It’s a strange analogy but film noir on DVD has become something like an oasis in the desert lately. With the trickle of classic titles at an all-time low in R1, it’s film noir which has stirred the pot this summer. VCI brought out New York Confidential and Olive Films licensed Dark City plus the noirish Union Station and Appointment with Danger from Paramount for release next week. I’m getting ready to start watching the stripped-down new Warner Bros. set that came out a week ago. Regardless of what’s happened with the Warner Archive and what could be in store for the future, nothing DVD-wise feels quite as good as a WB noir set stacked with 8 films on pressed discs. How it retails for $50 when, for example, Sam Fuller’s Verboten! goes for $25 by itself on a DVD-R from the Warner Archive is a mystery best left to someone else.

Late bloomer Sony has been the busiest of the studios regarding classic releases by far. It’s just released a second collection of Columbia film noir titles on DVD, and also issued a pair of Bad Girls of Film Noir sets earlier this year. That makes a whopping 17 new noir-related pictures to escape from Sony in the past 8 months or so. Now I feel like I should never say anything else bad about the studio in my TCM Ten write-ups. I’ve been won over, though not by the public relations department which, like most other American studios, won’t send me review copies because, primarily, I write for what is considered a UK site. Undeterred, I still wrote up the Columbia Film Noir II set for The Digital Fix. Here’s a link to my review. If I can gauge whether there’s any outside interest and if I have time then I might follow it later with a look at the Warner Bros. box.

Beyond some choice MGM-licensed titles on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection, the future looks murky for film noir on disc. I hope that this wave of noir releases is greatly successful and perhaps results in more availability for that still-significant pile of unreleased films. Maybe Universal could even return to the game, or at least those pictures could pop up on TCM sometime. Ride the Pink Horse, I’m thinking about you in particular.