Oscar-winning 'Schindler's List' on DVD shelves

By Terry Lawson
Knight Ridder News Service

Liam Neeson, center, stars as Oskar Schindler in the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List." Gannett News Service

The 3-hour, 14-minute drama, filmed in black and white, tells the true story of Oskar Schindler (played by Liam Neeson), a German industrialist who, with help from his Jewish bookkeeper (Ben Kingsley), saved more than 1,000 Jews from the concentration camps by convincing the Nazis their work was necessary to the war effort.

The DVD transfer and presentation are immaculate (both wide-screen and full-screen editions are available), though one wishes the supplemental material included something on the film's production, as well as a portrait of the real Schindler. Instead, we get the moving, 80-minute "Voices From the List," containing interviews with the surviving Schindler employees, and a brief, Spielberg-narrated film about the Shoah Foundation, which the director formed to preserve testimony from Holocaust survivors.

A special "Collector's Gift Set" packages the DVD, a hardcover, 80-page book of production stills and notes, and a full-size frame from the film in a Plexiglas box.

Raquel Welch films

On a less serious note: Three-headed men in mullets. Foam rubber caves. An iguana cast as a dinosaur. A script consisting entirely of grunts and gestures. Raquel Welch in an itsy-bitsy fur bikini. What else could anyone want in a movie? Well, a story maybe, or at least some explanation of why humans and dinosaurs are sharing Earth. But that would be only for people who have never seen Welch in that bikini on the poster for "One Million Years B.C.," an image burned into the brain of many an adolescent boy in early 1967.

The prehistoric howler leads a trio of Welch titles, all released by Fox, and two of which are very bad — albeit in a good way, I guess.

The exception is the funny if dated 1976 comedy "Mother, Jugs and Speed" in which Welch plays an ambulance company dispatcher whose star driver is Bill Cosby, who with partner Larry Hagman is competing with disgraced cop Harvey Keitel for business.

"Myra Breckinridge," is an adaptation of Gore Vidal's famous sex-change satire that turns Rex Reed into Welch.

While "One Million" may disappoint its bad-movie fans by not including the 9 minutes of extra footage included on the laser disc, "Myra" pulls out all the stops. It includes the original X-rated version (it included a scene in which Welch wore something still not all that common in 1970); the R-rated edition; and a commentary by Welch and director Michael Sarne in which she is hilariously bitchy and he is mildly defensive. They had to be recorded separately for reasons that become obvious.

There's also one of those American Movie Classics "backstory" docs that attempts to survey everything that went wrong with this movie, which proves impossible to do in 24 minutes.

Original 'Dawn of the Dead'

The impending release of a remake of "Dawn of the Dead" is the occasion for a new deluxe edition of the 1978 original (Anchor Bay), the second of George Romero's zombie trilogy. Production-wise, this was a vast improvement over the low-budget but horrifying "Night of the Living Dead." It was also widely hailed for its social satire, which equated zombies with mall consumers, devouring everything in their paths.

It should be noted that a 2-DVD expanded director's cut is due later this year.