The unfairly dismissive term "cozies" describes relatively bloodless mystery novels in which an amateur detective solves a murder in a comfortable setting, after which all returns to normal. Agatha Christie's Miss Marple novels were perfect examples, and directly inspired the creation of Jessica Fletcher, who lives in the tiny Maine village of Cabot Cove and stumbles upon one murder after another. Even the title of the TV show, Murder, She Wrote, was a play on Murder, She Said (1961), the first of several Miss Marple movies starring Margaret Rutherford. And Angela Lansbury, who embodied Jessica (it seems wrong to just say Fletcher), had played Miss Marple in the 1980 film The Mirror Crack'd.
The cozy pattern is evident in this week's three-DVD set, Murder She Wrote: The Complete First Season. As in the earlier TV series Burke's Law and Ellery Queen, guest stars with a high TV-Q or a fading film career speak to each other in fluent exposition. (Good heavens, Jeannie, I haven't seen you since you were a high-school cheerleader and I resented you so much that I started the successful software company that now employs your son, who's engaged to my daughter.) Somebody gets murdered. Jessica, who is inevitably in the vicinity, interrogates the guest stars with or without the co-operation of local authorities. At the end of an hour littered with red herrings, the scriptwriters devise a solution so tenuous that it's almost an afterthought. (Ah, but you were carrying a red purse at the party, not the green one in the photo.) The guilty party confesses in tears or outrage.
It's formulaic and, if you're in the mood, great fun. Look, there's Gabe Kaplan of Welcome Back, Kotter, and Martha Raye, and Greg Morris of Mission Impossible, and June Allyson, and Anne Francis, who did her own investigating on Honey West. But don't read the DVD's capsule summaries, and close your ears during the minute-long previews before each show. They give away who dies, and guessing the victim is part of the guilty pleasure.
The mysteries in Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries: Season One (from 1977) aren't very mysterious, but there's a comfort-food quality to seeing the Hardy Boys (Parker Stevenson as Frank, Shaun Cassidy as Joe) and Nancy Drew (Pamela Sue Martin) continually wandering into dark forests and opening doors they shouldn't. The boys and the girl get seven episodes each, with guest actors such as Jamie Lee Curtis and Richard Kiel. William Schallert, who plays Nancy's father, years earlier played the father on The Patty Duke Show.
Those who want to know whodunit from the start will find the great Peter Falk working backward to trap one guest star after another in Columbo: The Complete Second Season. Those who prefer their detectives grittier may gravitate to New York Lieutenant Theo Kojak, he of the steady gaze, Tootsie Pops and penchant for saying, "Who loves ya, baby?" Women are chicks, diamonds are rocks, and the 22 episodes from 1973-74 are on Kojak: Season One.
Those who like mysteries to feed their paranoia may turn to The Lone Gunmen: The Complete Series, the X-Files spinoff in which three true believers investigate government conspiracies with the help of other computer geeks and a gorgeous mercenary whose name is an anagram of Lee Harvey Oswald. The show's early-2001 pilot episode proved chilling in retrospect: In it, a U.S. government faction schemed to increase arms sales by flying a passenger jet into the World Trade Center and blaming foreigners. The writers, still shaken, address the parallel in an audio commentary.
Sometimes crime pays in caper flicks ( The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968) and sometimes it doesn't ( The Italian Job, 1969). This week's entry is After the Sunset, with Pierce Brosnan and Salma Hayek running merry circles around the FBI's Woody Harrelson. Also out: Mike Leigh's Vera Drake, with Imelda Staunton's extraordinary performance as a quiet woman in 1950s Britain whose sideline is helping women to abort unwanted pregnancies; and Mike Nichols's Closer, the dance of romantic entanglement among Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Clive Owen and Natalie Portman. A number of readers said The Dam Busters (1954) was their top pick for release on DVD. They will be happy to find it in a new Anchor Bay box set of British war dramas along with The Cruel Sea, The Ship That Died of Shame, The Colditz Story and Went the Day Well?
CLASSIC FOR KIDS
When Apollo 13 blasted off for the moon in 1970, the public yawned -- until an oxygen tank exploded and Mission Control scrambled to avert disaster. Even young viewers who know that the three astronauts survived in real life will be gripped by Ron Howard's 1995 film Apollo 13. Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon play the men in space, and Gary Sinise plays the guy who would have been up there but for exposure to the measles. One disc of this week's DVD is identical to the 1998 "collector's edition," with extreme letterboxing of the picture reflecting the way it was first shown in theatres (ratio of width to height, 2.35:1). The other disc, with two new documentaries about space exploration, contains the fuller-frame version shown in Imax theatres. It cuts a bit off the sides of the image and adds a good deal to the top and bottom.
EXTRA! EXTRA !
KAGEMUSHA: THE
SHADOW WARRIOR
The great director Akira Kurosawa ( Rashomon, The Seven Samurai) was in a bad way by the late 1970s. His perfectionism had saddled him with a reputation as a spendthrift and a tyrant. No one would finance his movies. He had attempted suicide in 1971 after a bitter end to his contract to film the Japanese scenes in Tora! Tora! Tora! Thanks to the intercession of directors George Lucas and Francis Coppola, Twentieth Century Fox supplemented the budget of Japan's Toho Studios and financed Kurosawa's 1980 return to form, Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior .
In the clan wars of the 16th century, a peasant who doubles for the warlord Shingen Takeda continues in that role for three years after the warlord's death. It all ends in tears, with a final battle scene that, like the rest of the film, is a work of art -- as Kurosawa imagined it in the 200 pictures he had painted over four years while waiting for the financing.
The Criterion DVD includes a 43-minute assembly of those paintings, complete with dialogue; a discussion with Coppola and Lucas; an astute commentary by Kurosawa expert Stephen Prince; and, in the sorts of commercials parodied in Lost in Translation, a string of ads that Kurosawa appeared in at the time of Kagemusha for Suntory whisky, a company whose patronage kept him afloat in the seventies.