E-Mail This Article to a Friend Consumers’ choice Warner and Turner issue five popular films on DVD BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Turner Classic Movies, the best TV station for old movies, and Warner Home Entertainment, one of the most responsible companies issuing classic films on DVD, have collaborated on several important releases: a two-disc set of Lon Chaney silent films (with the superb documentary Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces) and, more recently, a two-disc set of three Buster Keaton MGM films. Their latest joint venture is the result of a popularity contest. Last year, TCM aired a series of 20 films not yet on DVD and asked viewers to vote for the five they’d most like to have.

The final selection is a little disappointing. The two most serious films on the list came in eighth and ninth: Mervyn LeRoy’s 1932 I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, with Paul Muni, one of the darkest and most gripping images of Depression brutality and hopelessness, and Erich von Stroheim’s silent Greed (1925), his version of Frank Norris’s McTeague, long regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, butchered by the studio and now restored to nearly half its original eight-hour length. Neither will be released anytime soon.

Not that the films that got the most votes aren’t extremely good. But they’re all high-quality escapism — romances and melodramas, or stories of adventure and suspense without urgent artistic ambition.

The top vote getter is the best of the five, William Wyler’s The Letter (1940), a Somerset Maugham story turned into a vehicle for Bette Davis. This story of a woman who shoots her alleged attacker is one of Davis’s best roles: she gets to be both mousily prim and violently out of control. Despite being a liar and a cheat, she makes sure your sympathy is almost entirely with her. The DVD includes a newly discovered alternate ending that shows the subtlety of Wyler’s directorial decisions.

The second most popular choice is King Solomon’s Mines (1950), with Stewart Granger as H. Rider Haggard’s "great white hunter" (as his character is referred to in the trailer) and Deborah Kerr as the woman determined to find her lost husband, who’d been looking for a legendary diamond mine. The real star is Robert Surtees’s Oscar-winning Technicolor African location photography of jungle, wild animals, and tribal rituals. The film suffers by comparison with John Huston’s The African Queen, which came out a year later (and is still not available on DVD). In King Solomon’s Mines, Deborah Kerr takes off her corset and cuts her hair, but these are hardly examples of emotional complexity. Still, it’s great fun, with taut and telling direction by Compton Burnett and Andrew Marton.

The funniest moment in any of these films comes in Ivanhoe, the 1952 Technicolor blockbuster based on Sir Walter Scott’s popular novel. As Robert Taylor’s Wilfred of Ivanhoe is scouring Europe for his king, Richard the Lionhearted, a document is tossed to him from a prison window in Austria. He forces a monk to translate it, because, as he says, "I read no Austrian." Director Richard Thorpe keeps characterization to a minimum: Taylor is a stock hero and Joan Fontaine (Rowena) a stiff blonde Saxon shiksa, and a radiant 20-year-old Elizabeth Taylor can’t act yet as Rebecca, the raven-haired Jewess who saves Ivanhoe’s life and whom he must in turn rescue from being burned at the stake as a witch. More interesting are George Sanders as Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, the Norman villain who turns sympathetic, and Emlyn Williams as the fool Wamba, who becomes Ivanhoe’s devoted squire. The mediæval battle scenes are lively, and the real English castles make great backgrounds for certain haunting violet eyes.

Coming in fifth is Mervyn LeRoy’s Random Harvest (1942), a glossy World War II romance about the aftermath of World War I, with Ronald Colman as James Hilton’s amnesiac and Greer Garson, in her very best performance, as the endearing music-hall girl who rescues him from a mental hospital, then loses him when his long-term memory is restored. It’s pure tearjerker, but it works.

In surprising third place is Ice Station Zebra (1968), originally filmed in Cinerama and said to be Howard Hughes’s favorite movie. Directed by John Sturges (best known for Bad Day at Black Rock), it has solid performances by Rock Hudson as the captain of an atomic sub, Ernest Borgnine as an apparently anti-Soviet Russian, and Patrick McGoohan as a tight-lipped, clench-jawed British agent. The submarine photography is impressive, even on TV, and though this story of cold-war spies on a polar rescue mission is sometimes hard to follow, the action is never dull. In fact, there’s hardly a dull moment in any of these films.