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Taking a peek into holiday boxes

BY GENE SEYMOUR AND JAN STUART | Newsday Movie Critics

December 7, 2006

It's the holiday season and time for film, TV and music distributors to pump out those box sets, many of which are just repackaging of already released stuff - the industry's equivalent of re-gifting.

But there are also some real keepers in the mix, such as new James Bond, Frank Capra and Superman collections. CD sets range from Sinatra in Vegas to a goth music extravaganza. TV offers mega-sets featuring such attractions as the complete runs of such shows as "Friends," "M*A*S*H" and "The West Wing." What's worth getting?

Our TV, music and film critics sort the good from the bad and make their picks.

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This set's just, well, super

SUPERMAN: ULTIMATE COLLECTORS EDITION. (Warner Bros.) 14 discs, $89.98

If you can believe a man can fly, would you also believe that one boxed set can take care of all your Superman needs for life? Warner Bros. is betting you will with this exhaustive - and exhausting to contemplate - metal box containing all four of the "Superman" movies with Christopher Reeve along with a special two-disc edition of this year's "Superman Returns." The most super - or should one say, the "super-duper" - item in this mind-spinning set is the four-disc edition of the first Reeve "Superman" movie.

You not only get two versions of the 1978 movie (one of them an "expanded edition"), but four "making-of" documentaries and the complete "Superman and the Mole-Men," a 1951 black-and-white film that was the first Superman theatrical feature and was edited into the only two-part episode in the subsequent TV series starring George Reeves. Perhaps the most eye-popping find of all for longtime Superman cultists comes in both the "Superman" set and in the two-disc "Superman II" set: brilliantly remastered versions of the groundbreaking Fleischer Studios animated "Superman" shorts from the 1940s.

There's also an alternate edition of "Superman II," known as "the Richard Donner cut," which is the edition fashioned by the director of the first "Superman" movie. (Donner was replaced during the making of the 1981 sequel by Richard Lester.) And just in case you think all this isn't enough, the "Superman Returns" volume includes a "comprehensive" three-hour (!) documentary, "Requiem for Krypton: Making 'Superman Returns.'"

What, after all this, is there left to say? Just a couple of random observations: First, one must re-emphasize that those early "Superman" cartoons were the most visually arresting little action movies of their era. Second, and most poignantly, one must acknowledge that of all the actors who got to wear the "red-yellow-and-blue" of Superman's uniform, Reeve was the best, brightest and most resourceful. He deserves his prominence in what looks in this package to be a monumental legacy.

A wonderful life of films

THE PREMIERE FRANK CAPRA COLLECTION.

Sony, Six discs, $59.95

Brandishing sentimental streaks as thick and wide as the Continental Divide, Frank Capra's films are, as a whole, regarded as something of an antithesis to director Preston Sturges' cooler, drier Americana. Yet the brash energy that propelled Sturges' work is also found in Capra's. Such drive helps make palatable (most of the time) the cheese and corn that often seeps into Capra's stories of the Little People triumphing over the Greedy and Selfish Bigger People.

This collection brings together Capra's most representative work from the 1930s, including such Oscar-winning Best Pictures as "It Happened One Night" (1934) and "You Can't Take it With You" (1938). There's also "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (1936), in which humble-but-shrewd yokel Gary Cooper lays waste to big-city wiseacres.

And there's "Deeds'" big-government companion, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939). If the latter overpowers the former, it's not just because of James Stewart's impassioned, should-have-won-the-Oscar performance as the besieged idealistic senator, but Sidney Buchman's richer, subtler screenplay.

The set's grand revelation? "American Madness," the 1932 Depression-era story of how banker Walter Huston is rescued from ruin by faithful Little-Guy investors. The movie provided a template for what became known, not always derisively, as "Capra-corn." When you see the director's 1946 holiday classic, "It's a Wonderful Life," this season after seeing "Madness," you'll note that both movies not only share plot points, but a noir-ish edginess that Capra rarely indulged. The sixth disc is highlighted by a 1997 documentary, "Frank Capra's American Dream," hosted by Ron Howard and produced by Frank Capra Jr., the director's son.

What's up? Real lives

THE UP SERIES. Five-disc collector's edition (First Run). $22.46