A couple of curiosities enter the marketplace this week: Jack Garfein’s 1957 “The Strange One,” an anti-fascist allegory with homoerotic overtones that somehow slipped past the Production Code, and a recently discovered alternate version of Hal Ashby’s 1982 comedy “Lookin’ to Get Out,” featuring Jon Voight, Burt Young, Ann-Maragaret and about fifteen minutes of unseen footage. Reviews in the New York Times.

Two black-and-white classics of the early 60s, now looking much better than they ever have on home video, thanks to new Blu-ray editions from the Criterion Collection (”Last Year at Marienbad”) and Sony Home Entertainment (”Dr. Strangelove”). An appreciation here in the New York Times.

A new box set from Sony documents Jack Lemmon’s reign as America’s ultimate male hysteric, trapped between the corporate conformism of the 1950s and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Mark Robson’s 1954 “Phffft!” will not help the case for Robson’s post-Val Lewton auteur status, but Richard Quine’s distinctive style emerges in “Operation Mad Ball” (1957) and “The Notorious Landlady” (1962), both co-written by Blake Edwards. And then there is the curious case of David Swift, the former Disney animator who went from “Pollyanna” (1960) to the hypnotically smutty “Under the Yum Yum Tree” (1963) and the vastly superior “Good Neighbor Sam” (1964), a frenetic sex farce set largely in a fantasy suburb that seems presciently Spielbergian. Swift is a sort of road company Frank Tashlin, with an animator’s eye for visual abstraction and an anarchist’s resentment of the business world, though he lacks Tashlin’s elegance and control. Further profundities in the New York Times.

A number of websites, including Movie City News and Sean P. Means’s “Movie Cricket” blog in the Salt Lake Tribune (where Andrew is named “Number 57″ among “The Departed”), have been reporting that Andrew Sarris has been fired from the New York Observer.  Not true, says Molly Haskell.  Andrew, along with a dozen other writers at the rapidly sinking weekly, was taken off staff on Monday, but he will continue to write on a freelance basis, exactly as Rex Reed does currently.  Not great news, but — particularly in the current context — not a catastrophe.  Andrew’s day job, teaching at Columbia University, is not in danger.

“Zabriskie Point is everywhere!” wails Roy Orbison at the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s  parched and pessimistic 1970 examination of America’s alienated youth, which earned scornful reviews and bombed at the box-office only a few weeks before Michael Wadleigh’s verdant music documentary “Woodstock” proved that there was still plenty of money to be found in the youth market.  Both films are out in handsome new editions from Warner Home Video this week, occasioning a compare and contrast from your obedient servant in The New York Times.

Thanks to Zeitgeist Films and The Film Desk, two more films by Philippe Garrel have recieved subtitled releases:  his 1989  “Emergency Kisses” (”Les Baisers de secours”) and his 1991 “I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar” (”J’entends plus la guitar”).  Both are highly, almost intimidatingly personal “diary” films that deal, in fictionalized form, with Garrel’s relationship with the German singer Nico (who apparently introduced him to heroin) and its aftermath — in which the filmmaker appears to have been rescued by a strong-willed, motherly actress, Brigitte Sy, who got him off drugs and gave him a son, Louis (who grew up to star in Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers,” as well as in Garrel’s own account of the 67-68 student revolt, “Les Amants reguliers”).

I haven’t seen nearly enough of Garrel’s work to form a coherent opinion about it, but I hae offered a few observations in this Sunday’s New York Times.  Compared to his swaggeringly assertive contemporaries Maurice Pialat and Jean Eustache, Garrel can seem passive to a fault (he loves to depict himself being dominated by the women in his life, as well as by his real life father, Maurice Garrel, who makes a powerful appearance in “Emergency Kisses”).  But there is also a sweetness and helplessness in his work that is quite touching.  Perhaps Garrel is the true precursor of Mumblecore.

Nikkatsu, the venerable Japanese studio, seems to be on a licensing binge lately.  The latest titles to appear are “Pigs and Battleships,” “The Instect Woman” and “Intentions of Murder,” featured in Criterion’s Shohei Imamura box set, and two campy action pictures,  Seijun Suzuku’s campy “Detective Bureau 2-3″ and Motumu Ida’s “3 Seconds before Explosion,” both from Kino.  Reviews here.

IndieWire has the list of the Cannes award winners, lead by Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon.”  I thought we were through with that guy after his English language remake of “Funny Games” gave the game away, but apparently Haneke’s brand of finger-wagging sensationalism still wows ‘em on the festival circuit.

In the meantime, Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist” has won an “anti-prize” from the high-minded Ecumenical Jury,  suggesting that the great provocateur has once again completely succeeded in his intentions.  Alas, IFC has announced that they’ll be issuing a censored cut — what von Trier’s reliably sardonic producer, Peter Aalbaeck Jensen, has referred to as “the Catholic version” — when the film gets to the states this fall.

UPDATE:  I’ve heard from IFC’s Ryan Werner, who says that, in regards to “Antichrist,” “In theaters, we will release the Cannes version and the TV version is under discussion not only in American but around the world.  Anything done will involve LVT’s supervision.”

Fritz Lang was one filmmaker who couldn’t help investing himself in every shot he took — a truism underlined again by Fox Home Video’s very nice new edition of Lang’s 1941 “Man Hunt.” The film is at once a piece of highly topical propaganda, urging America’s entry into World War II just months before Pearl Harbor made any more editorializing moot, and a timeless Langian study in space and shadow. My New York Times review is here.

This week in the New York Times, I write about the new set from Criterion’s budget line, Eclipse, “Alexander Korda’s Private Lives,” which contains four historical films from the Hungarian-British producer.  The most interesting are the two that Korda directed himself:  “The Private Life of Henry VIII,” (1933), a Lubitschian comedy of sexual mores and table manners with an iconic performance by Charles Laughton, and the lovely, underrated “The Private Life of Don Juan” (1934), starring Douglas Fairbanks (in what would prove to be his final film) in a wise and witty reflection on the agelessness of the image and the frailty of the flesh.

For the new number of FIPRESCI’s Undercurrent, Chris Fujiwara has assembled 18 texts from some of our finest film thinkers, including Jean-Pierre Coursodon, Blake Lucas, Adrian Martin, Dan Sallitt, James Verniere, Richard T. Jameson, Sam Adams, Miguel Marias and David Sterritt, on a wide range of titles by John Ford.  I’m just getting started on it, but there is some very fine writing here, including Shigehiko Hasumi on Pappy’s little seen “Kentucky Pride” of 1925.

Three handsome Technicolor restorations from MGM DVD slipped in under cover of darkness this week: the ungainly but gorgeously designed “The Goldwyn Follies” (1938), Howard Hawks’s lackadaisical but gorgeously shot 1948 “A Song Is Born” (fodder for those jazz buffs who have commandeered the Oshima thread, but not too much, I hope), and William A. Seiter’s basically indefensible but I-like-it-anyway “It’s a Pleasure,” a low-budget effort for the short-lived outfit International Pictures, starring the Norwegian ice-skating champion Sonja Henie. Further musings can be found in the New York Times.

I’ve been on a Seiter kick since his 1932 “Hot Saturday” surfaced in the recent Universal pre-code collection. In many way, he seems like a better-adjusted, non-alcoholic version of Leo McCarey, who may not have scaled the heights that McCarey achieved but never suffered the long periods of inactivity that McCarey did either. Like McCarey, Seiter learned is craft working on dozens of silent one and two-reel comedies, an experience that seems to have given him a deep ability to appreciate what makes a particular performer distinctive and a concomitant talent for setting those qualities off within an elegantly “invisible” mise-en-scene.

Seiter is responsible for some of the best films by established comics like Laurel and Hardy (”Sons of the Desert”), Wheeler and Woolsey (”Peach-O-Reno”), Abbott and Costello (”Little Giant”) and the Marx Brothers (”Room Service”), and he had a particular gift for drawing out the acting talents of singing stars like Ginger Rogers (five films, including “Rafter Romance” and “Professional Sweetheart”), Shirley Temple (four, including “Stowaway”) and Deanna Durbin (four, including the memorable “Nice Girl?”).

There are some superb screwball comedies from the 1930s, including “We’re Rich Again,” “The Richest Girl in the World,” and “Sing and Like It” (all 1934), as well as the gentler romantic comedies “If You Could Only Cook” (1935) and “The Moon’s Our Home” (1936). And I revisit his Fred Astaire-Rita Hayworth South American reverie “You Were Never Lovelier” with undiminished pleasure; it’s possible that Hayworth was, indeed, never lovelier, and Seiter generates a sexual magnetism between his two leads that never quite emerges in the Astaire-Rogers films (including Seiter’s own “Roberta”). His last film was a deeply felt noir, “Make Haste to Live” (1954) with an uncommonly strong female protagonist (Dorothy McGuire), made for pennies at Republic.

For those who don’t know Seiter, I wouldn’t recommend the minor “It’s a Pleasure” as the place to start (but again — who knew Sonja Henie could pull off a dramatic scene?). But there is a lot to discover in the work of this gifted, self-effacing filmmaker, whose only honor during his lifetime was, according the IMDB, a 1956 DGA Award nomination for directing an episode of “Schlitz Playhouse.”