Since writing about the Warner Archive DVD-on-demand service the other day, I’ve been thinking about which currently MIA movies I’d most like to own in the form of a shiny silver disc. A few of them are pretty obscure, a couple are somewhat less so (i.e., I’m willing to bet my readers have at least heard of them), and four of them are beloved classics that simply have no good reason to be unavailable, aside from intransigence and the nonsense that so often just seems to happen in Hollywood.

In no particular order:

• High Road to China. I think it’s pretty well known that Tom Selleck came within a mustache hair of playing Indiana Jones, but lost the part when CBS refused to let him out of his contract with them. Everything turned out all right, considering he went on to embody another iconic character of the 1980s, Thomas Magnum, for eight seasons on television, but when High Road was released only two years after Raiders, it must’ve seemed like a mediocre consolation prize. Certainly that’s how I remember the movie-going public seemed to view it. The comparison is easy to make, since High Road is set in a similar time period (the 1920s, only ten years earlier — give or take — than the Indy movies) and Selleck’s character is unshaven and wears a leather coat. But I think it’s really an unfair comparison. High Road is a very different film from Raiders in tone and execution, and while it’s not a great movie, Selleck is appealing and the aerial footage is impressive. (Selleck’s character is a barnstorming World War I vet.) If I remember correctly, this was a Warner Bros. film, so it may end up becoming available through the Warner Archive. I’m keeping my fingers crossed…
• Lassiter. Another Selleck vehicle, made a year after High Road. This time, he’s a dashing cat burglar in 1930s London who gets recruited into stealing some Nazi gemstones in a nod to the It Takes a Thief school of heist pictures. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this one, but as I recall, it suffers from a too-leisurely pace and a generally cheap appearance. Selleck, however, plays his role with his usual twinkle in the eye and Jane Seymour is very easy on the eyes as Tom’s love interest. (This movie features a rare nude scene from her, if that’s any incentive for you to see it. It certainly was for me, back in the day!)
• Mother Lode. I recall seeing this movie with my friend Keith at the old Sandy Starship theaters one rainy day when we still young enough that we needed to be shuttled around by my mom. It’s a crackling adventure movie with Charlton Heston as a loony old prospector and Kim Basinger in (I believe) her debut appearance. The plot involves a young couple coming to the wilds of Alaska in search of a missing friend, only to stumble onto the titular mother lode, the source of all the gold ever found in the Yukon. The movie boasts some incredible landscape footage, an appropriately damp atmosphere (the scenes inside the gold mine are traumatically claustrophobic), and a spectacular airplane crash that, as I understand it, was a for-real accident that looked too good not to use. I’m really surprised this movie has been largely forgotten while other, less entertaining pictures are starting on cable about every five minutes.
• FM. A meandering but good-natured flick about the assorted misfits who work at a rock-n-roll radio station, this feels like a prototype for the TV series WKRP in Cincinnati. (As far as I know, there’s no connection between the two other than a similar premise.) The individual episodes that comprise what passes for a plot never quite add up to anything — think Caddyshack — but the movie has a comfortable, Hush-Puppies-and-good-weed feel and a killer soundtrack (assuming you like late-70s rock, which I do). It also serves as an inadvertent time capsule for the days before Clear Channel automated and homogenized every radio station in the country, and it even includes a couple of priceless concert scenes featuring Jimmy Buffett before he became Mr. Margaritaville and Linda Ronstadt before she lost interest in being popular.
• Elvis. Kurt Russell’s first movie after outgrowing the Disney stuff was not Used Cars or the better known Escape from New York, but rather a 1979 made-for-TV movie project where he played the (then) recently deceased King of Rock and Roll. I believe this was the first Elvis Presley biopic, and still stands as the best, in my opinion. Kurt was as perfect a fit for the role as Val Kilmer was as Jim Morrison in The Doors. Elvis was also the first collaboration between Russell and horror-meister John Carpenter; they of course went on to make four feature films together. (I’m still awaiting a fifth, guys!)
• The Great Waldo Pepper. Another movie about post-World War I barnstormers, this time with Robert Redford as a flyboy trying to make a living at 1920s airshows. This was the third collaboration between Redford and director George Roy Hill (The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid being the other two), and all the aerial scenes are accomplished with real planes, no model work anywhere. The movie is typical of mid-70s fare in that it ends on a downbeat note, but it’s a fascinating look at a nearly forgotten sub-culture and mileau, when air travel was still an amazing novelty to the vast majority of Americans. The film also features a very young Margot Kidder and Susan Sarandon in supporting roles.
• The African Queen. This is the one that baffles me… how can an Oscar-winning film starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, one of the best-known and best-loved movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age, not be available on DVD? There’s no doubt some kind of legal problem holding it up, but I’m amazed that, in the over ten years DVDs have been on the market, the issue has not been resolved. Come on, guys, somebody get on the ball, will you?
• Theatrical versions of the original Star Wars trilogy. And finally, my perennial windmill, the pre-1997 versions of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. But Bennion, you say, those movies are on DVD; they were “bonus features” on the 2006 release of the latest revisions. Well, yeah, but they didn’t get much love, did they? What’s actually on those DVDs are 15-year-old (at the time of the release) non-anamorphic (i.e., not enhanced for 16×9 HDTVs) transfers made for the 1993 laserdiscs, which means they don’t look much better than the bootleg DVDs that are floating around out there. They were a token effort only, made to silence purists like myself. (Another, slightly more cynical explanation is that they were intended to squelch the burgeoning bootleg market that was using old laserdiscs as source material.) You can read more about why these things aren’t all that great here. The bottom line, for me, is that it is the pre-’97, pre-Special Edition versions of these movies that are historically significant and it’s a travesty that they’re not available in the same state-of-the-art quality as so many marginal B-movies from the same time period. But Bennion, you say, Lucasfilm says the negatives were decaying, that he had to do all the digital substitutions for the Special Editions to preserve what was left, and that the original versions of the trilogy literally no longer exist. Sorry, I don’t buy it. George Lucas is the most thorough archivist in the history of the film industry; I simply cannot believe that he doesn’t have a copy of the master negs tucked away somewhere, and even if he doesn’t, there are other sources that could be used to create a decent hi-def transfer. Surely the Library of Congress has negatives or at least a nice clean print that could be copied. After all, Star Wars at least and I believe the other two films as well were named to the National Film Registry a few years ago, and I’m willing to bet it wasn’t copies of the Special Editions that got enshrined in our nation’s movie vaults. And if the LoC isn’t any help, there are always private collectors. If Uncle George put out a worldwide call for prints, I guarantee they would be found. Hell, we have restored versions of Nosferatu and Metropolis based on materials found in private collections; surely the same can be done for the most popular film series of the late 20th Century! Call me crazy, but I’m still hoping that someday, after enough time has passed and the smoldering ruins of the great prequel wars have finally cooled, George — or his heirs, perhaps — will finally do the right thing. Of course, by then, we’ll probably be using holo-crystals or something instead of DVDs. But you know what I mean.

And there’s my wishlist. If anybody cares, I’m planning to try out the Warner Archive after I get my next paycheck. I’ll probably order Oxford Blues, which is the one I remember best out of the titles I’m interested in. I’ll let you know how it turns out…