Director David O. Russell has a reputation for yelling a lot in real life, which may explain why his films contain so much yelling and screaming. Sometimes it flows naturally from the situation as in Flirting With Disaster and The Fighter. Sometimes it just seems like yelling and screaming for the sake of yelling and screaming. That’s one of the problems I have with Silver Linings Playbook, the first film to receive Oscar nominations in all four acting categories since Warren Beatty’s Reds thirty-one years ago. Come to think of it, that one had a lot of yelling in it, too, as did Sidney Lumet’s Network which achieved the same feat five years earlier.

The other problem I have with Silver Linings Playbook is its full of holes plot. Films about damaged souls finding one another are as old as the hills, but good ones like The Enchanted Cottage and David and Lisa are rare, which is why I was hoping this one would at least measure up to Russell’s best work, but it just doesn’t.

There is nothing wrong with the four Oscar nominated performances. Bradley Cooper gives his all as the man released too soon from a mental hospital and Robert De Niro does his best work in years as his exasperated father. Jacki Weaver does just fine in the less showy role of the mother and Jennifer Lawrence continues on her streak as one of the best young actresses around. But, oh, that plot!

The film doesn’t seem to be able to make up its mind whether it means to be a serious exploration of mental illness, which it’s not, or a romantic comedy, which it basically is. Lots of screen time is spent discussing and betting on sports, the Philadelphia Eagles football team to be exact. Lawrence’s character despises football, but is able to spout statistics with the best of them. Chris Tucker, a fellow mental patient of Cooper’s, keeps escaping from the Baltimore, Maryland facility, somehow making his way to Cooper’s home in the small town of Ridley Park, Pennsylvania. It doesn’t compute, but I know, it’s only a movie. It doesn’t have to make sense any more than anything else in the film. Nice use of music, however, and it has a sweet if predictable ending. Lawrence did give the best performance of the year by an actress in her early twenties. Whether she deserved an Oscar for it, though, is a matter of opinion.

Silver Linings Playbook is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Barbra Streisand had already been an international recording, concert and TV star when she made her screen debut in the film version of her 1964 Broadway smash Funny Girl.in 1968. Directed by no less than twelve time Academy Award nominee and three time winner, William Wyler, with musical numbers directed by Herbert Ross, Streisand was, as expected, sensational, winning a Best Actress Oscar out of the gate.

Funny Girl is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

The film, which has been restored to its full glory and given a World Premiere at the recent TCM Festival in Hollywood, has been released on Blu-ray and standard DVD to glorious effect.

Warner Bros. continues to enjoy profits from its releases of risque films made in the early days of the talkies. Subject matter permitted on screen from 1929 to early 1934 would be banned beginning later that year and these films, if shown at all in subsequent years, would be edited almost beyond recognition. Warner Bros. began resurrecting these films, some good, some mere curiosities, in the VHS era under its Forbidden Hollywood banner. DVD sets of these films have been released periodically since 2006.

The initial volume in 2006 featured Baby Face with Barbara Stanwyck as a female executive sleeping her way to the top of the corporate ladder; Red-Headed Woman with Jean Harlow as a woman who uses her feminine wiles to get what she wants and the long unseen 1931 version of Waterloo Bridge in which Mae Clarke’s eventual profession is not glossed over as it was in the more famous 1940 version.

The 2008 volume gave us a promiscuous Norma Shearer in her Oscar winning role in The Divorcee; Shearer again with Lionel Barrymore in his Oscar winning role as her father and Clark Gable in his star-making turn as her gangster lover in A Free Soul; Bette Davis and Ann Dvorak in the searing Three on a Match and Stanwyck, Gable plus Joan Blondell in the set’s best film, Night Nurse.

The third volume in 2009 gave us six by the prolific William A. Wellman. Included were Mary Astor in the descriptive Other Men’s Women; Stanwyck again as a mail-order bride in The Purchase Price; Ruth Chatterton as brothel madam Frisco Jenny; Loretta Young as the tantalizing Midnight Mary; Richard Barthlemess as down-and-out World War I vet in Heroes for Sale and Frankie Darro heading the cast of wandering youths in Wild Boys of the Road.

Volume four was the first to be released by the Warner Archive. This 2012 set featured William Powell and Kay Francis in the naughty but nice Jewel Robbery; Powell again in Lawyer Man, this time with Blondell; Francis again with David Manners in the exactly what it sounds like Man Wanted and Young and Manners playing footsy in They Call It Sin .

Volume five, also released last year, gave us a Hard to Handle with James Cagney; Stanwyck once again as one of Ladies They Talk About; Warren William as a phony illusionist in The Mind Reader and Blondell as a lady detective in Miss Pinkerton.

Warner Bros. has stepped up production with two releases in April, each featuring four films.

First up in Volume Six is an adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s impassioned The Wet Parade about demon rum’s ruin of two families. The eclectic cast includes Dorothy Jordan, Walter Huston, Lewis Stone, Robert Young, Neil Hamilton and Jimmy Durante. Victor Fleming directed this curiosity.

Audiences of the day allegedly recoiled at the coarseness of John Gilbert’s chauffeur in his self-penned Downstairs. He seduces, or tries to seduce, all the women of the house including butler Paul Lukas’ bride, Virginia Bruce, who would become the next Mrs. Gilbert in real life. It was directed by silent master Monta Bell.

Kay Francis stars a woman sold into prostitution by her lover, Ricardo Cortez, in Mandalay in which Francis rises from the depths to seek vengeance on the man who done her wrong. Michael Curtiz directed one of Francis’ least insufferable films.

The cream of this particular crop is Massacre featuring Richard Barthelmess in one of his last starring roles as an American Indian superstar who returns to the reservation to see his dying father and stays to right the many wrongs done to the Indians on the reservation. Directed by Alan Crosland, the film co-stars Claire Dodd as the privileged white woman who wants to make him one of her trophies and Ann Dvorak in a lovely performance as an educated Indian.

First up in Volume Seven is the long out of circulation The Hatchet Man in which Edward G. Robinson, looking about as Chinese as Donald Duck, plays an enforcer for the Tongs. Obliged to kill his best friend (J. Carrol Naish), he inherits the man’s fortune and his daughter who grows up to be Loretta Young who becomes his wife. She runs off with a younger man who sells her into slavery. The film gave a lot of work to Asian actors of the day, but most have no speaking parts. The principal roles, in addition to those essayed by Robinson, Young and Nash, are played by Leslie Fenton and Dudley Digges. It’s one of William Wellman’s lesser efforts, but at least the actors aside from Robinson are given convincing makeup.

The last entry in the set is Robert Florey’s Ex-Lady featuring Bette Davis and Gene Raymond as young lovers who share a bed without the sanction of marriage. Once they do get married, they become bored by convention and drift into other love affairs, eventually reconciling. This was a pre-Of Human Bondage Davis, yet to achieve her soon to come stardom. It’s okay, but nothing major.

In between these two films is the real meat of the release, two Warren William treasures – Skyscraper Souls and Employees’ Entrance. In the former, directed by Edgar Swlwyn, he’s the manipulative owner of a hundred story building with a marriage of convenience allowing him to romance several mistresses at once. Maureen O’Sullivan, Norman Foster, Verree Teasdale, Wallace Ford and Hedda Hopper co-star. In the latter, directed by Roy Del Ruth, he’s the unscrupulous general manager of a Macy’s-like department store who seduces Loretta Young the night he meets her and again when she’s married and upset with husband Wallace Ford. He gets his come-uppance in the former, but gets away with everything in the latter. Both are delicious fun.

This week’s new releases include Safe Haven and Mama.