This week, if you’re lucky enough to be getting some stimulus money, read this column to figure how to use some of it to help build up your collection of movies on DVD and Blu-Ray. And if you’re not getting any money, you can at least see what you’ll be missing.

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THE GOOD FAIRY (1935)

Ferenc Molnar's prolific output (around 40 plays) was plundered (often in radically altered and/or watered-down form) by everyone: Rogers & Hammerstein got Carousel out of his Liliom, and Billy Wilder's fleetest farce, One, Two, Three updated (apparently unrecognizably) another play. Often forgotten is 1935's The Good Fairy, a triumph of clever dialogue and expert performances over William Wyler's typically ponderous, absurdly slow direction. In keeping with the good "production values" Wyler stolidly brought along for his whole career, things move way too slow. For no good reason, Preston Sturges' adaptation retains cumbersome faux-Hungarian street-name signs, presumably in the name of reminding audiences what cultivated terrain they've stumbled upon whenever an actor gets slowed down by a word. But Sturges keeps throwing away funny lines and faux-ponderous diction in every direction, and the movie's a blast despite all that. "Unhand me, varlet, lest I cleave thee to the brisket!" yells a drunk aristocrat. "I will scale yonder precipice alone!" And he's never heard from again.

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NEW YORK: If you've ever wondered why Robert Downey, Jr. keeps that "junior" in his name, it's because, once upon a time, when Downey was starting out in the mid-1980s, it still seemed prudent to make it easier for casting directors to figure out that he was not his own father, a man who until recently did not have to be advertised as "Robert Downey, Sr." In the 1960s, Downey the Elder made a string of low-budget satirical comedies, notably Babo 73 (1964), which starred underground cinema mainstay Taylor Mead and 1965's Chafed Elbows, arguably the first "underground" to receive a significant measure of commercial and critical success. Though he had an almost-mainstream hit with 1969's Putney Swope, he pretty much dropped off the radar after 1972's Greaser's Palace. (In between, he made the 1970 Pound, which is set in one, and which features Robert Downey the Younger's film debut. He played a puppy.) But while most of his later feature-film work made it to home video in the 1980s--even Up the Academy, the infamous (and disowned) attempt to start a Mad magazine movie franchise to compete with the National Lampoon--those early-'60s films just dropped off the face of the Earth, and were generally assumed to have been lost.. Now Anthology Film Archives is bringing them back for a week's run. Bruce Bennett at New York Sun has the story of how Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation got on board with the project of restoring Downey's early work. It is reported that Downey, upon learning that Martin Scorsese agreed that it was worth putting up the "small fortune" necessary to restore these films because of their cultural significance, had a quick answer: "Has he seen them?"

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