Warner Bros. Home Entertainment (WBHE) and Turner Classic Movies (TCM) are adding four new collections to their TCM Greatest Classic Films line, which spotlights some of Hollywood's most legendary actors and actresses in classic cinema.
Available October 15, 2013, the newest additions are: TCM Greatest Classic Films: Legends - Ronald Reagan, starring the successful Hollywood actor turned politician; TCM Greatest Classic Films: Legends - Barbara Stanwyck, featuring the four-time Academy Award nominee¹; TCM Greatest Classic Films: Legends - Gary Cooper, starring the two-time Academy Award winner who received the Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role for "Sergeant York," released in 1941, and Best Actor in a Leading Role for "High Noon," released in 1952; and TCM Greatest Classic Films: Legends - Val Lewton, featuring four films from the remarkably resourceful producer best known for his high-quality horror films made on limited budgets. Each star-studded collection features four classic films and is affordably priced at $27.92 SRP. Orders are due September 10, 2013.
To build further momentum for these titles, WBHE has set the street date for the collections to coincide with the airing of one film from each collection on TCM. Additional promotional support for these titles will include TV programming with on-air promotional spots on Turner Networks and print advertising in the Now Playing guide.
ABOUT THE COLLECTIONS
TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS: LEGENDS - RONALD REAGAN
KNUTE ROCKNE ALL AMERICAN (1940) - Pat O'Brien is coach Knute Rockne, who revolutionizes football, winning close to 90 percent of his games, and who wants to shape his players into honorable men. Ronald Reagan plays doomed halfback George Gipp, delivering his famous plea: "win one just for the Gipper."
KINGS ROW (1942) - The peaceful exterior of a quaint, small town conceals human lives twisted by cruelty, murder and madness. Reagan's portrayal of Drake, a cheerful ne'er-do-well shattered by tragedy, has been hailed as his career best in this powerful saga of dreams, despair and triumph.
STORM WARNING (1951) - Marsha Mitchell (Ginger Rogers) witnesses a Ku Klux Klan murder, then recognizes her sister Lucy's (Doris Day) brutish new husband as one of the killers. She could leave town...or be the one
Brave enough to bring the Klan to justice. Reagan costars as a crusading D.A.
THE WINNING TEAM (1952) - Reagan is Hall of Fame pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander, who suffers from double vision and fainting spells and sees his career bottom out. But helped by his wife (Doris Day), he makes a successful return that reaches its peak in the 1926 World Series.
TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS: LEGENDS - BARBARA STANWYCK
BABY FACE (1933) - Added to the National Film Registry in 2005, this notorious pre-Code film stars Barbara Stanwyck as Lily Powers, a streetwise girl forced into prostitution by her father. She heads for the big city, using her brains and body in her relentless pursuit of wealth and status.
ANNIE OAKLEY (1935) - A radiant Stanwyck sharpshoots her way into biopic glory...and into the heart of a rival marksman (Preston Foster). Add trick riders, bronco busters and more and you have a hoopla-and-ballyhoo-filled re-creation of the pinnacle of American showmanship.
MY REPUTATION (1946) - People are talking. They say young widow Jessica Drummond (Stanwyck) is romancing an army officer (George Brent) too much, too soon. Jessica's heard the gossip. Unfortunately, so have her two impressionable sons in this resonant melodrama.
EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE (1949) - Isabel Lorrison (Ava Gardner) is a good-time girl destined for a bad fate: murder. But who killed her? A philandering husband? His wife, who had every motive to put her hands around Isabel's neck and squeeze? Stanwyck plays the wronged wife in this sleek mystery melodrama.
TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS: LEGENDS - GARY COOPER
SERGEANT YORK (1941) - Torn between religious pacifism and patriotism, simple farm boy Alvin York (Gary Cooper) of Tennessee went on to become WWI's most acclaimed hero, capturing 132 German soldiers during the Battle of Argonne. As York, Cooper won the 1941 Oscar for Best Actor.
THE FOUNTAINHEAD (1949) - Cooper plays unyielding architect Howard Roark, who will
Sacrifice everything - the woman he loves (Patricia Neal) or the project he dynamites when others interfere - to maintain his individuality in this film scripted by Ayn Rand from her novel and directed by King Vidor.
FRIENDLY PERSUASION (1956) - For two years, the Civil War has been elsewhere. Now Confederates are nearby, looting and burning. Jess Birdwell's neighbors insist it's time to fight back. Yet Birdwell (Cooper), a Quaker, knows there's a better way to settle things in this film version of Jessamyn West's novel.
LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON (1957) - May-December romance is in bloom when Billy Wilder directs and Audrey Hepburn and Cooper meet for Love in the Afternoon. Laughs, Parisian settings, champagne elegance - Wilder, co-writing with I.A.L. Diamond, delivers them all in his soufflé-light homage to Ernst Lubitsch.
TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS: LEGENDS - VAL LEWTON
CAT PEOPLE (1942) - Directed by Jacques Tourneur and written by Dewitt Bodeen, Cat People was the trailblazing first of Val Lewton's nine horror classics. Simone Simon portrays a bride who fears an ancient hex will turn her into a deadly panther when she's in passion's grip.
I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943) - Lewton takes the gothic romance of Jane Eyre, resets it in the West Indies and adds the overriding terror of the living dead for the screen horror classic I Walked with a Zombie. Frances Dee plays the nurse who witnesses the strange power of voodoo.
THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944) - Simone Simon returns in The Curse of the Cat People, a sequel in title but a landmark study of a troubled child. Dewitt Bodeen again provides the script, with Robert Wise making his directing debut, co-helming a gothic-laced mix of fantasy and fright.
THE BODY SNATCHER (1945) - Boris Karloff plays the title role in the Lewton adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Body Snatcher. A doctor needs cadavers for medical studies, and Karloff is willing to provide them - one way or another. Don't miss his scene with fellow horror icon Bela Lugosi.
