The Legacy
An unsolicited job offer brings young architect Margaret (Katharine Ross) to England. After an apparently random car accident, Margaret and her boyfriend (Sam Elliott) find themselves stranded in a British castle. They discover strange doings, ancestral secrets and evil concealed within worse evil among an international set of wealthy occultists—among them, a chipper Roger Daltrey in rock-star mode. This 1978 film (out on Blu-ray) is silly but stylish, tony drive-in fare in its day.
Busting
Director Peter Hyams surveyed the territory Quentin Tarantino would occupy 20 years later in this 1974 crime drama. Elliott Gould and Robert Blake star as a pair of hard-knuckled, wise-cracking L.A. vice-squad detectives determined to bring down an invulnerable, well-connected crime boss who laughs in their faces. Busting features one of the finest cinematic foot chases ever shot—a long tracking shot through a supermarket complete with a gun battle in the produce aisle.
“Gene Autry Collection 11”
None of the singing cowboys rode taller in the saddle than Gene Autry. He made many low-budget movies, four of them included in this DVD collection. The oddest one features him as the leader of “Gene Autry and his Television Troubadours,” pitching for a coffee company in a medium that didn’t exist yet in this 1936 flick, released four years before the advent of commercial TV broadcasting. Guess ol’ Gene was ahead of his times.
“Nelson Mandela…and more inspiring stories”
When he was 10, Kadir Nelson’s parents brought him to a Los Angeles stadium to hear Nelson Mandela on his triumphant post-imprisonment world tour. Years later, Nelson became an illustrator of children’s books with positive black themes. Several of them have been transformed into the short children’s films collected here. Leading the menu is the Forest Whitaker-narrated “Nelson Mandela,” which distills the essence of his story from childhood through election as South Africa’s president.
