Academy Collection: The Envelope Please, Volume 1

The eight selections on this four-disc set have two things in common: all were Academy Award nominees for Best Picture and all are in the public domain. This collection offers classic cinema at a bargain price, and you get what you pay for—mostly grainy, washed-out editions taken from what appear to be worn 16mm film prints or poor video masters. Lewis Milestone's silent gangster movie The Racket (1928) is the rarity here, but this blurry version appears to be many generations removed from the source. The other films are all available in superior editions from companies such as Criterion, Kino, and Image. Roland West's early sound picture Alibi (1929) is almost unwatchable; Milestone's The Front Page (1931) suffers from a flickering, unstable image; Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) hails from a slightly better but still worn print; Frank Borzage's A Farewell to Arms (1932) and William Wellman's early color feature A Star Is Born (1937) both sport plenty of surface scratches and soundtrack hiss; and Leo McCarey's Love Affair (1939) is unforgivably washed out. In fact, Anthony Asquith's Pygmalion (1938) is the only film in the bunch that looks marginally acceptable, but compared to the Criterion edition, it's downright primitive. As a final cinematic insult, every single film has the brand “Hollywood Select Video” burned into the lower right-hand corner of the image like a network logo. DVD extras include a battered collection of trailers from other Academy Award–nominated features. Not recommended. (S. Axmaker)