”An American in Paris”-boxed in a three-disc set, fitted out with extensive supplementary material and spruced up in its ”new Technicolor restoration”-is the last entry in a long line of special home video presentations that have marked so much of the past year in laserdiscs.
The 1951 Oscar winner for best picture, starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, has been cleaned and sharpened in its laserdisc transfer and is extensively chapter-encoded. However, it is not as free of speckles and its colors are not as full-bodied as those in the earlier MGM/UA ”restorations” of ”The Band Wagon” and ”Easter Parade.”
Nevertheless, the disc (MGM/UA ML102803, $49.95) is of exceptional interest (and a good buy) because of its supplementary materials. Available on a separate audio channel are several George and Ira Gershwin songs that were recorded for but finally not used in the movie. Also included is a film outtake of the French singer Georges Guetary performing ”Love Walked In,”
with Oscar Levant at the piano.
The background music, musical numbers and special effects have been isolated on a separate soundtrack, and after the movie is over, there is the original theatrical trailer.
Here are some other noteworthy new discs, released at the end of a year in which the number of laserdisc titles of all types-movies, concert performances, visual arts programs, how-to guides and so on-rose to about 7,000:
”She Done Him Wrong” (MCA/Universal 40597, $34.95) offers the 1933 Mae West comedy in a crisp black-and-white transfer that shows off all the sparkle of her diamonds. This is the film in which West, as a Gay `90s saloon entertainer, mutters to the handsome young mission director (Cary Grant),
”Why don`t y` come up `n see me?”
”Grass” (Lumivision LVD9272, $34.95) is the restored, full-length version of the seminal 1925 black-and-white documentary shot in Persia (now Iran) by filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, who a few years later would make ”King Kong.” The drama of a tribe of 50,000 people migrating to take their herds of a half-million animals to pasture is captured in one panoramic scene after another, augmented by a striking new stereo soundtrack of contemporary Iranian music.
”This Is Garth Brooks” (Pioneer Artists 92-493, $39.95) supplements a taped mega-concert by the country-and-western star with backstage scenes and interviews. Most of Brooks` standards (”The Thunder Rolls,” ”If Tomorrow Never Comes,” ”The Dance”) are performed, but they take second place in sound to the roar of the crowd as Brooks gleefully races up and down the stage, waving to and playing to his adoring fans.
Several new discs at last present important films in the wide-screen format in which they were originally shown in theaters, instead of in the badly cropped, pan-and-scan dimensions in which they are usually shown on television.
”Spartacus” (MCA/Universal 41130, $44.95), in a two-disc set, has the same picture image, along with overture and intermission music, contained in the elaborate Criterion version of the screen epic that was released earlier in the year. This edition, however, has a Technicolor transfer that may be just a tad better, and though it has none of the Criterion supplementary materials, it is less than half as expensive.
”The Right Stuff” (Warner 20027, $39.98), the astronaut saga, is a two- disc beauty in both sound and sight reproduction. Hear those rockets roar;
watch those missiles soar.
Both ”Deliverance” (Warner 12482, $34.98) and ”Dirty Harry” (Warner 12483, $34.98) are also available on tape cassettes, but you have not seen or heard them properly on home video until you watch and listen to these new letterboxed laserdiscs.
But wait, you say, how can there be a year-end laserdisc report without a list of the 10 Best Laserdiscs of 1992?
The 10 Best Laserdiscs of 1992 are: ”Alien” (with supplements), ”The Busby Berkeley Disc,” ”The Commitments” (for the stereo soundtrack alone), ”The Dawn of Sound,” ”How Green Was My Valley,” ”Jason and the Argonauts” (Criterion version), ”Modern Times” (with supplements), ”Pillow Talk” (letterboxed), ”Tabu,” ”The Tales of Hoffman” (Criterion edition)
and ”Tootsie” (Criterion version).
