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Robert Altman Made a Movie About a Lunar Landing?The thrill of exploring Warner's archive of previously unreleased films.

By Mark HarrisPosted Tuesday, April 21, 2009, at 6:45 AM ET

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Separating the treasures from the trash in the first batch of Warner titles, which range chronologically from 1923's silent Scaramouche to the 1987 Alan J. Pakula film Orphans, requires some patience. (You'll want to keep IMDB.com open while you browse.) First, the big news: The studio has, in this first round, included 15 Clark Gable movies and 13 Joan Crawford movies. For anyone who wants to understand what made Gable such a big star that nobody blinked when he was cast in Gone With the Wind, these titles alone would make the archives an essential supplement to film scholarship. As for Crawford, the new releases confirm that her reputation as a mannered camp gorgon, while fully earned, is also unfairly incomplete: You can now go all the way back to the 1927 silent Spring Fever and proceed forward to discover that Crawford was, in the first 20 years of her career, a riveting star and, at times, even an OK actress. The films offered here allow you to watch her strut through comedies, romances, and random insanities like Ice Follies of 1939 at the top of her self-assurance, with a determination that had not yet curdled into grotesquerie.

Keep digging and you'll find a combination of the sublime (three films directed by the recently rediscovered '30s melodrama master Frank Borzage); the ridiculous (it's hard to believe that anybody was pining for Luciano Pavarotti in 1982's kitschy Yes, Giorgio!, but someone somewhere is probably shrieking with delight); and, in many cases, the gratifyingly weird, including a large portion of the hitherto-unrecalled directorial oeuvre of William Conrad, better known as the portlier half of Jake and the Fatman. I watched a dozen Archive movies I hadn't seen before, and even those that weren't very good (OK, weren't any good) scratched an itch or satisfied a curiosity. 1968's Countdown may be a dull moon-landing thriller in which the sets look like they're made out of spray-painted Styrofoam and pressboard, but it's also a chance to see Robert Altman's only completely by-the-book studio film. Made two years before M.A.S.H. (so this is what he was rebelling against!), the film also boasts James Caan and Robert Duvall, together four years before their dual breakthrough in The Godfather. The Defector (1966) is a run-of-the-mill Cold War spy drama set in East Germany, but, more significantly, it's a showcase for the final performance of Montgomery Clift, whose skeletal physique and haunted countenance give the movie a painful valedictory gravity. And An Enemy of the People (filmed in 1976 but not released until 1981) is your only shot to see Steve McQueen interpret Ibsen. Having watched the movie, I now know why. Still, I wouldn't have missed a minute.

Almost every film I viewed colored in my understanding of an actor, director, or era. Payment on Demand (1951), whose working title was The Story of a Divorce, is a standard punitive weepie about a wife whose relentless ambitions for her husband eventually destroy her marriage. Standard except for the fact that the wife is played by Bette Davis, who, late in the movie, tears into the self-lacerating second-rate dialogue as if it were first-rate, because that was her job. And in doing so, she makes it first-rate, and opens a window on a moment when movie stars knew they were being paid to sell pictures in every scene, not just at a press junket months later.

By shopping with a combination of adventurousness and research, you will, more than once, chance upon not just goodness but greatness. Which brings me back to the extraordinary Margaret Sullavan, who could apparently shift almost seamlessly from breezy romantic comedy to light tragedy within the same movie. The Archive Collection has spotlighted her in three films, including Frank Borzage's excellent, insanely plot-packed drama The Shining Hour, which also features Crawford, Hattie McDaniel, Robert Young, dialogue by Ogden Nash, a bitter spinster, a dance number, and a huge fire—all in 78 minutes. But her greatest work comes in Borzage's Three Comrades (script by F. Scott Fitzgerald, with dialogue that actually sounds Fitzgerald-ian). It's about three German soldiers, their lives after World War I, and the woman one of them loves. Sullavan received a best actress nomination for this film, probably for (spoiler) one of the most irresistibly over-the-top death scenes in the 1930s canon. But it's her gentle, bemused underplaying up to that point that will stay with you, as well as the movie itself, which unfolds with a mature, thoughtful attention to its characters that marks it as one of the period's best, gentlest melodramas, richly deserving of a fresh look.

There is a particular kind of movie buff who likes to go deep, who prints out Turner Classic Movies' schedule (where you can see some of these movies) two months in advance, who will DVR a film based on the tiniest sliver of hope. (I admit to once hitting "Record program" based on an on-screen description for a movie that read, in its entirety, "1940. ***. A jealous woman destroys her family's …" Her family's what? Fortune? Hopes? Rec room? I didn't care—I was on board.) For them (for us), the Archive Collection is dangerous turf. Glass-half-empty types will complain that these movies, most of which represent gambles on the unknown, can't be rented, only purchased. But $19.95 is about what it'd cost you and a friend to take a chance on a film in a revival house, and revival houses, as you've probably noticed, are even harder to find than these movies have been. Besides, small luxuries in the absence of big ones make enduring a recession a lot easier. At least, that's my rationalization for the fact that I will be revisiting the Archive Web site until the good folks at Visa break down my door and stop me.