Product Details

• Actors: Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, Gary Coope, Audrey Hepburn, Clark Gable
• Directors: Elia Kazan, Billy Wilder, John Ford, Irving Rapper
• Format: Color, DVD, Black & White, Subtitled, Full Screen, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 1.0)
• Subtitles: English, French
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Turner Home Ent
• DVD Release Date: February 2, 2010
• Run Time: 488 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B002TSAAME
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,455 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Romance (Splendor in the Grass / Love in the Afternoon / Mogambo / Now Voyager)" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Love in the Afternoon

Fairy-tale Paris doesn't get more enchanting than Billy Wilder's Love in the Afternoon, an ode to picnics on the grass and champagne at the Ritz. Audrey Hepburn (who had already made Sabrina with Wilder) is at her best as the inexperienced cellist with a fascination for millionaire American playboy Gary Cooper. Maurice Chevalier (who else?) is Hepburn's father, a private detective with ample evidence of Cooper's crowded history of l'amour. Alongside the sheen of the romance is Wilder's unerring sense of craftsmanship; watch how inanimate objects such as a liquor tray, a white carnation, or the little dog in the suite next door are developed into sublime running gags. The age difference between the two leads has often been questioned, but perhaps this is what gives the gossamer material the whiff of welcome melancholy. The final three minutes leave no doubt that Wilder hatched the best endings in Hollywood history. --Robert Horton


Mogambo

This remake of the 1932 Red Dust is famous for using the very same romantic leading man--21 years after the fact. But when that leading man is Clark Gable, what's a little gray hair in the temples? Gable was certainly still the great strutting rooster of American movies in 1953, when Mogambo made him a safari guide juggling two much younger women. First up is good-time girl Ava Gardner, who's game for a little harmless romp with Gable after she gets stood up by a playboy in the African jungle. But when Grace Kelly--the proper wife of a visiting anthropologist (Donald Sinden)--arrives on the scene, a new affair begins. The location shooting is much in the vein of King Solomon's Mines, although the story is much more intimate. This feels like a bit of a holiday for Hollywood's top director, John Ford, and not one of his most committed pictures. Still, Ford's unparalleled eye for backlit exteriors and for the way people move around in rooms is on display, even when the script wobbles. People always joke about Gable being too old for this movie, but that doesn't take into account his durable movie-star appeal--he certainly looks every inch the Hemingwayesque hunter, and it's not that big a stretch to imagine Gardner or Kelly in the clinches with him. Indeed, he and Grace Kelly had an offscreen affair during shooting, graying temples or not. --Robert Horton

Product Description

SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS - Two teenagers (Natalie Wood and screen-debuting Warren Beatty) find their intense feelings for each other put them at odds with their families and the rigid respectability of their 1920s Kansas town. Elia Kazan directs a poetic portrait of young love from an Oscar-winning William Inge screenplay. LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON - May-December romance is in bloom when music student Audrey Hepburn and millionaire playboy Gary Cooper cross paths. Laughs, Parisian settings, champagne elegance – director/co-writer Billy Wilder delivers them all in a soufflé-light comedy charmer also starring Maurice Chevalier. MOGAMBO - In the jungles of Kenya, safari guide Clark Gable is attracted to two beautiful women: a tough out-of-work showgirl (Ava Gardner) and the prim wife (Grace Kelly) of his anthropologist boss. John Ford directs this on-location remake of Red Dust that captured Oscar nominations* for both ladies. NOW, VOYAGER - A tender love story, a taut psychological drama, an inspiring tale of physical and spiritual transformation. Experience all three in this Bette Davis career milestone, as she magically plays a spinster who defies her domineering mother to discover love, heartbreak and eventual contentment.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Romance has a 50/50 Chance in this Classic Four-Pack, Classic Hollywood DVD Set, January 7, 2010

By 

Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Romance (Splendor in the Grass / Love in the Afternoon / Mogambo / Now Voyager) (DVD)

Turner Classic Movies' classic movie series continues with this two-disc set showcasing four beloved films with romantic themes. Intriguingly, while two movies have the requisite happy ending, the other two close with former lovers resigned to the wisdom gained from relationships that could not endure. All four have been presented in pristine print condition.

Splendor in the Grass (****1/2): Director Elia Kazan was able to extract a searing performance from Natalie Wood in this classic 1961 melodrama about youthful sexual repression in rural 1920's Kansas. She has never been more affecting then she is here as Deanie Loomis, the local butcher's daughter deeply in love with Bud Stamper, the son of an oil scion and the high school football hero. They are the senior sweethearts everyone expects to marry, but both have to battle constantly with their sexual longing and their grasping parents.

While the whole film is beautifully executed thanks to Kazan's sure hand and William Inge's screenplay (his first directly for the screen), it's the last fifteen minutes that really resonate with the characters expressing their emotions with a minimum of dialogue. At her most youthfully beautiful, Wood is wondrous as she moves fluidly from innocently infatuated to obsessive to resigned. As the none-too-bright Bud, Warren Beatty is charismatic in his film debut and makes Deanie's powerful fixation completely understandable. The classic Wordsworth poem from which the film's title is derived makes a fitting coda for this movie, and I still feel the intractable sense of longing in the two lead characters every time I see this movie. The 2009 DVD offers the original theatrical trailer and a familiar 1961 Roadrunner cartoon short, "Beep Prepared".

Love in the Afternoon (****): There is likely no more romantic ending to a Hollywood movie than the one in this soufflé-light 1957 romantic comedy, where Audrey Hepburn tries to keep up with a departing train upon which Gary Cooper stands and listens intently to her babbling about her fictitious sexual conquests. Hepburn plays Ariane, a young cellist and the daughter of a Parisian private investigator named Claude Chevasse. She has an unbridled interest in her father's often tawdry cases, chief among them the affairs of Frank Flannagan, a millionaire industrialist and aging playboy who finds himself in various trysts with married women around the world. They embark on a clandestine affair under the pretense that she is as much a worldly bon vivant as he is.

Things come to a head when Flannagan becomes infatuated with this mysterious "thin girl" and recruits Crevasse to find out who she is. Film master Billy Wilder leaves his unmistakable stamp on this confection with a clever, ironic script co-written with his long-time partner I.A.L. Diamond in their first collaboration. The dialogue is full of their trademark sparkling banter. Hepburn is her usual impeccable self as Ariane. Cooper played this type of boulevardier role in the 1930's under masters like Ernst Lubitsch, and it is quite enjoyable to see him come back to this milieu two decades later as an aging lothario. Maurice Chevalier is ideally cast as Crevasse even if he has to play down his naturally effervescent manner. Granted the film runs a little too long at 126 minutes, but it is fine, light entertainment. The print transfer on the bare-bones 2005 DVD is fine though not outstanding.

Mogambo (****): Ava Gardner could hardly be considered anyone's second choice, but this is what director John Ford and screenwriter John Lee Mahin would have you believe in this overripe 1952 safari melodrama. Yet, she is the primary reason why this film is still worth a look 56 years later, epitomizing a primal sensuality and a hidden vulnerability, the combination of which was intoxicating in her prime. Ford captures this, as well as her dark beauty and sharp comedy sense, by casting her as smart-mouthed, carefree playgirl Eloise "Honey Bear" Kelly, who has come to a remote African outpost to meet up with a wealthy maharajah.

Finding herself stood up, she is greeted by no-nonsense big game hunter Victor Marswell as she conveniently takes a shower al fresco. Looking the patrician beauty that served her well during her brief movie career, a 24-year-old Grace Kelly plays a prudish English wife in starchy, melodramatic fashion. As Marswell, the 52-year-old Clark Gable still shows his enduring appeal, but he really hands the picture to Gardner. Ford handles the exotic background as well as he does Monument Valley in his classic westerns, and the look of the film is sumptuous even by MGM's high standards. The only extra with the 2006 DVD is the original theatrical trailer.

Now, Voyager (****): Let's face it - this 1942 Warner Bros film classic is a hoot. Directed by journeyman studio veteran Irving Rapper, it's an unabashed, only-in-Hollywood soap opera with Bette Davis at the peak of her popularity as she evolves from a distraught, overweight spinster to a glamorous Boston society social maven in about ten minutes. It's also a big valentine to the positive effects of psychoanalysis, as the plot focuses on heiress Charlotte Vale, a walking disaster of sheltered neurosis. Her sister-in-law contacts a doctor who convinces Charlotte to seek psychiatric treatment at a posh sanitarium. Transformed by the experience, she finds romance with architect Jerry Durrance, who is married to an unstable woman.

Overcome with guilt, Charlotte returns to the sanitarium, where she meets troubled young Tina, who turns out to be Jerry's daughter. In what amounts to a showcase for her versatility, Davis is superb in both before and after modes, even playing a romantic shipboard teenager with sincerity in a flashback sequence. Paul Henried plays Jerry with requisite Continental charm, but he is truly overmatched by Davis in their scenes together. Claude Rains fares better in the pivotal role of Dr. Jaquith providing his medical advice with convincing paternal authority and genuine warmth. Gladys Cooper portrays Charlotte's iron-willed mother in a sharply uncompromising manner befitting the intimidating stature she holds in the family. The print condition on the 2005 DVD is excellent, though there are no other extras included.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars four classic romantic movies for one super price!, November 13, 2009

By 

Byron Kolln (the corner where Broadway meets Hollywood) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Romance (Splendor in the Grass / Love in the Afternoon / Mogambo / Now Voyager) (DVD)

TCM/Warner's ongoing series of "Greatest Films" collections gets a little romantic with four fondly-remembered titles on 2 double-sided DVDs, starring the likes of Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn and Natalie Wood.

LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON: Despite being directed by the great Billy Wilder, this is sadly one of Audrey Hepburn's lesser vehicles. She plays Ariane, the daughter of a private detective (Maurice Chevalier), who is fascinated by the antics of an aging playboy (Gary Cooper). Once you get past the uncomfortable pairing of Hepburn and Cooper it's actually quite enjoyable.

SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS: William Inge's sensitive portrait of young love, destroyed by 1930s small-town morés. Warren Beatty makes his screen debut, with Natalie Wood as Deanie, the role that kicked her career into high-gear as an adult star. Special features: trailer, Oscar-nominated cartoon short "Beep Prepared".

MOGAMBO: Clark Gable stars in a Technicolor remake of his 1930s potboiler "Red Dust", with splendid support from Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner as the two women competing for his affection. Special features: trailer.

NOW, VOYAGER: Bette Davis is hapless spinster Charlotte Vale, repressed into a nervous breakdown by her icy mother (Gladys Cooper) until she's transformed by love and psychiatry. Special features: music scoring sessions.

If you haven't yet purchased these movies individually, the savings made by buying all four in this box-set will be quite substantial.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Get this for your collection!, October 24, 2010

By 

Talb "Talb" (USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Romance (Splendor in the Grass / Love in the Afternoon / Mogambo / Now Voyager) (DVD)

Great set of DVDs for classics collectors. I bought it just for "Love in the Afternoon". It is so hard to find these movies in stores...nearly impossible.