I decided not to review the gigantic new John Ford collection for this week’s forthcoming DVD column—partly because it’s hard to justify requesting an entire box set when you only have space to write about one or two films, partly because I like the way the little girls in the recent DVD release Innocence compare to Briony in this week’s big theatrical release, Atonement—but there’s no question it’s today’s (and possibly this year’s) most important DVD. Dave Kehr at the New York Times:

Film culture in this country has long been in need of a paradigm shift, a way of saving old films from the swamp of nostalgia and seeing them as vital cultural products rather than quaint artifacts of another age. People don’t read Faulkner’s “Light in August” to be reminded of their lost youth, but most studios continue to market their library titles (when they bother to market them at all) as so many trips down memory lane.

That approach might have worked at the dawn of home video in the late 1970s, but for obvious reasons the nostalgia audience for prewar films is not a growing market segment. What the home video industry needs is something that book publishers have had for a century: a sense of the backlist as a living body of work that merits and rewards the attention of each new generation.

“Ford at Fox,” a gargantuan set that assembles 24 of the 50-some films John Ford made for the studio that was his most consistent home, may be just the nudge the old paradigm needs.

If you can’t afford a $300 box set, I feel you. TMC is playing a bunch of the films next week. If you don’t even have cable, you are me.

Scarecrow has ‘em, though.