Joel and Ethan Coen have tried to make something profound in the guise of a black comedy with A Serious Man, one of ten films nominated for this year’s Best Picture Oscar.

The film is a re-telling of The Book of Job from the First Testament, in which God sets terrible plagues upon a good man to test him. When he fails the test, God smites him and his eldest son. In the Coen Brothers’ version, the good man is a Professor of Mathematics at a small college in the American mid-west of the 1960s. Sets are filled with the ugly furniture and tacky clothes of the day which serve to undermine the bleakness of the tale. It is so bleak, in fact, that it isn’t really a comedy at all. The title is a misnomer. It should have called A Miserable Life.

On one hand, it’s intriguing to see how the Coens translate the old biblical tale to modern existence, even throwing in Schrodinger’s cat”, a thought experiment, a paradox of the 1930s, relating to theories in quantum physics. Cerebrally, it’s masterpiece.

On the other hand, this is not entertainment for the masses as we have come to expect from the writing, directing team of Fargo and No Country for Old Men. Though the text may be religious, it is not uplifting.  There are no singing rabbis, or for that matter, singing nuns, here. God may be good, but he’s not nice in this movie.

The largely unknown Michael Stuhlbarg is excellent in the lead, but the film’s lackluster box-office receipts would seem to suggest that he’ll be going back to supporting roles on TV shows rather quickly.

A Serious Man is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Max Mayer is a TV feature writer-director whose first film, the excellent Adam deserves a higher profile than it’s gotten.

Hugh Dancy stars as a young man with Asperger’s Syndrome whose ordered life is shattered when his father dies and he loses his job as a developer of computer generated toys. Rose Byrne plays his new neighbor, a schoolteacher with writing aspirations, who helps him cope. There is a subplot involving Peter Gallagher as her jackass of a father and Amy Irving as her mother, which we could have done without, but the scenes between Byrne and Dancy and, in fact, all of Dancy’s scenes, contain a poignancy that is rare in romantic comedies these days and are a joy to behold.

Byrne has deservedly become a star in TV’s Damages. Dancy, whose career hasn’t exactly been chopped liver, has been on the verge of major stardom for the last decade, but never quite seems to get there. He was marvelous as the grown David Copperfield in Peter Madek’s 2000 telefilm, the only version in which the actor playing the grown David is more memorable than the kid playing him as a child. He was nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of the young Earl of Essex in Elizabeth I opposite Helen Mirren. On the big screen, he was Anne Hathaway’s Prince Charming in Ella Enchanted and the geeky lover of an older Maria Bello in The Jane Austen Book Club. He was nominated for a Satellite award for his performance in Adam, but poor marketing, or karma, or whatever, has kept him from capitalizing on the opportunity.

Adam is available on standard DVD only.

Columbia has followed up its recent success with its Film Noir Classics: Vol. 1 with The Bad Girls of Film Noir. No classics, these, but an interesting collection of B pictures, some of which are better than others.

Based on a true story about an outbreak of small pox in New York City, 1950’s The Killer That Stalked New York changes the source of the epidemic, but not the basic story which saw the emergency vaccination of six million New Yorkers in 28 days. I actually remember having to be vaccinated during the epidemic as a child.

Only the second of three films helmed by second unit director Earl McEvoy, the film has a real feel for life on the mean streets. Evelyn Keyes, in a rare starring role, excels as a gem smuggling singer who picked up the disease along with $50,000 worth of diamonds in Cuba. Charles Korvin is her no good husband, Lola Albright her two-timing sister, Whit Bissell her frightened brother, William Bishop the doctor whose patient is the first to die, Dorothy Malone his loyal nurse, Jim Backus a sleazy nightclub owner, Barry Kelley and Richard Egan the treasury agents on Keyes’ trail, Carl Benton Reid the health commissioner, Roy Roberts the mayor, Ludwig Donath a concerned doctor, Art Smith a rare gem appraiser and Connie Gilchrist, Keyes and Korvin’s landlady.  It was quite a cast for such a deceptively minor film, and they’re all good.

Henry Levin was a well known Hollywood director and Lizabeth Scott, Edmond O’Brien and Alexander Knox established veterans of film noir when they made 1951’s Two of a Kind. Too bad they didn’t have a better script.

This one is the old chestnut about an imposter claiming to be the long lost son of an elderly couple in order to cash in on an inheritance when the old folks finally croak.

Terry Moore, in one of her last squeaky clean good girl roles before Come Back, Little Sheba appears in an interview about her career and the making of the film. She talks about learning how to wear her hair from Scott’s example. The amusing thing is that no one has seen the now 81 year-old actress’s hair in decades. She continues to wear an obvious, unbecoming long blond wig in her public appearances. The presumption is that she is bald.

Irvin Rapper was a long way from the sublime 1942 classic, Now, Voyager when he directed 1953’s Bad for Each Other about a once idealistic doctor who abandons the poor for the good life until a disaster strikes, bringing him to his senses.

There are some good performances here, notably by Charlon Heston between spectacles, Lizabeth Scott, nominally bad as the girl who gets him to stray, Dianne Foster as an idealistic nurse and Mildred Dunnock as Heston’s mother, but there is nothing in the telling of the story you won’t see coming.

Maxwell Shane was a prolific Hollywood writer who rarely got to direct, but all five of the films he did direct, were exceptionally well made, not the least of which is 1953’s The Glass Wall.

Vittorio Gassman makes his American film debut as a World War II displaced person, a stowaway who is stopped from leaving his ship when it docks in New York. His escape leads to a manhunt ending in a chase through the newly erected United Nations building. Gloria Grahame is the girl who helps him and Jerry Paris is the former G.I. whose identification can help him stay in the country if only he can be found. Atypical of film noir, this one has a richly earned happy ending.

The trailer for the film is a hoot. It begins with a picture of Shelley Winters and a voiceover saying Shelley Winters loves him, and you will, too.”  Winters is not in the film, but she had famously married the Laurence Olivier of Italy” the year before.

Based on a long running radio program that later became a TV series, 1946’s Night Editor, directed by Henry Levin, tells the tale in flashback of a good cop brought low by a bad woman.

William Gargan was an actor who was often better than his material and he’s that once again here, but Janis Carter is so one-note as the conniving femme fatale that it strains credulity that it takes him as long as it does to come to his senses and turn her in for murder.

There’s a nice O. Henry style twist at the end that makes it worth your while.

Cleo Moore’s own life story will someday no doubt make a better film than most of the duds she appeared in.

Married to notorious Louisiana Governor Huey Long’s son at the age of fifteen, the marriage lasted just six weeks, after which she made her way to Hollywood and struggled to make a name for herself.Eventually she was given a few starring roles, enough to help finance her own unsuccessful run for Governor of Louisiana in 1965. She died of a heart attack a week before her 45th birthday in 1973.

Moore was at the height of her beauty and her fame in1953’s One Girl’s Confession, the second of seven films she made for actor/director Hugo Haas. In it she plays the ward of a crook who learns to fend for herself, beating the bad guys at their own game. This is the one in which she had the immortal line:

"Men are all alike, their faces are just different so you can tell them apart."

Glenn Langan and Hass co-star.

Lewis Seiler had a long and somewhat distinguished career, but by the time of 1955’s Women’s Prison he was no longer directing major films. Sadly, none of the many fine actresses in this film were at the peak of their careers either.

Ida Lupino chews the scenery as a nut job prison superintendant and Juanita Moore, several years away from her Oscar nomination for Imitation of Life, makes her entrance on her knees scrubbing the prison floor while singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”.

In-between we get Jan Sterling, fresh from her Oscar nomination for The High and the Mighty in a rare, for her, highly sympathetic role as a good-time gal with a heart of gold, Cleo Moore, Audrey Totter and Phyllis Thaxter as various other inmates and veterans Gertrude Michael and Mae Clarke as prison matrons. Howard Duff and Warren Stevens have the principal male roles, the former as the prison doctor, the later as a male prisoner who breaks into the women’s side of the shared prison to visit his wife.

It’s all rather fun in a loopy sort of way.

Cleo Moore returns as nightclub photographer with a sideline in blackmail in Seiler’s Over-Exposed from 1956.

A now seasoned Moore and a young Richard Crenna make an incongruous couple, but veterans Isobel Elsom and Raymond Greenleaf manage to give it some class. Constance Towers, in only her second film, is also on hand.

Two half-hour TV dramas from the 1950s, The Payoff and Remember to Live are included as extras in the two set, four disc collection.