Catherine Deneuve: 5-Film Collection
Sophia Loren: 4-Film Collection

Catherine Deneuve: 5-Film Collection

Lions Gate, $39.98

Sophia Loren: 4-Film Collection

Lions Gate, $39.98

After taking a bullet or three with April's Alain Delon: 5-Film Collection, Lions Gate reloads for another round of Studio Canal roulette. The French brand counts more Franco-Italian productions in its vast holdings than MGM prodded lions, so the rarely seen foreign titles padding out these domestic collections often prove their own reward. Delon's samurai squint returns for Catherine Deneuve's Clairol locks in 1982 hit-man siege Le Choc, topped here for action only by set highlight Le Sauvage (1975), which strands the beach blonde on a Venezuelan island with rumored paramour and co-star Yves Montand. Director Jean-Paul Rappeneau, who realized his leading lady's comedic insouciance to farcical effect in La Vie de Château a decade earlier, further reveals Deneuve's gifts in Sauvage (one estimate being 34B). André Téchiné's soggy Hôtel des Amériques (1981) – Deneuve's depressive anesthesiologist mirroring the real-life doom of actor (and soon-to-be-suicide) Patrick Dewaere – pales vastly next to Téchiné's succeeding collaborations with the iconic actress in 1993's Ma Saison Préférée and 1996's Les Voleurs. Manon 70 (1968) tousles yet another variation of Luis Buñuel's Deneuve as that not-so-obscure object of desire, while Fort Saganne – the sole film in the black-vinyl Deneuve pack once widely available in the U.S. – relegates madame to a 20-minute miscasting in the service of a three-hour Depardieu of Arabia camel walk. Sophia Loren suffers a similar fate not once, but twice, and with one less entry in her DVD set's red plastic purse casing. Anthony Quinn's fun-loving Hun in Attila (1954) rejects the advances of Loren's Empress Honoria, whose Technicolor teeth-baring flashes past almost as quickly as her late-inning jackpot in Carosello Napoletano (1954), an aged musical tribute to the city of her hardscrabble youth. The Italian bombshell's Le Sauvage comes via Frenchie Madame Sans-Gêne (1962), a silly bodice-ripper about Napoleon's laundress, but nothing in the Catherine Deneuve: 5-Film Collection can touch Vittorio De Sica's I Girasoli from 1970. Hardly the director's Oscar-winning Loren vehicle Two Women from 10 years previous, the pair's determined handling of Marcello Mastroianni's disappearance into the Russian front during World War II almost justifies Loren's bereaved make-up. The leads' long onscreen chemistry, breathtaking by lightning storm, can't obscure Loren's affecting performance throughout. Huppert, Cardinale, Binoche: Collect 'em all.

Out Now ...

Classe Tous Risques (Criterion, $29.95): Nail-biting noir rivets Claude Sautet's 1960 directorial debut to another trademark Lino Ventura (Army of Shadows) performance as a gangster on the run with his children. A pre-Breathless Jean-Paul Belmondo mans up as his last friend.

Black Widow (20th Century Fox, $14.98): Written, produced, and gamely directed by screenwriting great Nunnally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath), Fox noir No. 22 Bs it to the bank with Van Helfin, Ginger Rogers, and Gene Tierney embroiled in a whodunit frame up. No relation to 1987's Debra Winger/Theresa Russell webbing of the same title.