With one exception they're all from the '50s, '60s and '70s, and I don't know what that means. Actually I do know what this means: they're less likely to be worked on and released because the Adam Sandler fans couldn't care less.

I chose them anyway because they're mostly great or near-great films, although two or three aren't. I guess it boils down to my simply missing them the most. They've all been absent since DVDs came into their own in '97 and '98, which was about the time my Pioneer tin-lizzy laser disc player died and went to heaven. (I shouldn't need to point this out, but like any half-civilized movie lover I refuse to watch a film on VHS.)

I've also felt that some of these films never looked sufficiently vibrant or detailed before, and even looked a bit muddy or anemic in some cases, and could stand a DVD upgrade.

Few if any of these titles has a prayer of selling as well as 50 FIRST DATES did last June. They should and would in a more cultivated world. As Jose Ferrer said to Peter O'Toole in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, "I am surrounded by cattle." But then I'm sure you could find someone to deplore my taste in movies just as much. Standards are relative and we love what we love.

Alphabetically then...

1. Gillo Pontecorvo's THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1967). A three-disc set from Criterion is hitting the stores next month, and about time. Famed for it newsreel-like, caught-on-the-fly shooting style (which was actually used first by Stanley Kubrick during the attack-on-Burpleson sequence in DR. STRANGELOVE), Pontecorvo's film is a riveting account of the Algerian struggle to win independence from France in the mid 1950s. A new high-def transfer, five documentaries, and two killer round-table discussions -- one between filmmakers Steven Soderbergh, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Julian Schnabel and Mira Nair, and another about the parallels to Iraq featuring former White House security chief Richard Clarke and two other authorities.

2. Peter Glenville's BECKET (1964), with Peter O'Toole, Richard Burton, John Gielgud, Donald Wolfit. This 40 year-old film speaks louder and more clearly today than it did when it first opened. A movie like BECKET would be nearly impossible to make under current Hollywood management, but if it happened regardless and the new version had the same high-calibre acting, it would lay waste. MPI Home Video, lately in possession of a nicely restored print paid for by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, will release a loaded BECKET DVD (which will include a long interview with O'Toole that was video-taped about seven or eight months ago in London) sometime next year....maybe. MPI's vp of development and special projects Greg Newman told me a couple of months ago that he hopes to do this. "We're still doing quite a lot of the technical work for the DVD and everything else," he explained, "and we're going to have a hell of an extras package, and these releases take time."

3. David Jones' BETRAYAL (1983), with Ben Kingsley, Jeremy Irons, Patricia Hodges. The tightest, sharpest and best acted film version of a Harold Pinter play, ever...and it's been sitting around on a faded videotape since the mid '80s, and nobody else has tried to goad Fox Home Video into releasing it on DVD already. I'm assuming they still own the rights; 20th Century Fox released the film theatrically, and CBS Fox Video put out the VHS. Pinter's strategy of running the story backwards (starting with the end of an affair between a literary agent and the wife of his best friend, and ending with the first touch of the lovers' hands) becomes an endlessly fascinating chess game. The film constantly asks, "Who knows and doesn't know what, and when did they first get wise?" Easily among Kingsley and Iron's best performances. Hodges seems right and true in every respect except one (which is the film's only failing): she doesn't seem remotely interested in having sex with anyone or anything.

4. Howard Hawks' BRINGING UP BABY (1938), with Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Charlie Ruggles, May Robson, Walter Catlett, Barry Fitzgerald. Not just one of the two or three greatest screwball comedies ever made, but one that requires repeat viewings to fully appreciate. (The timing involved in Grant's slipping on a grape tossed by Hepburn onto a shiny wax floor at precisely the right moment, and with Kate not even trying to aim where she's throwing, is just dazzling.) And yet I'm hearing there's some kind of rights hassle keeping it off DVD. BABY has been viewable on tape and laser disc for years, but to see it all spruced up and special-editioned would be awesome. An IMDB guy wrote that "a group of teenagers who recently watched [BABY] were literally rolling on the floor laughing at it." A good story, even if it's hooey.

5. Robert Altman's CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1973), with Elliott Gould and George Segal. One of the all-time hippest and coolest gambling movies ever made. Love that finale in Reno when Segal tells Gould to get lost because he's "got the heat" and he doesn't want Gould messing things up. And that bit with the two of them in a bar trying to name the Seven Dwarfs. (At one point Gould gives up and says "Snoopy?" and then Segal grims up and says, "Okay, like a gatling gun...Sleepy, Grumpy, Doc," and then runs dry.) And Gwen Welles going to bed in her pink bunny-girl pajamas, and those live-wire scenes at the track in Pomona, and that sudden robbery in the parking lot outside the poker club in Gardena. And back to Reno with that great poker-game finale with Amarillo Slim and the others, and that heavy-set woman playing piano nearby and crooning, "Look down, look down, look down...your fly is open."

6. Don Siegel's CHARLEY VARRICK (1973), with Walter Matthau, Joe Don Baker, John Vernon, Andrew Robinson, Sheree North, Woodrow Parfrey, Norman Fell. One of the best second-tier, no-big-deal crime flicks ever made. Admired for its low-key tone and character-driven action, for the crackling tension from Siegel's shooting and cutting of the opening bank-robbery sequence, and for Matthau's easy-going turn as a wise, cagey, seen-it-all indie felon. But it's Baker and Vernon who give the tastiest performances -- the former as a suave, southern-fried, pipe-smoking assassin in a cowboy hat and cream-colored suit, and the latter as a Reno exec fronting for organized crime. The dialogue in Vernon's heart-to-heart scene with Parfrey, playing a wimpy Las Cruces bank manager to perfection, is so good that Quentin Tarantino ripped it off. "You know what kind of men they are," Vernon informs Parfrey, whom he suspects may have colluded with guys who made off with $300,000 in mob loot. "They'll strip you, tie you down and go to work on you with a blowtorch and a pair of pliers."

7. Bernardo Bertolucci's THE CONFORMIST (1970), with Jean-Louis Trintingant, Stefania Sandrelli, Dominque Sanda, Enzo Tarascio. Bertolucci's best ever, and of course it's unavailable. If there's a deserving candidate for a Criterion double-disc, this is it. Set in late 1930s Italy, it's about a haunted, petty-minded kiss-ass named Marcello (Trintignant) who agrees to murder an enemy of the Italian fascists during his Paris honeymoon. All the Bertolucci obsessions (the tensions between decadent sexuality and politics, beautiful sets and clothes, etc.) along with the usual drop-dead photography by Vittorio Storaro are here. That killing scene in the forest is a classic in and of itself. Sanda desperately screaming at Trintignant through the backseat car window....wow.

8. Elia Kazan's EAST OF EDEN (1955), with James Dean, Raymond Massey, Jo Van Fleet, Julie Harris, Burl Ives. Dean's first and finest big-screen performance is soul of this convulsive, deeply felt family love story, adapted from a portion of John Steinbeck's original novel. Dean's big scene with Van Fleet, his tough- as-nails, whore-house-madame mom, is superbly played. Love Kazan's tilted camera angles! Leonard Rosenman's score feels a bit turbulent at times, but is also sublime when it chooses to be. A Warner Home Video laser disc was sold in the mid '90s, but a rights issue has delayed the DVD. The laser disc presented the original's 2.55 to 1 widescreen version, plus the rousing overture. A "making of/looking back" doc would be essential, although the only principal cast members who haven't died or suffered strokes are costars Lois Smith and Richard Davalos. The 79 year-old Rosenman is still around.

9. George Stevens' GUNGA DIN (1939), with Victor McLachlan, Cary Grant, Sam Jaffe, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Joan Fontaine. Probably too creaky for the under-25s, and as loathsome as a film could get from a third-world, anti-colonialist point of view (i.e., soldiers repping the British oppressors are the lovable good guys), but it's still a lot of fun. The last 15 minutes of this archly comic film resorts to rote sentimentality about bravery and self-sacrifice, yes...but there's probably something wrong with you if it leaves you entirely unmoved. Image Entertainment put out a great "special collector's edition" nine or ten years ago (or was it earlier?), complete with color home-movie footage of the Long Pine location shoot, audio commentary from Rudy Behlmer, production and scene stills, and audio commentary from screenwriter William Goldman about the emotional impact the film had on guys of his generation. So the package is there. It just has to be paid for and the film digitally remastered.

10. William Wellman's THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY (1954), with John Wayne, Claire Trevor, Robert Stack, Jan Sterling, Robert Newton, Laraine Day, Regis Toomey. Yes, it's just a passengers-in-peril soap opera, and only a pretty good one. It's somewhat better than AIRPORT, but that's not saying too much. I saw it on TV when I was a kid, and it's probably one of those things you should never see again as an adult. Probably...but then I've never seen it in color, or in the 2.55 to 1 Scope aspect ratio it was shot in. And it has one of those Dimitri Tiomkin scores that both serenades and carpet-bombs. And it has one of the most shamelessly sentimental finales in the annals of disaster movies, which is that from-the-cockpit POV shot of the landing lights at San Francisco airport forming an image of a crucifix. (Actually, I've been in a cockpit during a night landing and this is pretty much how they appear.) And there's that final scene with Wayne and Toomey on the tarmac. I won't describe it; see it someday. One of Wayne's sons has been trying to get it restored, but it's taken forever. Paramount Home Video apparently has the rights and planning a release sometime in '05.

11. Lindsay Anderson's IF… (1968), with Malcolm McDowell, David Wood, Richard Warwick, Christine Noonan, Robert Swann, Peter Jeffrey. That look in McDowell's eye as he and his friends fire their automatic weapons from a rooftop at their public-school enemies….that's the whole '60s up-against-the-wall mania in a nutshell. An altogether brilliant capturing of a social eruption in poetic fantasy terms, IF… begins as a relatively straightforward story of a few malcontents -- McDowell's Mick Travis being the ringleader -- coping with the routine humiliations imposed upon students by a military-minded British private school. But the film (based on a script called "Crusaders," by David Sherwin and John Howlett) gradually becomes more and more surreal, and not just in a political vein. Stanley Kubrick hired McDowell to portray "Alex" in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE because of how sensational he was as Travis. It's time to pay tribute to this great seminal film, which may have been the first to mix color and black-and-white footage in an impressionist vein. (Does anyone know for sure?) IF… was theatrically re-released in England in March '02. A looking-back doc with McDowell as the main source and speaker (he's been talking about this film as part of a recent lecture or speaking tour) would be required on the DVD, naturally. Your move, Paramount Home Video.

12. Joseph L. Mankiewicz's JULIUS CAESAR (1953), with James Mason, Marlon Brando, Louis Calhern, John Gielgud, Edmond O'Brien, John Hoyt, Deborah Kerr, Greer Garson. A sturdy, pro-level, handsomely shot adaptation of Shakespeare's play…although it's mainly about the acting. Mason's, Gielgud's, Calhern's…even established character actor Lawrence Dobkin, reveling in the juice of playing a "citizen of Rome." But Brando's Marc Antony is the big draw, and especially his "cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war" speech. Shakespeare and barely-suppressed fury have rarely mated to such an effect. MGM/UA put out a nicely mastered laser disc in the mid '90s, and you'd think they'd be dusting off the masters in the wake of Brando's death. Maybe they are.

13. Alfred Hitchcock's LIFEBOAT (1944), with Tallulah Bankhead, John Hodiak, Hume Cronyn, Walter Slezak, William Bendix, Henry Hull. The only U.S.-produced Hitchcock film that hasn't been made to look good on video, much less gotten a DVD release. CBS Fox Video put out a laser disc in the late '80s or early '90s that looked like it was taken from a poor-quality print. Show some respect, guys. The lensing by Glen MacWilliams was immaculately composed and finely detailed, and deserves to be savored by the best rendering possible. The film itself is one of Hitchcock's technical challenges, like ROPE (shooting a reel at a time without cutting) or DIAL M FOR MURDER (shooting an entire feature in a single London apartment). This was even tougher - i.e., keeping audiences enthralled despite the entire film unfolding in a lifeboat floating on the North Atlantic -- but Hitch nailed it like a champ. Why does this modestly-priced film, shot in a studio tank and using rear projection, convey more of the robust excitement of the high seas than anything in WATERWORLD? The script (by John Steinbeck, Jo Swerling and Ben Hecht) is whip-smart, and everyone gives on-target performances. Bankhead especially rules as a hard-nosed journalist in love with Hodiak's Chicago palooka. Love that insert shot of Slezak's stolen compass (which has been kept hidden from the others, which of course triggers rage) followed by Hodiak's hand unfolding a pocket knife…. perfect. And that Reduco ad! Hitchcock movies are a brand unto themselves. Why keep one of his best on the shelf?

14. Tony Richardson's THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER (1962), with Tom Courtenay, Michael Redgrave, Alec McGowen, James Bolam. Courtenay plays a working-class teen named Colin, sent to a boy's "Borstal" prison for theft, in a kitchen-sink drama that still feels as rude and phlegm-y as ever. A restored print was shown at last May's Cannes Film Festival, so somebody must be thinking of putting out a DVD version. It's a disjointed memory piece (i.e., Colin reviewing his life from the Borstal) composed of flashes and scattered chapters, and in so doing creates a believable young-man's despair. It finishes with a cross-country race between Colin's track team and boys from a private school, and ends on a note that sums up the nihilism in Colin with one blunt move. RUNNER is one of those films that's about more than the sum of its parts.

15. Lewis Milestone's MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1962), with Marlon Brando, Trevor Howard, Richard Harris, Gordon Jackson, Hugh Griffith. A DVD that at least tries to simulate how beautiful this movie looked when it opened in 1962 in 70 mm roadshow engagements (which wasn't in any way captured by the MGM/UA laser disc released in the mid '90s) should be viewable. Cinematographer Robert Surtees shot this expensive semi-clunker in the rare Ultra Panavision process, which delivered a super-wide 2.76 to 1 aspect ratio, which was quite a knockout even when the plot was sputtering. The film itself is a good lively adventure for thee-quarters of its length. It falls almost totally apart after the mutiny, although Brando's death scene has gained in estimation over the years. (He discovered that traumatic burn victims tend to shiver, so he laid down on a bed of ice.) Warner Home Video has the materials. Maybe they're thinking about going with a DVD to cash in on the Brando mystique, although Brando hated the finished film. He probably lost a lot of work because of it also, due to the reputation he acquired during production of being an expensive pain in the ass.

16. John Flynn's THE OUTFIT (1974), with Robert Duvall, Joe Don Baker, Robert Ryan, Joanna Cassidy, Sheree North. Probably the most under-seen, under-appreciated crime pic of the 1970s, and unquestionably the best ever from director-writer John Flynn (ROLLING THUNDER, BEST SELLER), who based his script on a Donald Westlake book (which Westlake apparently wrote as Richard Stark). Every scene is hard and lean and under-played. It's a revenge tale about a small-time felon named Macklin (Robert Duvall) who learns after getting out of prison for a bank job that his brother was shot by two gunnies, apparently because the bank they hit was owned by mob guys. Macklin hooks up with Cody (Baker) and goes right to the top bad guy (Ryan) to settle things. Sharp dialogue, good shootin', across-the-plate performances. Warner Home Video has it out on VHS a few years ago, so they probably have the DVD rights. The tape is out of stock on Amazon. Has anyone ever seen this film on cable?

17. Richard Lester's PETULIA (1968), with George C. Scott, Julie Christie, Shirley Knight, Richard Chamberlain. Another cool title being kept on ice by Warner Home Video. One of Richard Lester's best-ever films -- a angular, bittersweet account of an affair that almost happens...but never quite does. The would-be lovers are Archie, a 40ish doctor who's going through a divorce (Scott), and Petulia (Christie), the flaky affluent wife of an abusive husband (Richard Chamberlain. Lester's hopscotch cutting (including flash-forwards) suggested Petulia's disjointed way of processing things, as well as the summer-of-love freak vibe that was manifesting in San Francisco just as PETULIA was being shot there in 1967. Knight is especially moving as Scott's rejected wife. Ahead of its time, and probably too subtle and unusual for its own commercial good back then. It really needs to be available on DVD, and I'm insisting on a double commentary track from Lester and his admirer, director Steven Soderbergh, who co-wrote a brilliant book together called "Getting Away With It."

18. Frank Perry's PLAY IT AS IT LAYS (1972), with Tuesday Weld, Anthony Perkins, Adam Roarke, Tammy Grimes, Ruth Ford. A better-than-pretty-good film about a kind of jaded existential despair among wealthy Hollywood types in the early '70s, directed by the once-very-hot Frank Perry (DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE, RANCHO DELUXE, MOMMIE DEAREST), and based on a respected 1970 Joan Didion novel of the same name. Last fall I called it "a dark and nihilistic portrait of some very skewed souls, [that] has a chilly, almost- spooky fascination with downer attitudes among affluent people." Out of circulation for 30 years, and never even released on tape or laser disc. Universal Home Video has the materials.

19. John Boorman's POINT BLANK (1967), with Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Vernon, Lloyd Bochner, Carroll O'Connor. One of the greatest hard-boiled noirs ever made, a great Los Angeles movie (ask Thom Andersen), and a kind of neo-impressionist art film about emptiness and alienation in the mid '60s. Not as arterial or crazy as our current urban actioners, but somehow possessed of a crude force and vitality that feels more sincerely violent. Marvin's "Walker" is my kind of psycho. Quiet, focused, savage when so inclined. $93 thousand. That clop-clop-clop on the soundtrack as he comes closer and closer to seeing his ex-girlfriend who betrayed him. That wacko test-drive scene with Michael Strong's "Big John" Steadman. "Trust me, Walker…trust me!" The way Marvin whispers into the ear of Bochner's secretary while crushing a phone-circuit joiner with his heel. Vernon falling from his Santa Monica penthouse… I have to stop this. The MGM/UA laser disc was on the pale, bleachy side. I seem to recall Boorman himself telling me it could have looked a bit better.

20. Sidney Lumet's PRINCE OF THE CITY (1981), with Treat Williams, Jerry Orbach, Lindsay Crouse, Richard Foronjy, James Tolkan, Lance Henrickjson, Carmine Caridi. One of the all-time great New York movies, in the same grittily atmospheric league as THE FRENCH CONNECTION and SERPICO. Lumet's anguished cop drama is also one of the most persuasive arguments against anyone involved in illegal on-the-job activity ever doing the "right" moral thing and making a clean breast of it. This is one of those films that isn't supposed to look pretty or immaculate, but it deserves a DVD release anyway. A doc about the "real" Ciello and his ex-partners would be interesting, and I'd love to hear Lumet, Williams and Orbach talk about the shooting. It's an obtuse thing to say, but there's profound integrity at work in a film lasting just shy of three hours that's partly about cops and mob guys, but is mostly about New York prosecutors in white shirts and red ties sitting around talking about indictments.

Reminder

The new site at www.hollywood-elsewhere.com went up on Wednesday, 8.18. The column will appear at both the new site and my familiar old berth at Movie Poop Shoot Poop concurrently for a few weeks, as a way of maximizing readers and making sure no one is left unawares when I finally leave Poop Shoot forever.

So if you haven't yet visited, please go to the new site (again, at www.hollywood-elsewhere.com) and bookmark it so that when I'm totally free and un-tethered, finding the column will not be a problem for anyone. Thanks.