{"product_id":"0012569648456","title":"Classic Musicals Collection: Classic Musicals from the Dream Factory, Vol. 3 [9 Discs]","description":"\"For this 9-disc set, Warner Home Video -- which controls the former MGM library -- seems to have thrown together a few secondary 50's and late 1940's examples of the musical genre, with some highly recognizable names attached, and grouped them with a few important titles from the 1930's and early 1940's that hadn't previously made the cut for DVD -- the latter make up most of the obvious substance of this set, though the later titles, especially those from the 1950's, are not without their virtues. What else would one do with titles such as Nancy Goes To Rio or Two Weeks With Love, nice little \"\"B\"\" musicals that simply don't interest mass audiences today? Or with Deep In My Heart (1954), an offbeat musical biopic about Sigmund Romberg, a figure who is hardly compelling to (and, indeed, scarcely remembered by) modern audiences? Every movie here has been given a state-of-the-art digital video transfer, which for most viewers will be sufficient to justify the purchase -- and that goes double for anyone with a big-screen monitor where the two CinemaScope pictures in this package, Kismet and Hit The Deck, are concerned; the former letterboxed to 2.55-to-1 and the latter 2.35-to-1. Ironically, Kismet has the most impressive credits of any picture here, as a Vincente Minnelli film -- but it's well-known as a second-rate work in the director's output, filmed in a huge hurry by Minnelli, who could be a notoriously slow-shooting director (with uncredited help in one key scene from Stanley Donen); the score and the cast are better than the resulting picture, despite some great scenes. Hit The Deck, directed by Roy Rowland, actually comes off a bit more beguiling, ironically enough because of its unambitious plot, and attractive cast and score, and the fact that it is unexpectedly better than its credits would lead one to expect.  The oldest films in this set, Broadway Melody of 1936 and Broadway Melody of 1938, Born To Dance and Lady Be Good, are paired up, respectively, in two slim double-disc cases. All have similar bonus features, a mix of pre-World War II cartoons and comedy shorts, each one's original trailer, and surviving audio-only outtakes plus MGM promotional pieces relating to the underlying movies. Oddly enough, the audio for the complete film Broadway Melody of 1936 has been mastered with significantly less sharpness and punch than the sound for its trailer, a problem that also afflicts Kismet to some extent -- it's possible to fix both with a volume adjustment, but one wonders how closely the quality control people were listening. All of the black-and-white titles look very good, particularly given their age, with no scratches or blemishes once one gets past the opening credits (and that caveat is only relevant to Broadway Melody of 1936) -- and all are, of course, shown full-screen (1.33-to-1). The chaptering is generous, between 27 and 34 markers keyed mostly to songs and production numbers with a few plot-points named as well; but one heartily wishes for a commentary track on which the relevant scores, by Cole Porter et al could have been discussed at length.   We then jump a decade ahead, to a pair of Technicolor B-musicals, Nancy Goes To Rio (with a screenplay by Sidney Sheldon, no less), both starring Jane Powell, with Carmen Miranda in the former and Ricardo Montalban in the latter. These are very pretty full-screen transfers, generously chaptered but with minimal bonus features, just a short, a cartoon, and a trailer each, It's a pity that they couldn't have gotten Powell and Montalban to do commentary; but for Two Weeks With Love the makers have appended Powell's appearance on Turner Classic Movies' Reel Memories -- she's a lot of fun and prettier than ever.   Stanley Donen's Deep In My Heart has been letterboxed non-anamorphically at 1.85-to-1, in a gorgeous video transfer for this set. The film, starring Jose Ferrer as composer Sigmund Romberg in a highly fictionalized account of the latter's life, features a star-laden cast that includes Helen Traubel, Rosemary Clooney (who was then married to Ferrer), and Merle Oberon. It's a pity here that the makers couldn't have gotten Donen to do a commentary track for this disc, which also contains a brace of video and audio outtakes from the picture.   As far as it goes, the set is a pleasure and, indeed, contains more than its share of unexpected pleasures -- the latter include the brace of Tex Avery cartoons as supplements to the post-war movies, the Harman-Ising cartoons that augment the pre-war titles, and the Oscar-nominated 30-minute short The Battle of Gettysburg, narrated by Leslie Nielsen. Each disc opens automatically to a simple two-layer menu that's easy to maneuver around, with Kismet containing some extra bonus features as well, including the trailer to the 1944 non-musical version of the story, starring Ronald Colman and Marlene Dietrich (and we'd love to see that out on DVD, in all of its Technicolor glory).\"","brand":"WARNER HOME VIDEO","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47090466947312,"sku":"0012569648456","price":69.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/0012569648456_p0.jpg?v=1763226919","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/0012569648456","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}