
List Price: $19.98 Our Price: $9.93
Until They Sail [VHS]

Until They Sail [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Jean Simmons , Paul Newman , Joan Fontaine , Piper Laurie , Charles Drake
Director: Robert Wise

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Gunga Din [VHS]

Gunga Din [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Cary Grant , Joan Fontaine , Victor McLaglen , Douglas Fairbanks Jr. , Sam Jaffe
Director: George Stevens
This big, boisterous adventure is more inspired by than based on Rudyard Kipling's famous poem. Legendary screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur have fashioned a rousing Hollywood movie full of high adventure, knockabout comedy, and old-fashioned male bonding. And old-fashioned it is: the trio of British officers and best friends who form the core of the film are a 19th-century three musketeers in India, threatened by the interventions of a woman who means to marry the dashing Ballantine (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). Blustery commander MacChesney (Victor McLaglen) schemes to keep Ballantine in the army while his second in command, the treasure-hunting Cutter (Cary Grant in a hopelessly mugging comic performance), continues searching for his elusive mother lode, but all their plans are thrown into chaos when the rise of the bloodthirsty Thugs threaten Britannia's soldiers. Sam Jaffe takes up the rear guard in turban, loin, and full-body make-up as the titular Gunga Din, the loyal water carrier who dreams of becoming a soldier. Bombastically chauvinist and naively imperialist, the film is bound to rub some people wrong, but Stevens creates a thrilling spectacle in the grand Hollywo...
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Voyage to Bottom of Sea [VHS]

Voyage to Bottom of Sea [VHS]

Rated: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Staring: Walter Pidgeon , Joan Fontaine , Barbara Eden , Peter Lorre , Robert Sterling
Director: Irwin Allen
A routine scientific expedition to the North Pole turns into a race to save all mankind when a radiation belt in space causes a fiery inferno on Earth. Admiral Nelson (Walter Pidgeon) and the crew of the atomic submarine Seaview battle saboteurs, giant sea-creatures and attacks by enemy submarines as they race to prevent global catastrophe. Renowned disaster film producer, Irwin Allen, produces and directs an all-star cast including Joan Fontaine, Barbara Eden, Peter Lore, and Frankie Avalon. The stunning visual effects and breathtaking underwater photography make this one of the most respected sci-fi adventure classics of all time.
List Price: $9.98 Our Price: $15.97
Suspicion [VHS]

Suspicion [VHS]

Rated: Unrated
Staring: Joan Fontaine , Cary Grant , Sir Cedric Hardwicke
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Repeated viewings can't dispel the shock of the final scene in this classic 1941 romantic mystery--a brief but disorienting confrontation that suddenly inverts the heroine's mounting conviction that she's married a murderer, forcing us to reconsider virtually every scene and line of dialogue that's preceded it. It's a masterful coup de grace for director Alfred Hitchcock, who has built a puzzle around the corrosive power of suspicion, threaded with deft ambiguities that toy with dramatic conventions and character archetypes in nearly every frame.

As embodied by Joan Fontaine, who nabbed an Oscar in this second outing with the director, Lina McLaidlaw is a buttoned-up, bookish heiress whose prim exterior conceals longings for a more engaged emotional life. Her solution materializes in the darkly handsome Johnnie Aysgarth, a gambler, womanizer, and spendthrift who flirts, then pursues, and soon marries her. As Aysgarth, Cary Grant is both irresistible and sinister, capable of deceit and petty theft, as well as grander designs on his bride's impending fortune. Lina's passion for Johnnie is clouded by each new revelation about his apparent dishonesty, from clandestine gambling to re...
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Ivanhoe (1952) [VHS]

Ivanhoe (1952) [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Robert Taylor , Elizabeth Taylor , Joan Fontaine , George Sanders , Emlyn Williams
Director: Richard Thorpe
Among the most exciting of MGM swashbucklers, Richard Thorpe's 1952 Ivanhoe stars Robert Taylor as the medieval hero of Sir Walter Scott's novel. Returning to England from the Third Crusades, Ivanhoe is steadfast in his determination to raise the ransom for the captured King Richard (Norman Wooland), but the effort is full of peril. First is Ivanhoe's reunion with his estranged father (Finlay Currie), a Saxon who hates the Norman king and refuses to give his son the money. Then there's Ivanhoe's unpopular rescue of a wealthy Jew, Isaac (Felix Aylmer), from anti-Semites, and the subsequent decision by Isaac's beautiful daughter, Rebecca (Elizabeth Taylor), to pay Ivanhoe's entry fee in a tournament. (The strapped knight seeks the tourney's cash prize.) Wait, it gets worse: two of Ivanhoe's closest associates (played by George Sanders and Robert Douglas) collude with Richard's evil brother, Prince John (Guy Rolfe), to discredit their friend and steal away Rebecca and another woman, Rowena (Joan Fontaine)--who also fancies Ivanhoe--for themselves. Yes, the situation looks grim, but surprise appearances by a couple of legendary hero types toward the end help level the playing fi...
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