5 Smart DVDs: Darwinian Developments

Every year is an anniversary of sorts, but 2009 has proved to be a memorable one for two pretty different headliners: Alfred Hitchcock and Charles Darwin. Into espionage? Among new DVD releases this month is a special 50th-anniversary edition of Hitchcock’s masterpiece, "North by Northwest." If evolution is more your style, check out an illuminating documentary that marks Darwin’s 200th birthday and the publication of his seminal treatise on evolution in 1859. There’s also a new edition of Wim Wenders’ lyrical tale of a modern-day angel, an exploration of daily life among ancient pyramid builders and, for animation enthusiasts, the DVD release of one of the year’s biggest hits, the unlikely and uplifting "Up."

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

This 50th-anniversary edition of the great Hitchcock thriller allows us to revisit one of the most entertaining movies ever. Working with a witty and inventive screenplay, Hitchcock gives us a look at American life that is constantly in motion. Its very title (lifted from a line in Hamlet) is directional nonsense – but oh, the places it goes.

The plot riffs on a Hitchcock specialty – a man who is confused with someone else, and who must outwit his pursuers while piecing together the truth. The peerless Cary Grant plays the ad man who is mistaken for an undercover agent. After he escapes his kidnapers, he becomes a moving target against a changing backdrop of iconic American images.

Here is the late-’50s bustle of New York streets, the swirling drama of the United Nations, the sophistication of a cross-country train trip and, in a justly famous sequence set on a cornfield in the middle of nowhere, the desolation of the Midwest plains where Grant’s character tries to outrun an assassinating crop-duster. There’s also a grand finale atop Mount Rushmore over the passive stone faces of dead presidents.

The newly re-mastered DVD (also available in Blu-ray) allows us to see afresh this topnotch entertainment in a decade that provided at least three very different and enduring works that explored Americans’ need to keep moving: "On the Road," "Lolita" and "North by Northwest."

Directed by Wim Wenders

We’re approaching that time of year when images of angels will be everywhere. But "Wings of Desire" offers a different sort of unearthly creature. Here a very human-looking angel, Damiel, surveys Berlin from above and on the ground, listening to and recording the hopes and fears of everyone around him: He’s a celestial eavesdropper on a mission to preserve reality by capturing human thoughts.

Like many an eternal creature before him, Damiel is willing to give up his wings and embrace morality because he falls in love – here with a beautiful trapeze artist.

Wenders, filming in black-and-white (with color at choice moments, such as when the angels look away or are not present), provides haunting images of Berlin just before the end of the Cold War. The movie is a reverie about the fragility of the human condition; Wenders has said he was inspired by the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke in conceiving it.

This Criterion edition features audio commentary with Wenders and with Peter Falk – who plays himself – a documentary about the film, interviews with the director and actors, plus deleted scenes and outtakes. And it could make a lovely companion piece to that most famous seasonal classic featuring angels, It’s a Wonderful Life, which has just been released in Blu-ray.