Fast-Forward to a Vintage Year on Video

Scratch at least two titles from home video’s Most Wanted list: “Walkabout” and “Seconds” will make their debuts on videocassette in 1997.

“Seconds” director John Frankenheimer, for one, is thrilled. “Maybe it will stop all these phone calls from people asking if I can get them a copy,” he said.

Among connoisseurs and budding collectors, the new year brings hope that favorite long-sought films will at last find their way onto videocassette. It takes, on average, five to seven months for a movie to go from theaters to video stores. Release schedules of classic, or catalog, titles are not as easy to predict because of legal entanglements, perceived limited appeal or substandard materials from which prints are struck.

This can lead to consumer frustration. “They assume that if a movie is old or has played on cable that it is available on videocassette,” said Irv Slifkin, co-editor of the encyclopedic mail-order Movies Unlimited Video Catalog.

The wait continues for Billy Wilder’s “The Big Carnival,” “American Hot Wax,” “California Split,” “Drive, He Said,” “Hollywood Knights,” “Kansas City Bomber,” “The High and the Mighty” and “Nosferatu” starring Klaus Kinski, which Slifkin cited as among the most requested.

But devotees of films ranging from “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” to “Pink Flamingos” can look forward to seeing their favorites on video in 1997, many boasting extras usually associated with laserdiscs, including “making of” footage, the restoration of deleted scenes and interviews.

“Walkabout” will be released March 18 on the Home Vision label in a 100-minute director’s cut never before seen in the United States. Director Nicolas Roeg supervised the transfer to video.

The 1971 film stars Jenny Agutter, then 16, and Roeg’s 7-year-old son, Lucien John, as a brother and sister stranded in Australia’s outback. They encounter an Aborigine youth who has embarked on his tribal coming-of-age ritual, the walkabout.

“Seconds,” a May release from Paramount Home Video, was originally marketed in 1966 as a horror film (to Frankenheimer’s displeasure). In what is considered one of the best performances of his career, Rock Hudson stars as a “reborn” incarnation of a middle-aged businessman who has accepted the chance to begin his adult life anew.

The video version will include a sequence deleted from American prints in which Hudson attends a free-spirited ceremony during which nude revelers crush grapes into wine.

Two previously unreleased foreign film classics will arrive on video after critically acclaimed theatrical engagements that raised their public profile. Rene Clement’s 1961 thriller “Purple Noon” will be released Feb. 18 on the Miramax Home Entertainment label. One week later, Fox Lorber Home Video will release Jacques Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” which will be available for the first time on video in its original language with English subtitles.

Fox Lorber will also follow up its recent release of Lina Wertmuller’s “Swept Away” with the expected summer release of subtitled versions of two of her most renowned films, “The Seduction of Mimi” and “Love and Anarchy.” On March 18, New Yorker Video will release Robert Bresson’s penultimate film, “The Devil, Probably,” which was made in 1977 but which did not premiere in Los Angeles until 1985.

Twentieth Century Fox Home Video has further mined its vaults for additions to its “Studio Classics” collection. “Captain From Castille,” the 1947 Tyrone Power swashbuckler, will debut Feb. 11, to be followed on April 8 by “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison,” “Pigskin Parade” on June 3, “Three Coins in the Fountain” on Aug. 5, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” on Oct. 7 and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat” on Dec. 2. Each will retail for $19.98.

*

New York-based Kino on Video is looking especially buff for the new year. The company has carved a niche in the marketplace with archival collections that span a century of cinema history. This year, Kino is “full of surprises,” according to director of video sales Lance Schults.

On Jan. 21, Kino will launch “British Classics of the 1930s and ‘40s,” which will include a restored version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1939 thriller “Jamaica Inn.” Other titles in the series are Carol Reed’s “Night Train to Munich”; “St. Martin’s Lane,” starring Vivien Leigh; “Wings of the Morning,” Britain’s first Technicolor production; and the once-scandalous comedy “On Approval.”

In March, Kino pays homage to silent comedian Harry Langdon with the release of “Tramp Tramp Tramp,” “The Strong Man” and “Long Pants.” Other March releases include the 1965 Academy Award-winning documentary, “The Eleanor Roosevelt Story,” with a new introduction by--who else?--Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as the William Wyler profile, “Wild Bill.”

A collection to be released in June will spotlight pioneering American independent filmmaker Morris Engel and will include “The Little Fugitive,” “Lovers and Lollipops” and “Weddings and Babies.” A Fatty Arbuckle collection is also in the works for August.

MCA/Universal Home Video will add new titles to several of its star-driven collections. The Deanna Durbin musicals, “That Certain Age,” “Nice Girls” and “Can’t Help Singing” will be released Jan. 28. In March, “Flame of Araby,” “Bagdad” and “Lady Godiva” will join the “Maureen O’Hara Collection.”

One of the studio’s key releases will be the release of the restored version of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” which is scheduled to drop into stores in the spring, said vice president of marketing Craig Relyea.

He said great lengths are being taken to ensure a quality video, with the same team that restored the film for its theatrical release working on the video transfer.

Many studios have created product lines that dress up previously released catalog titles to attract new video buyers. On Feb. 11, MGM/UA Home Video will release as part of its “Vintage Classics” collection restored and repackaged editions of “Angels With Dirty Faces,” “The Apartment,” “Dinner at Eight,” “Grand Hotel,” “I Want to Live,” “Key Largo,” “A Patch of Blue” and “Separate Tables,” each to retail for $19.98.

Growing acceptance of the letterbox, or wide-screen, format affords studios with another opportunity to cater to film buffs as well as to reach out to the more casual collector with “as they should be seen” versions of classics and more mainstream hits. Several of MGM/UA’s “Vintage” titles will be made available for the first time on video in letterbox, including “The Apartment” and “A Patch of Blue,” with “In the Heat of the Night” to follow in May, “Irma La Douce” and “The Fortune Cookie” due in August and “A Pocketful of Miracles” expected in November.

*

MCA/Universal will release letterbox editions of Martin Scorsese’s “Casino” and Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys” on Jan. 28.

Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will launch in March a wide-screen edition of last year’s biggest box-office hit, “Independence Day,” along with the disaster films “The Towering Inferno” and “The Poseidon Adventure.”

Taking its cue from Walt Disney Home Video’s best-selling “Sing-Along” series, MGM/UA will launch on March 4 its own family-oriented “MGM Sing-Alongs” franchise. The first volume will feature songs from, among others, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “Anchors Aweigh” and “All Dogs Go to Heaven.”

John Waters’ infamous “Pink Flamingos” is celebrating its 25th anniversary in 1997, and New Line Home Video is hoping to mine some shock value out of the mother of all midnight movies, which has been long unavailable on video. It is scheduled for a video release in the late summer or fall, after a spring theatrical re-release, and will include exclusive additional footage, promised Kevin Kasha, senior vice president of sales and distribution.

Also on the cult movie front, MCA/Universal is readying an archival footage-enhanced collector’s edition of David Lynch’s “Dune” as part of a science-fiction promotion scheduled between April and June. And Buck Jones fans, hold your horses. Based on fan-mail entreaties, the studio is readying a collection of the western hero’s films.

Anchor Bay Entertainment, which owns the video rights to Handmade Films, will release Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” and Terry Gilliam’s “Time Bandits” in August.

A&E; Home Video, flush from the success of “Pride and Prejudice,” will offer more “Must-Own TV,” including the March 7 release of “Emma,” starring Kate Beckinsale, as well as episodes of the MTM series “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “WKRP in Cincinnati” to follow later in the year.

Paramount Home Video plans to make available episodes of “Happy Days” as well as “Brady Bunch Home Movies,” with original footage shot by the cast members.