Among movie actresses of her generation, when melodrama was an accepted currency and bigger often meant better, Barbara Stanwyck was somehow earthier, less glamorous, far more real than most.

There was – and still is – such a thing as a “Stanwyck performance,” where beneath the artifice of the acting is a sly, driven and knowing presence that somehow connects to real life in ways the Hollywood dream factory could never dream up.

That quality made Stanwyck a unique actress in her time and contributes to her steadily growing status since her death in 1990, and it’s largely the focus of Dan Callahan’s sharp, new, career-oriented biography, “Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman” (University Press of Mississippi, $35).

With so many details of Stanwyck’s childhood and early career lost to time – the actress was loathe to talk about her upbringing – Callahan’s book looks most acutely at her movies, her career choices and what they might reveal about the woman herself. A certain amount of speculation and biographical license might enter the equation, but largely Callahan’s insights and instincts about his subject ring out as sympathetic, reasonable and well founded.

He neatly lays out the biographical facts we know: Stanwyck was born Ruby Stevens in 1907 in Brooklyn. Her father disappeared early on and her mother was run over by a streetcar when Ruby was 3. Afterward, she was cared for by her older sister and later lived in a series of foster homes.

There’s some evidence that she suffered from abuse, even after she was grown and married to vaudevillian Frank Fay, an alcoholic and anti-Semitic perhaps best known as the original Elwood P. Dowd of Broadway’s “Harvey.” She also apparently had unhappy dalliances with certain gangsters during her days as a chorus girl and later with star Al Jolson, whom she referred to as “a real son of a bitch.”

After a rocky start in early films like “Ten Cents a Dance,” Stanwyck found her acting muse in director Frank Capra, who seemed to get her raw, earthy appeal and cast her in a series of strong films from 1930-32 (including “The Miracle Woman,” “Forbidden” and “The Bitter Tea of General Yen”).

Callahan duly notes Stanwyck’s sharp instincts and tough-mindedness in going forward, choosing roles, scripts and directors that perfectly fit her personality, skills and ambitions. In rich succession she teamed with King Vidor on “Stella Dallas” (1937), Cecil B. DeMille on “Union Pacific” (1939), Preston Sturges on “The Lady Eve” (1941), Howard Hawks on “Ball of Fire” (1941), again with Capra on “Meet John Doe” (1941) and Billy Wilder on “Double Indemnity” (1944).

While Callahan covers Stanwyck’s second marriage to Robert Taylor, which failed after his infidelity, and her romance with the much younger Robert Wagner, he mostly measures her life through her work. While many of her contemporaries saw their stars fade with age, Stanwyck always retained her passion for work, even in lesser roles such as the Elvis starrer “Roustabout” (1964) and the TV western “The Big Valley” (1965-69).

Late in her life, she accepted roles that were clearly beneath her abilities (on the Aaron Spelling spinoff of “Dynasty,” which she quickly left). But, Callahan points out, she never gave a performance less than her best. She was, he notes, one of the first movie stars of her time to employ observed behavior rather than conventional acting techniques, and it’s one of the things that make her acting seem modern and timeless.

Of her finest roles, Callahan writes: “Stanwyck loved the movies, even at their most extreme and artificial, yet she was the actress who most often reminded the movies of reality.”

- Dennis King

(This year marks two decades since the release of Robert Redford’s burnished fly-fishing classic “A River Runs Through It.” With Lasse Hallstrom’s “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” on the banks awaiting a March 9th release, with the recent DVD debut of “The River Why,” and with the growing success of the national Fly Fishing Film Tour, angling on the big screen seems to be enjoying a renaissance. So it’s a good time to revisit the granddaddy of angling cinema on its 20th anniversary. Following is the reprint of an essay that appeared in the April 2008 issue of “Gray’s Sporting Journal” that tackles the prickly love-hate relationship that anglers continue to have with Redford’s film.)

IN DEFENSE OF “THE MOVIE”

BY DENNIS KING

I am haunted by movies.

For 20 years, when I was full-time film critic at the daily newspaper in Tulsa, movies were my passionate vocation. And since fly fishing and reading were my equally passionate avocations, it came by grace that one particular movie – drawn from a stately novella sacred to trout fishers all – should stand out among the thousands I waded through and reviewed.

“A River Runs Through It,” director Robert Redford’s elegiac 1992 adaptation of Norman Maclean’s beloved book, strikes me as literally the only time Hollywood has ever gotten it right when it comes to angling with a fly rod. Cast over a hundred-plus years of movie history and you’ll be hard pressed to find any other literary narrative film that touches on fly fishing in such a substantive, authentic way.

Although image-conscious Hollywood has always had its fair share of off-screen fly-fishing movie stars – from Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper and Clark Gable on up to Liam Neeson and Michael Keaton – for the most part cinema has never really gotten this most visually graceful of sports.

Which is why it puzzles and pains me that Redford’s film is viewed with such knee-jerk scorn by so many anglers. Merely speak of “the movie” in the company of fly fishers and a united sneer goes up with lemming-like certainty. To many trout anglers, Maclean’s book is the sport’s holy writ, but the film adaptation is viewed as a pox.

It’s a paradox, really.

Fly fishing on film has largely been relegated to the obscure documentary tributaries, which run rich with arcane how-to titles, fly-tying instructionals, travelogue pieces to exotic locales and storied rivers, boisterous chronicles of trout bumming and macho collections of “fish porn.” But the thrust of these is reportorial, not literary. Odd for a pastime that’s inspired such a fertile tradition of the written word.

MOVIE MISCASTS

Narrative storytelling on the big screen, the character- and plot-driven kind practiced by mainstream theatrical movies, rarely ventures into trout waters.

And when feature-length movies do go a-fishing, they seem to pay little heed to the niceties of detail or distinctions in angling styles.

Director Howard Hawks’ 1964 “Man’s Favorite Sport?” – featuring Rock Hudson as a vaunted angling expert for the venerable old Abercrombie & Fitch – is a miscast romantic farce filled with rich old fogies chunking hardware in a fishing tournament. And with leggy Paula Prentiss in the picture, the question mark in the title more than implies that man’s favorite sport is not about catching fish at all.

The mirthless comedy “Gone Fishin’ ” from 1997 features two hapless Mutt-and-Jeff yahoos from Jersey (Joe Pesci and Danny Glover) hauling a bass boat to the Everglades. En route they encounter purloined jewels, murder, slapstick mayhem and hippie-dippy bass master Willie Nelson, but they never get around to any actual fishing.

And from 2006, the romantic trifle “Catch and Release” aims for a Rocky Mountain high and briefly co-opts fly fishing as a saccharine metaphor for love and loss. And in the process it takes a snarky, wrong-headed swipe at the sport’s most successful philosophy of resource conservation.

Anywhere else fly fishing shows up in the movies, it’s usually as background filler to paint some character as a robust outdoorsman – most likely one who rigs his reel upside down and flops his line around like a soggy noodle.

So if anglers have a collective gripe to level at the movies, it should be over such sloppy slights and misrepresentations. That and the overall lack of attention paid by feature filmmakers to the inherent art, drama, comedy and beauty of angling.

Those are not sins you can pin on “A River Runs Through It.”

TAKING POETIC LICENSE

Certainly Redford and company took literary license in bringing Maclean’s story coherently to the screen. They nipped some text, expanded some characters, shifted some events and created new dialogue and scenes to channel the contemplative plotline into a visual flow. All those artistic liberties served to underscore in tangible ways the book’s deeply internal themes of Scottish Calvinist reserve, of the painful complexity of family communication, of brotherly love and competition and of the poetic tragedy of the doomed.

Brad Pitt

With the picturesque Gallatin and Yellowstone rivers subbing for the Big Blackfoot (which the filmmakers found visually marred by mining and timbering scars and commercial development), the film looks gorgeous. And with real-life guide John Dietsch and rod artist Jason Borger standing in for the actors, throwing lovely backlit loops and performing those magical shadow-casting maneuvers, it often resembles one of those glossy magazine ads for high-end fly rods. Cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, in fact, won an Academy Award for the film’s ravishing composition. And among skeptics, writer Jonathan Raban observed that the film looks like “a feature-length Ralph Lauren window display.”

Sure, Redford’s film is dressed in period finery and populated by impossibly handsome movie stars (hunky Brad Pitt reportedly had never touched a fly rod before taking the role of Paul, Norman’s fated brother, despite being raised in some pretty prolific trout country around Springfield, Mo.). And certainly the film is painted in soft sepia tones of nostalgia and dreamy earnestness that might appear decidedly quaint in this age of glaring irony, when fly fishing seems mired in a contentious environment of politics, commercialism and competition.

But behind the film’s artsy sheen and wistful idealism beat Maclean’s sinewy words and his sturdy philosophy of sporting behavior and no-nonsense individualism that all thoughtful fly fishers would live up to if they could.

Even though the moviemakers perform all the usual cinematic trickery to make flawed, chaotic reality look like perfect, ordered fiction, Maclean’s bittersweet memory story transcends issues of artifice and style. Like all fine literature it bears the mark of myth rooted in real life, and even in its transfer from page to screen it hews to an unassuming authority that makes it feel timeless and true. Indeed, it speaks softly but carries a big stick.

THE AUTHOR’S BLESSING

Perhaps the most compelling defense of “the movie” might be that it had the blessing of Maclean himself. Although the aging author’s health was failing as preliminary work on the film began, Maclean forged a painstaking relationship of trust with Redford that allowed him to track the progress and contribute insights to the writing of the script by Richard Friedenberg.

Arnold Richardson as the elderly Norman

Sadly, Maclean died in August of 1990 at age 87, ten months before shooting of the film began. But the author’s son John, also a fly fisher and writer, has said that although his father was dismayed over the tourist swarms the book brought to his beloved Big Blackfoot, he very much desired that the film be made. In fact, in his final days Maclean had even come to refer to the project as “my movie.”

In the end analysis, the moviemakers surely did the author proud. While no book-to-movie translation is ever exact, Redford’s vision of “A River Runs Through It” honors the spirit of Maclean’s stoical reminiscence and holds faithful to its ideal of a life informed and enlarged by fly fishing.

FLY FISHERS’ SCORN

Still, since its release 20 years ago, the film has been a lightning rod for all manner of anglers’ angst.

To hear the scorners speak, “the movie” is singularly responsible for the Hollywoodization of Montana, the increasing privatization of once-open waters, the glut of tourist anglers on rivers, the coarsening of stream etiquette, the decimation of fish populations, the rise in acid rain, the spread of whirling disease and a host of other fishermen’s tribulations, short of a plague of locusts and a biblical shower of frogs.

The reasons for this acrimony are probably rooted in many impulses – some logical, some contradictory: the rugged individualist’s skepticism of all things Hollywood; a priggish suspicion of newcomers; a certain enlightened self-interest; a mulish resistance to the inevitable forces of change.

We who wield long rods are all landed gentry in our hearts, and we like to think that fly fishing – with its brain-addling detail, its arcane historical lore, its befuddling Latinate lingo and its physical/intellectual rigors – is our own private preserve. Its rough romantic mystique makes us special, colorfully eccentric, apart from the madding crowd.

But by putting a gloss on Maclean’s spare, lyrical prose and parading it in golden images for the popcorn-munching masses of the nation’s multiplexes, Hollywood somehow betrayed a primordial covenant and exposed our hallowed waters to a decidedly unsavory mob. Trendy “lifestyle” followers, idle rich with too much time and cash on their hands, corporate climbers seeking an alternative to golfing, grasping gadget freaks who spend more hours perusing the aisles of Orvis than stalking the banks of trout streams.

Our image of this crass newcomer is of a boorish but dapper bigfoot tromping around in dangly, overstuffed vest, clumsily wielding $700 worth of fast-action graphite. He mucks up stream bottoms, puts down fish for a hundred yards up and down and generally pisses off all of us gnarly, old-school vets. Blame “the movie” for crowding up the rivers with all these effete poseurs and their macho Brad Pitt fantasies.

That’s the going argument of “the movie” haters, anyway.

A SPORT IN FLUX

Never mind that in order for the sport to prosper we need earnest rookies and new blood to fuel the muscle of all those windmill-tilting conservation groups battling despoilers and lobbying for habitat protection and sane resource management.

Never mind that we need new generations of fishers to support a burgeoning commercial infrastructure. We need all those product developers, feather-and-fur alchemists, genius rod builders, crazy inventors and tackle manufacturers to advance the science that keeps all our gadgets, gizmos and gear on the cutting edge. We need all those wizened fishing guides, friendly lodge keepers and mom-and-pop fly-shop merchants that live by and enliven the sport and keep it grounded.

And never mind that fishing among young people, the sport’s future, is a dwindling game. A recent U.S. Fish & Wildlife Department study shows “a minus-20 percent change from 1990 to 2005 in children who had ever participated in fishing, with declines occurring nationwide.” Furthermore, applications for fishing licenses have been decreasing nationwide for more than a decade.

Ours is indeed a sport in flux. But is it from a gluttony of popularity or a threat of creeping irrelevance?

Craig Sheffer, Brad Pitt

And never mind that “the movie” celebrates this rugged yet delicate, trendy yet time-burnished sport in the most humane way and frames its age-old customs, sacraments and tough ethics in the most alluring light. Like all good sports stories, it recognizes that the ritual of play so often exposes with compelling urgency those virtues and frailties, those triumphs and failings that make us fully human.

A CAST OF NAYSAYERS

Despite all arguments in its defense, the film version of “A River Runs Through It” will perhaps always have a polarizing effect on fly fishers.

It’s nothing new, really. Anglers are born romantics but congenital contrarians. And certain among us will always be cranky about the encroachment of other anglers on our precious, idealized waters.

Way back in 1598 – just a century after Dame Juliana Berners published her famed “A Treatyse of Fysshyne with an Angle” and as the collegial “Compleat Angler” Izaak Walton was barely out of nappies – the suitably named English satirist Thomas Bastard gave voice to the curmudgeonly impulses that underlie our sport’s pastoral surfaces and expressed a dyspeptic regard for newcomers that holds true to this day:

“Fishing, if the fisher may protest,
Of pleasures is the sweet’st of sports the best,
Of exercises the most excellent,
Of recreations the most innocent,
But now the sport is marde, and wott ye why,
Fishes decrease, and fishers multiply.”

And poor old Bastard didn’t even have “the movie” to blame.

Sometime during every Academy Awards telecast, there comes a break from the incessant glamour and self-congratulations for a solemn moment of reflection.

Elizabeth Taylor

That’s when they air that most morbid yet compelling video montage that punctuates each year’s Oscar telecast and pays homage to Academy members who have died in the past year. This year, Academy notables who have gone on to the Big Craft Services Table in the Sky number 88 (there’s an official list on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences website).

Many of those listed are members of the organization’s more obscure, behind-the-scenes branches – executives, film editors, art directors, musicians, public relations folks and writers. In others words, people most viewers won’t recognize.

But there are always those famous, on-camera figures (actors!) that flash onto the montage screen and elicit an uncomfortable smattering of applause (a final curtain call, if you will) before the film moves on.

Steve Jobs

This year, recognizable screen figures who have left us include: glam screen divas Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Russell, leading men Cliff Robertson, James Farentino and Ben Gazzara, former child star Jackie Cooper, the great Peter Falk, versatile actress Dana Wynter and wonderful character actors Farley Granger, Harry Morgan and Kenneth Mars.

A few non-actors who might stir some recognition are: Steve Jobs (the Apple genius was a force behind Pixar Animation Studios), director Sidney Lumet (“12 Angry Men,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Network”) and influential costume designer Theadora Van Runkle (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Godfather, Part II”).

And, although she may not have been a member of the Academy, who could ignore the media-blitzed passing of musical diva and occasional actress Whitney Houston (“The Bodyguard,” “Waiting to Exhale”)?

Tune in to the telecast of the 84th Academy Awards on Feb. 26 to bid farewell to these and other less famous Oscar insiders. R.I.P.

- Dennis King

Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes the Blu-ray edition of one of the most commercially popular and critically polarizing romantic heartbreakers of all time, “Love Story.”

Many critics slagged this weeper for being shamelessly manipulative, contrived and soapy, blowing raspberries at the film’s most famous line — “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” — for being a ridiculous sentiment.

Perhaps it is. But for those of us who are suckers for a good old fashioned boy-meets-girl tear fest — and there must be a bunch of us, judging from the millions raked in by the film and the Erich Segal novel on which it was based — this is melodramatic manna from heaven.

As the title indicates, this Arthur Hiller-directed piece is told with beautiful simplicity, giving away its tragic ending with the opening voice-over from Ryan O’Neal as Oliver Barrett IV: “What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved Mozart and Bach, The Beatles, and me?”

Man. You’re instantly hooked. You’ve just got to know what the heck happened. Cut to flashback: Harvard law student Oliver meets music student Jennifer Cavilleri (Ali MacGraw), who’s attending Radcliffe on a scholarship. They start out shooting verbal barbs at each other and soon fall hopelessly in love. He’s the son of a Boston elitist (Ray Milland) and she’s the daughter of a poor Italian widower (John Marley). When they decide to marry, Oliver’s father disowns him. Jenny makes an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile the Barrett men, and the couple must struggle to put Oliver through law school with Jenny working as a teacher. They trust that love will find a way, but luck won’t have it. Be sure to have some Kleenex handy.

Exquisitely photographed against a snowy New England backdrop (which looks great in Blu-ray), “Love Story” also moved Academy voters, who nominated it for seven Oscars, including Best Picture of 1970. It won for Francis Lai’s musical score.

With commentary from Hiller, the documentary “Love Story: A Classic Remembered” and the original trailer as special features, here’s a great Valentine gift. Whatever you do, don’t forget your sweetheart on that special day, or you definitely will have to say you’re sorry.

— Gene Triplett

BY GENE TRIPLETT

“Wild Bill” Wellman’s first major movie mission was in danger of crashing numerous times before it finally landed at the first Academy Awards ceremony.

But “Wings” did make it to the 1929 Oscars, swooping up the very first best picture trophy and best engineering (special effects) honors to boot.

Now, with the 84th Academy shindig just weeks away, Paramount Pictures is celebrating its centennial year with the release of a newly restored version of the silent World War I epic on DVD and Blu-ray.

“It totally knocks me out,” said William Wellman Jr., son of the Oscar-winning “Wings” director who also helmed such classics as the 1937 version of “A Star is Born,” “The Public Enemy,” “The Ox-Bow Incident,” “Battleground” and “The High and the Mighty.”

“I mean, I have hosted the picture in five countries since 1993, and I’ve seen the picture many times,” Wellman Jr. said in a recent phone interview. “And when Paramount did this restoration and they showed me the final version I was speechless, how beautiful it is. It’s just incredible. … I couldn’t be happier.”

Andrea Kalas, vice president of archives at Paramount, said the restoration of “Wings” was accomplished in a meticulous frame-by-frame process, with state-of-the-art digital tools normally used to create special effects.

Before restoration

“It’s really just been in the last few years that digital restoration technology has evolved to a point where we could actually do what we did with this film,” Kalas said. “The element we restored from was compromised with things like printed-in nitrate deterioration, which literally softened the sides of the frame. And there were extreme vertical hairline scratches. To just bring the picture back to a basic viewable form involved major technology.”

On DVD and Blu-ray, the film now appears as sharp and clean as the freshly-struck prints shown in the first road show engagements of “Wings” in 1927, Kalas said.

The film stars Clara Bow — who was a superstar at the time — Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Richard Arlen in a story of two men and the woman they both leave behind as theygo off to become fighter pilots in the “Great War.” Gary Cooper also appears briefly — but memorably — in what was only his second screen role.

William Wellman — a former World War I flying ace himself — was a relative newcomer in the film business, having directed only a handful of B-movies when he received the “Wings” assignment.

After restoration

“Paramount was the number one ranked studio in Hollywood because they had the best directors under contract,” Wellman Jr. said. “Cecil B DeMille, Victor Fleming, Allan Dwan …”

Studio cofounder Jesse Lasky was trying to decide on a director for “Wings,” which would be most ambitious project ever undertaken by the studio, when production head B.P. Schulberg recommended his protégé, William Wellman. But Lasky didn’t relish the idea of putting his epic in the hands of a 29-year-old second-stringer.

“But my father had a couple of things going for him,” Wellman said. “First of all he was a decorated fighter pilot in the first world war, so he was the only director under contract at Paramount that had frontline battle experience. And they felt that that’s what the picture needed.”

Lasky reluctantly agreed to meet with Wellman.

“Lasky said, ‘Well, what makes you think you can direct my big road show picture better than my veteran staff of directors?’ And my father said, ‘My war record does. And I’ll make it the best goddamn picture this studio’s ever had.’”

The senior Wellman had earned the nickname “Wild Bill” for his willingness to volunteer for the most dangerous dawn patrols during the war. He would continue to live up to it on the set of “Wings.”

For example, to achieve ultimate realism in the film’s aerial battle sequences, Wellman required that his two leading men, Rogers and Arlen,  take flying lessons so they could go up in real planes and activate cameras mounted in front of them.

Arlen had had some flying experience but Rogers had none at all.

“Never before had actors been photographed in the air,” Wellman Jr. said. “They usually simulated it on the ground. My father did that too but he didn’t like the way it looked.

“Well, the studio figured that he was gonna kill their stars by making them take flying lessons. I mean it went on and on and on. And you can understand the studio’s position. But my father was not going to do anything that wasn’t in the best interest of ‘Wings.’

“Of course, they way they did it, there was a safety pilot. They went up in two-seaters and there was a safety pilot who would duck down. … Buddy Rogers said that he was the director, the cameraman, the actor and the pilot for 400 feet (of film) … the film rolls were 400-foot rolls.”

Wellman said Rogers would immediately “lose his lunch” each time he landed after an aerial sequence.

The filming was also running over schedule, because Wellman would only shoot the air battles when the sky was blue, with white, fluffy clouds.

“My father thought that the planes would all look like they were flies up in the sky if you didn’t have the clouds and the blue sky,” Wellman said. “So there was a lot of down time and this caused the studio to be, you know, let’s say anxious about where their money was going.”

But “Wings” eventually did get off the ground and into theaters, and now present-day audiences can thrill to the still-incredible flight scenes Wellman managed to engineer.

“It’s just incredible to watch,” Kalas said. “I think (film director) Kevin Brownlow said something like, ‘“Wings’ captures the romanticism that veterans remember about war.’ Which is a great way of summing up some of the real emotion that stays with you when you watch this film. I mean, when you get to the end of this film there’s very few dry eyes in the house.”

The upcoming release of Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse” calls to mind a long and storied bloodline of great horse movies in Hollywood history.

Generations of filmmakers have been drawn to the allure of horses and man’s long, close history with magnificent equine steeds. In fact some of the first moving images ever shot were of horses galloping.

In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge photographed a horse named Occident in fast motion using a series of 12 stereoscopic cameras. The cameras were arranged along a track parallel to the horse’s, and each of the camera shutters was controlled by a trip wire that was triggered by the horse’s hooves.

So as we prepare to take a journey in the hoof prints of a horse named Joey in “War Horse,” we’ve dusted off 10 of our favorite equine epics from the movies:

“Into the West” (1993) – In this enchanting Irish tale from director Mike Newell, two young Dublin brothers get the gift of a white stallion named Tir na nOg from their grandfather. When authorities threaten to impound the animal and sell it, the lads set off into the west on a wild flight to save their horse.

“National Velvet” (1944) – Elizabeth Taylor was a blue-eyed, brunette ingénue when she played the spirited young girl, Velvet, who wins the feisty horse Pie in the town lottery and teams up with a rootless young trainer (Mickey Rooney) to prepare the horse for the Grand National – England’s greatest racing event.

“The Black Stallion” (1979) – In this post-World War II story, a 10-year-old boy becomes shipwrecked on an island with a spirited Arabian stallion and the two bond. Once they are rescued, the boy and horse team up with a trainer (Mickey Rooney again) to prepare for a daunting challenge match against the fastest racehorses in the world.

“Seabiscuit” (2003) – This true, Depression-era tale examines the life and times of Seabiscuit, the small, unconventional champion steed with a slight limp, and the horse’s inspirational, redemptive effect on the struggling nation and on two down-on-their-luck human partners – the man who trained him and the jockey who rode him.

“Phar Lap” (1978) – Another true story, this one follows the legendary racing career and the mysterious death of the Australian horse Phar Lap, who rose from obscurity with the help of a dedicated stable boy and left behind an intriguing “murder” mystery when he died suddenly just before an important and lucrative race in Mexico.

“Hidalgo” (2004) – An American cavalry dispatch rider (Viggo Mortensen) takes his plucky mustang, Hidalgo, around the world to race in the Ocean of Fire – a 3,000 mile survival race across the Arabian desert that pits cowpoke and pony against the world’s greatest Arabian horses and Bedouin riders.

“The Man From Snowy River” (1982) – A prized stallion and a decades-long feud between bickering twin brothers (both played by Kirk Douglas) animate this love story – based on a poem by Aussie legend A.B. “Banjo” Patterson – about a poor Australian farm boy and the girl he wants to marry.

“My Friend Flicka” (1943) – Roddy McDowall was a veteran teen actor when he took the role of young ne’er-do-well Ken, whose parents put him in charge of a sorrel chestnut filly, who becomes injured and tests the rebellious Ken’s abilities to stick to a task and nurse the horse back to health.

“A Day at the Races” (1937) – A horse named Hi-Hat figures prominently into the zany antics of the Marx Brothers in this chaotic comedy about veterinarian Hugo Hackenbush (Groucho), who is posing as a human doctor in a scheme to save Maureen O’Sullivan’s farm by winning a big race with her misfit horse.

“Buck” (2011) – This sensitive and inspirational documentary examines the life of acclaimed “horse whisperer” Buck Brannaman, a soft-spoken cowboy who recovered from years of child abuse and went on to master the Zen-like intricacies in the interactions between horses and people.

- Dennis King

In Hollywood’s Golden Age, Myrna Loy was a lovely paradox – a champagne-tippling sophisticate on-screen in her many roles opposite the dapper William Powell and a budding humanitarian off-screen with values that belied glittery show-business extravagance.

In “Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood” (University of California Press, $34.95), biographer, poet and memoirist Emily W. Leider puts together an engaging and heartening portrait of the classic movie star who never let the glamour of her impossibly glamorous profession go to her head.

Always down-to-earth and sensible, although graced with exotic looks that led to her discovery by Rudolph Valentino during the silent era, Loy enjoyed an extraordinary career in movies that spanned six decades and that eventually lead her to a post-acting career as goodwill ambassador for the Red Cross, the United Nations and UNESCO.

Born in 1905 to a middle-class family in Montana, Loy lost her father to an influenza epidemic in 1918 and moved with her mother to Culver City, Calif. There, she took dance and ballet lessons, training that Leider says instilled in Loy a lifelong sense of grace and timing that became hallmarks of her acting style.

Soon, Loy landed a place in the chorus line at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre and found bit parts in several movies. Her discovery in the 1920s by Valentino and her exotic looks led to her various casting as the daughter of Fu Manchu, a gypsy seductress and a Mexican spitfire.

But once she signed with MGM and was teamed with William Powell (they would eventually do 14 movies together – six of them in “The Thin Man” series), Loy’s career kicked into high gear. As Nora Charles, the better half to Powell’s debonair, often tipsy detective Nick Charles, Loy set the standard – and a lasting screen image – as the perfect partner: good sport, stylish wife and a gal who could match her witty husband quip for quip and drink for drink.

Leider offers anecdotes giving insights into many of Loy’s finest roles (“The Best Years of Our Lives,” “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House,” “The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer”), her friendships with stars such as Joan Crawford, Cary Grant, Jean Harlow, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable (Cable, the author relates, once made a pass at Loy and she pushed him into a hedge) and her collaborations with filmmakers such as David O. Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn and William Wyler.

But Loy didn’t allow herself to be defined by her stardom. Later in her life, she indulged her passion for activism and her notion of artists as ambassadors of peace. She served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO and worked for other charitable causes and told friends that she got “more emotional satisfaction” from her charitable work than from her acting career. Loy died at age 88 in 1993; three years earlier she’d been awarded an honorary Oscar for career achievement.

- Dennis King

In his heyday Danny Kaye was a hugely popular, multi-threat performer – actor, singer, dancer, lithe mime, rubber-faced clown, limber-tongued monologist and charming raconteur.

As a performer from his early teens, he rose from the Borscht Belt vaudeville of Jewish resorts in the Catskills to international stardom and made his mark as a movie star in mild but enduring classics such as 1947’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” 1954’s “White Christmas” (opposite Bing Crosby) and 1956’s “The Court Jester.”

“The Inspector General,” a loose-limbed 1949 musical farce casually adapted from a play by Nikolai Gogol, is indicative of the best and worst of Kaye’s surprisingly slender big-screen resume. Directed by the versatile Henry Koster (“Harvey,” “The Bishop’s Wife”), it’s a film tailor-made for Kaye’s unique, wide-ranging and ingratiating gifts, but at its heart it’s essentially a silly bit of fluff without a hint of narrative or thematic heft.

“The Inspector General” features the red-haired dynamo Kaye as Georgi, an illiterate gypsy stooge who wonders into a quaint, unspecified European village and is quickly mistaken by corrupt local officials for the crime-busting Inspector General. Despite his clownish, bumbling ways, Georgi is thought to be in cunning, undercover mode, and the oily mayor (Gene Lockhart) and his buffoonish police henchman (Alan Hale, father of “Gilligan’s Island’s” beloved Skipper) plot devious ways to thwart Georgi, including several botched assassination attempts.

Meanwhile, the mayor’s wife (a comically ardent Elsa Lanchester of “The Bride of Frankenstein” fame) is smitten by the charmingly clueless Georgi, and the gentle townsfolk, overburdened by the mayor’s onerous taxes, rally to the supposed Inspector General’s aid.

While the film is loaded with corny jokes and pratfalls that give ample elbow room for Kaye’s over-the-top comic mugging and improvisational skills, there’s nothing terribly inspired here (certainly nothing measuring up to the star’s later routines in “The Court Jester” – remember “The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true?”).

The best sight gag involves Georgi at a military training school, and it allows Kaye to engage in a pretty funny acrobatic wrestling scene with a dummy. There are also a few catchy tunes (including “Gypsy Drinking Song” and “Soliloquy for Three Heads”) penned by Kaye’s longtime wife and occasional manager Sylvia Fine that show off the actor’s legendary vocal agility.

Depending on your esteem for Kaye, “The Inspector General” will likely seem a mid-level work by a great comic artist or a bland, outdated relic of a simpler cinematic era. Either way, it leaves no doubt of Danny Kaye’s comic virtuosity and his essential, good-hearted likability even with material that doesn’t quite live up to his talents.

“The Inspector General” (Collector’s Edition) is supposedly re-mastered for this DVD release, but the picture quality is seriously marred by dirt, scratches and cue marks and generally fuzzy resolution.

The disc does contain a couple of DVD bonus features of merit, including a 17-minute behind-the-scenes featurette that offers color home movies shot by Koster and commentary by the director’s son, Robert. There’s also an 18-minute short film from 1938, “Money on Your Life,” that features Kaye as a comic dupe in an insurance scam. It comes with an insightful commentary track by film historian Bruce Lawton.

- Dennis King

Some iconic movie directors’ off-screen lives seem so large, dramatic and event-packed that they threaten to overshadow their works on screen. Big, brawling, boozing, men’s-men directors such as Raoul Walsh, John Ford, Nicholas Ray and Howard Hawks boast colorful, rousing, trouble-filled private biographies that seem positively Heminwayesque in competition with their creative lives.

Certainly, John Huston is a charter member of that macho fraternity, and his rich, raucous personal and professional experiences get a thorough, entertaining chronicling in “John Huston: Courage and Art” (Crown Archetype, $30), the first complete biography of the legendary filmmaker by prolific biographer Jeffrey Meyers, author of acclaimed studies of Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper and many others.

Making ample use of original interviews with Huston’s Hollywood cronies and his children and relatives, as well as newly opened archival materials, the biographer offers up a vivid portrait of a truly great filmmaker (whose classics range through “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “The Asphalt Jungle” and “The African Queen”) and a larger-than-life adventurer and raconteur (at various times he was a champion boxer, a bullfighter, a big-game hunter and fisherman, a soldier, a gambler and a legendary womanizer).

Meyers colorfully details the Missouri-born Huston’s early life as a sickly child, son of famed actor Walter Huston, and how through sheer force of will young John one day rose from his sickbed, dove from a waterfall into a raging river and determined to pursue a strenuous life.

Though he dropped out of high school, Huston found success as an actor in the 1920s and a screenwriter in the 1930s, before making a dazzling debut behind the camera with 1941’s “The Maltese Falcon.” In a astoundingly productive directing career that yielded 37 feature films, 15 Oscar nominations and two Oscar wins (“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and Lifetime Achievement), plus directing turns that earned his father Walter (“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”) and daughter Anjelica Huston (“Prizzi’s Honor”) acting Oscars, Huston also managed to live a life off-screen that rivaled any adventures he captured on film.

In addition to his vigorous outdoors and sporting adventures, Huston directed plays on Broadway and operas at La Scalia and engaged in rigorous political causes (he was a staunch opponent of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunts in Hollywood). He was a serious painter and art collector, a connoisseur of wine, food and literature (many of his great films were adaptations of novels), and an unabashed womanizer (he married five times to successively younger wives, and all ended badly).
So it doesn’t sound like hyperbole when Meyers calls Huston “one of the most fascinating men who ever lived.”

Indeed, as this fine and literate biography points out, Huston’s life was as ambitious as his art, and his art is truly enduring.

Meyers neatly sums up the creative drive and grit to the very end that Huston maintained in his remarkable life:

“Huston’s most outstanding quality was personal courage: braving the waterfall as a childhood invalid in Arizona, filming under fire in the Aleutians and in Italy, opposing the Communist witch hunt in Washington, shooting ‘The African Queen’ and ‘The Roots of Heaven’ under dangerous conditions in Africa, hunting elephants in Africa and tigers in India, riding recklessly in fox hunts in Ireland, winning a camel race in Nevada, marrying for the fifth time, making ‘Under the Volcano,’ ‘Prizzi’s Honor’ and ‘The Dead’ while confined to a wheelchair, gasping for breath and supported by a tank of oxygen.”

- Dennis King

BY GENE TRIPLETT

When the last trick-or-treaters disappear into the dark with their sweet swag in tow, it’ll be time to turn the lights down low, pop your favorite fright film in the player and subject yourselves to a couple of hours of harrowing horror, or at least some nail-biting suspense.

Of course the master of that is Alfred Hitchcock, and if you’re planning a dusk-to-dawner, “Alfred Hitchcock: The Essentials Collection Limited Edition” (Universal) is just the ticket. This box contains five of the rotund one’s very best thrillers from what was arguably the director’s best decade, including his lessons in the dark consequences of voyeurism (“Rear Window,” 1954), falling for the wrong woman (“Vertigo,” 1958), being mistaken for someone else (“North by Northwest,” 1959), pissing off our feathered friends (“The Birds,” 1963), and, last but not least, taking a shower at the Bates Motel (“Psycho,” 1960).

Extras include original documentaries on “Rear Window” and “Vertigo,” script pages and stills from a deleted scene and storyboard drawings of the unfilmed alternate ending of “The Birds,” original trailers and production photographs.

If more graphic stabbings, impalings and decapitations are desired, Paramount’s “Friday the 13th: The Ultimate Collection Limited Edition” (only 50,000 manufactured, so hurry!) holds deluxe editions of all eight installments (1980-89), an eight-page booklet, two pairs of glasses for watching “Part 3 in 3-D,” AND a replica of the infamous hockey mask, so you can watch all the gratuitous gore from a Jason’s-eye-view.

Or if it’s unintentional hilarity you’re hankering for, the original, 1958 “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” is a towering hoot, one of those great, gosh-awful Allied Artists sci-fi/horror pictures of the period starring second-string scream queen Allison Hayes as hard-drinking rich woman Nancy Archer, fresh out of a psychiatric hospital with a philandering husband named Harry (William Hudson) keeping her constantly on edge. When an alien encounter on Route 66 causes Nancy to grow as tall as her temper, Harry and his girlfriend (Miss July 1959 Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers) are in for a bad night. Nancy comes a-hunting, barely covered in the biggest damned sheets you’ve ever seen and crashes her giant rubber hand through the roof of the beer joint where Harry’s been making out with his gold-digging mistress, and colossal consequences are paid. This one’s available on demand from the Warner Archive Collection.

And if you really want to experience the worst of cinema’s simple-minded slop jobs, there is “‘Manos’ The Hands of Fate” (1966), but unless you’re totally masochistic, the only way to view this travesty of ineptitude is with the accompanying snarky commentary and ad-libbed dialogue embellishments of Satellite of Love captive Joel Robinson and his robot sidekicks Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot in the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” Special Edition from Shout Factory. We have fertilizer salesman turned filmmaker Harold P. Warren to thank for this mess. Really bad pacing, poor photography and lighting and inept dubbing come together with terrible acting to make this story of a family getting lost and stumbling onto the lair of a devil worshipping cult a legendary low point in cinematic history, and perfect fodder for some of the funniest riffing the SoL crew ever conjured up during the entire run of MST3K.

But while the half-man, half-goat and the evil guy in the cape are the obvious monsters of “Manos,” the evil in the classic chiller “The Bad Seed” (1956) comes packaged in the unlikely form of an overly well-mannered 8-year-old girl. Based on the Broadway hit by Maxwell Anderson and the novel by William March, this highly original horror piece from director Mervyn LeRoy tells the story of prissy, pigtailed little Rhoda (Patty McCormack) who butters up her elders with exaggerated sweetness, but turns unfeeling killer when she doesn’t get what she wants. Original stage cast members McCormack, Nancy Kelly as the torn, protective mother and Eileen Heckart as the grief-stricken mother of one of Rhoda’s victims all won Oscar nominations for their electric performances in this classic psychological thriller that’s now available in a Warner Bros. Blu-ray edition, just in time for Halloween viewing.

More high-quality horror is available from Lionsgate in the Blu-ray edition of “Mimic” (1997), which has Mira Sorvino and Jeremy Northam as married biotech scientists who concoct a cure for a plague that mutates into giant, subway-crawling cockroaches that can mimic — and kill — people. Director and co-writer Guillermo Del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth,“ “Hellboy”) mounts smart, visually stunning production with arresting special effects.

For haunted house enthusiasts there’s “The Others” (2001) from director Alejandro Amenabar, with Nicole Kidman as a mother of two small children living in a secluded island mansion behind locked doors and drawn curtains as she await’s the return of her husband from World War II. When three mysterious servants show up, it becomes disturbingly obvious that there is more to this house than meets the eye. Twists and turns keep the viewer guessing right up to the jolting surprise ending. Kidman is chillingly superb in this moody Gothic gem, available in Blu-ray from Lionsgate.

The supernatural reaches out again in “The Caller” (2011) when divorcee Mary Kee (Rachelle Lefevre, “Twilight“), already a nervous wreck thanks to a threatening ex-husband, moves into a modest apartment equipped with an old-fashioned rotary phone and starts getting weird calls from a woman who implies she’s calling from the past. The caller keeps asking to speak to someone named Bobby, and when the woman starts talking about murder, Mary tries to break off contact. But the caller doesn’t like being ignored, and so she seeks revenge in a deeply terrifying way. Available from Sony Home Entertainment, it’s a nifty little creepshow from director Matthew Parkhill that also stars Stephen Moyer (“True Blood”).

From the romping stomping thunder lizard category there’s “The Giant Behemoth,” one of the scarier features of the resurrected dinosaur variety to hit the drive-ins in 1958, starring Gene Evans as a heroic American scientist, playing opposite a ticked-off, radiation-breathing palaeosaurus that can turn people to piles of ash and cities such as London to mountains of rubble. Written and directed by Eugene Lourie (“The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms”), “Behemoth” features stop-motion effects by “King Kong’s” Willis O’Brien. Available from Warner Archives.

And finally, for fright fans who are also vintage television enthusiasts, the 1960-62 anthology showcase that Stephen King has called “the best horror series ever put on TV” is now available in “Thriller: The Complete Series,” a pricey 14-DVD set that holds all 67 episodes, hosted by Boris Karloff and featuring such stars and stars-to-be as William Shatner, Leslie Nielsen, Mary Tyler Moore, Elizabeth Montgomery, Rip Torn, Richard Chamberlain, Cloris Leachman, Robert Vaughn, John Carradine, Ursula Andress and Karloff himself, in stories ranging from not-so-scary, crime-based stuff to mostly the stuff that nightmares are made of, from the pens of such luminaries as Richard Matheson, Cornell Woolrich, Robert Bloch and Edgar Allan Poe himself.