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How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (Widescreen Edition)
: :This fizzy musical was a Broadway smash in 1962, and boy, is it a product of its era. Executive washrooms, gray-flannel-suit businessmen, hip-swinging secretaries--they're all preserved in the movie's brightly colored amber. J. Pierpont Finch (Robert Morse) is the window washer who climbs the corporate ladder in a few days, guided by a how-to book. The Frank Loesser songs are great fun, the Bob Fosse dances are very clever and mod, and the gaudy set design may have given Andy Warhol a few ideas. The jack-in-the-box performance of the elfin Robert Morse doesn't ...
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Smokey Joe's Cafe - The Songs of Leiber and Stoller (Widescreen Edition)
: :You know that rock & roll has staying power when it can survive even the homogenization that comes from being performed on Broadway. So it is with this live performance of a Broadway revue that celebrated the music of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, one of the finest songwriting teams ever to have hits with Elvis Presley, Ben E. King, the Drifters, the Coasters, and everyone else who mattered in the early days of rock. Everything from 'Hound Dog' to 'Charlie Brown,' from 'I'm a Woman' to 'On Broadway' is included in this ...
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Monty Python's Life of Brian (Widescreen Edition)
: essential video:'Blessed are the cheesemakers,' a wise man once said. Or maybe not. But the point is Monty Python's Life of Brian is a religious satire that does not target specific religions or religious leaders (like, say, Jesus of Nazareth). Instead, it pokes fun at the mindless and fanatical among their followers--it's an attack on religious zealotry and hypocrisy--things that that fellow from Nazareth didn't particularly care for either. Nevertheless, at the time of its release in 1979, those who hadn't seen it considered it to be quite 'controversial.' Life of Brian, ...
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Jekyll & Hyde - The Musical (Widescreen Edition)
: :Baywatch alum David Hasselhoff stars in the dual title roles of Jekyll and Hyde: The Musical, Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse's version of Robert Louis Stevenson's gothic horror classic. The story of the brilliant scientist who uncovers the good and evil aspects of the human heart was a pay-per-view event on the Broadway Television Network, filmed on stage before a live audience. If that audience had seen a lot of Broadway shows, they probably didn't see much they hadn't seen before, but its familiar plot and accessible pop score give Jekyll and Hyde ...
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Gigi (Widescreen Edition)
: essential video:Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's 1958 direct-to-screen follow-up to their My Fair Lady was--miraculously--every bit as memorable as that stage smash. Set in fin-de-siècle Paris and based on a Colette story, Gigi also is about a girl (Leslie Caron) on a lower rung of society who blossoms into Cinderellahood before our eyes and ears. Thank heaven for Hermione Gingold and Maurice Chevalier as her mentors, and Louis Jourdan as her prince. The screenplay writer and lyricist Lerner always said that Gigi's title song was his favorite of all he'd written, ...
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Victor/Victoria (1995 Broadway Production)
:Description:One of the world's most talented and best-loved performers, Julie Andrews reaches new heights in the most challenging role of her career as a woman pretending to be a man impersonating a woman! Filmed on the Broadway stage in 1995 (and based on the 1982 film), the immensely popular Victor/Victoria is a warm, funny, wildly energetic look at the nature of love, gender perceptions and the battle of the sexes. Written and directed by Blake Edwards, with an unforgettable score by Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse, Victor/Victoria tells the story of an out-of-work ...
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Pink Floyd's the Wall
: :Conceived by the French director Adrian Maben as 'an anti-Woodstock film,' Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii was shot in October 1971 in a vacant, 2,000-year-old amphitheater--a venue chosen to accentuate the grandeur and spaciousness of the band's Meddle-era music. This disc contains a new, 90-minute director's cut as well as the original 60-minute concert film, whose production and effects feel inescapably dated. Maben's cut goes to great lengths to lend the film a more contemporary feel, but it's the earlier version that makes this disc such a gem, being more focused on the ...
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The Music Man (Widescreen Edition)
: :Conceived by the French director Adrian Maben as 'an anti-Woodstock film,' Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii was shot in October 1971 in a vacant, 2,000-year-old amphitheater--a venue chosen to accentuate the grandeur and spaciousness of the band's Meddle-era music. This disc contains a new, 90-minute director's cut as well as the original 60-minute concert film, whose production and effects feel inescapably dated. Maben's cut goes to great lengths to lend the film a more contemporary feel, but it's the earlier version that makes this disc such a gem, being more focused on the ...
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Brigadoon (Widescreen Edition)
: essential video:Anything is possible in Brigadoon, the Lerner and Loewe musical put to celluloid in 1954 by director Vincente Minnelli: a village can reappear for only one day each century, and Gene Kelly can tap-dance on a dirt path. Kelly and Van Johnson play a pair of New Yorkers who go on a hunting vacation in the highlands of Scotland. But what Tommy Albright (Kelly) captures is the heart of a bonny Scottish lass, Fiona Campbell (Cyd Charisse). The catch: Fiona lives in Brigadoon, an enchanted town that appears for only one ...
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The Sound of Music
: essential video:Some people may sneer at this 1965 musical, but the truth is the film has earned its status as a perennially watchable romantic-drama, largely on the strength of a fun story and chemistry between stars Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. Veteran filmmaker Robert Wise (The Day the Earth Stood Still) mostly stays out of the way of the film's appealing elements, which include a based-on-fact tale of Austria's von Trapp family, who fled their Nazi-occupied country in 1938. Andrews is delightful and even fascinating as Maria, who sheds her tomboyish ways ...
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