I’m a veteran of the laserdisc era.

I was thinking about that as I pondered the first decade (or perhaps even 11 years) of the DVD, which 2008 marked, on December 24 of the year.

To a lot of people under the age of 25 — and actually, to just plain a LOT of people — the “laserdisc format” won’t mean too much, because at the peak of its popularity, around 1996 or so, there were never more than about a million laserdisc players in use in the United States.

Those with longer memories, or who spent time in Japan (where there were several million players in use, even in the 1980’s), however, will remember the format: LP-size platters, usually silver on both sides (distinctly non-compact discs was the best way to summarize them), massively heavy, and usually in fairly flimsy LP-size jackets, all containing visual programming (movies, TV shows, still-frames, but in the end mostly movies). They were never overly popular, partly owing to the cost ($25 to $100 list, in a $15 CD marketplace), their cumbersome size, some production problems, and the fact that one couldn’t record in the format. As a clue to their lack of visibility, until the 1990’s laserdiscs were hardly ever mentioned in mainstream video advertising, except as an after-thought.

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Andrew Sarris, the longtime critic for the Village Voice, has called Lola Montès “the greatest movie of all time.” While some may disagree with that accolade, it’s impossible to ignore a film that bears that kind of reputation and critical imprimatur.

And yet… Max Ophüls’ Lola Montès was in need of a rescue operation almost from the moment it opened. The massively expensive 1955 film, the director’s final film and his first ever in color, was greeted with such extreme critical rejection on its original opening in France, that it was withdrawn and re-cut by its studio (even the original negative was re-edited) and the whole narrative structure and content of the movie was altered — indeed, it opened in the United States as “The Sins Of Lola Montes” missing 30 minutes of its original 115 minute running time.

There was a serious effort at reconstructing the movie in the late 1960s, sponsored by producer Pierre Braunberger, which restored the film’s original cyclical narrative and some of the luster of the Technicolor cinematography; and the movie got a fresh re-release in the 1980s in the United States, though even those efforts only hinted at what audiences should have been seeing, in terms of depth of color and hue, and the sheer elegance of the narrative and the compositions.

In 2006, however, a fresh restoration was undertaken, this time sponsored by Braunberger’s daughter, and this time it was possible to restore the movie to its original ultra-wide 2.55-to-1 aspect ratio, and to recapture the Technicolor luster of the original and the scope and range of the original soundtrack. In the process, Lola Montès has become the first movie to be presented at the New York Film Festival on three separate occasions, at the first festival in 1963, again in 1969 on the occasion of the interim restoration, and in October of 2008 for the newest restoration. It opened at New York’s Film Forum on October 10 for a three-week run ending on the 30th. It is also scheduled to play the Laemmle’s Royal in Los Angeles from October 10-23, and the Laemmle’s Playhouse in Pasadena; the Music Box in Chicago from November 7-13; the Castro in San Francisco from November 19-25; the Rialto Cinemas Elmwood in Berkeley, California from November 19-25; the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, California from November 19-25; and the Landmark’s E Street Cinema in Washington, D.C. from November 21-27.

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, for all of their sterling reputations as movies, have had a rough and uneasy life on the home screen — at one point re-edited by Coppola so that their narrative was linear, the movies have never wholly satisfied home viewers, especially given their theatrical reputations. And no one was happy — with the color or the quality, or much else — in the Godfather complete DVD set issued at the start of the twenty-first century.

Paramount Pictures, in conjunction with Coppola himself and film preservation specialist Robert A. Harris (best known for his work on Hitchcock’s Vertigo and David Lean’s Lawrence Of Arabia, have solved most of the problems associated with The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, with meticulously restored prints, which are making their DVD and Blu-ray debuts on September 23, 2008.

But for true fans of the film, there’s no substitute for a theatrical screening — these images were meant to be seen on screens 40 feet across (or more), not 40 or 50 inches. And for those in the northeast and specifically in the New York area, there will be three full weeks of the two epics, in tandem, at New York’s Film Forum (209 West Houston Street, New York, NY 10014, 212-727-8110) from September 12 through October 2. The restored print of The Godfather, seen by this writer, looks as good as it did in 1972, with Gordon Willis’s photography given its original luster — there are rich, deep tones to the color in almost every shot, and intensely crisp detail throughout. And on a modern theater sound system, the movie takes on an almost 3-D audio profile. It’s worth the commitment of time and energy to see it in a theater, and the wealth of detail revealed in the frame-by-frame restoration makes this one also worth jockeying for a seat nice and close to the screen (third row is ideal — but fourth or second would suffice, and anyplace will keep your eye good and busy).

Amanda Robinson never set out to be an actress — indeed, at 67 (and known as Amanda Robinson Lane), she’s a retired schoolteacher with a proud record of achievements in that field behind her; but in 1956, at age 15 she achieved something akin to big-screen immortality by way of Elia Kazan’s production of A Face In The Crowd, which was partly shot in her hometown of Piggott, Arkansas. Not only did the teenaged Amanda Robinson manage to get a featured spot on screen, doing some of what she did best in those days (twirling a baton), but she got her real name mentioned in the movie as well, by the star, Andy Griffith.

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