SCOTT EYMAN RECOMMENDS!

The disc: Icons of Screwball Comedy

The details: Throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, Columbia Pictures was engaged in a fairly consistent program of upgrading its product. It had big hits with the screwball comedies It Happened One Night and Twentieth Century, and spent a lot of time and money filling that niche, and very successfully so.

Icons of Screwball Comedy collects four films in each of two volumes. Some of them are semi-famous (Theodora Goes Wild, My Sister Eileen). Those are both good, although they seem awfully tame without Frank Capra’s snap or Howard Hawks’ crazed anything-for-a-laugh ethic.

The most pleasant surprise of the sets is Together Again, which reunited Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne a few years after their hit in the deeply romantic Love Affair. She plays a small-town mayor, and he’s a sculptor hired to repair a statue of her beloved late husband. They fall in love while she’s running for reelection against a nasty challenger. It’s very charming, and even flaunts impeccable feminist credentials (the producer was a woman).

The other films are If You Could Only Cook (Herbert Marshall and Jean Arthur), Too Many Husbands (Fred MacMurray and Arthur), She Wouldn’t Say Yes (Rosalind Russell), The Doctor Takes a Wife (Loretta Young and Ray Milland) and A Night to Remember (not the one about the Titanic but the one with Young).

The scripts for the films are good, but the direction is often awfully polite, as if Columbia was trying to compete with MGM and achieving only an equivalent blandness. Columbia often hamstrung its generally excellent leading ladies by refusing to spend the money to give them equivalent leading men. Poor Russell has to work against Lee Bowman in She Wouldn’t Say Yes, and Young’s opposite number in A Night to Remember is Brian Aherne!

The only extras offered are trailers, but the transfer quality is quite high.

ON THE HORIZON

Vin Diesel: Fast & Furious
TV on DVD: Dollhouse: Season One
Action: Dragonball: Evolution
Documentary: Harvard Beats Yale 29-29

Tuesday: The Soloist; Race to Witch Mountain; Obsessed