a small wonder

Christmas in July
The Great McGinty
Sullivan's Travels
The Lady Eve
The Palm Beach Story
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
The Great Moment
Hail the Conquering Hero
Unfaithfully Yours

Starting in 1940 and until his somewhat disastrous grab for both personal and career freedom (never go into business with Howard Hughes, that dude's crazy) Preston Sturges put together a string of perfectly constructed comedies that has never been equaled. Take a look at the list above, it represents the pinnacle of hollywood sound comedy. Now, take another look and think about whether you've seen any of those films. You probably haven't (although you might have seen the remake of Unfaithfully Yours) unless you've been willing to fork over $50+ for either Criterion DVD on that list, The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels. And these are both terrific, well worth the Criterion treatment. But so is The Palm Beach Story, consistently voted one of the top 100 movies ever made, and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. Neither of these, or any of the others are available in any DVD release at all.

That changed today, when I looked at my Amazon recommendations and was overjoyed to see TPBS listed as coming out in February of next year. For $10. It feels good, as I round towards 300 of these damn things, to finally see some maturity in the market that lets the really good lesser known stuff hit the shelves. Do yourself a favor and just buy this thing, seriously, what's $10, more or less? With any luck we can open some floodgates and get the rest of these pieces of movie heritage released at a resonable price, making sure that they don't have to die out like so many other great films from the past.