Vintage films arriving on VHS and DVD

As Cinemax's "Not on Home Video" series demonstrates weekly, many vintage films have still not been released on videocassette and DVD. What was once a booming market for oldies has slowed down, although there are several notable arrivals this month.

To start at the very beginning, there's "Silent Shakespeare" (Milestone Home Video, $30), an 88-minute British Film Institute production that goes back to 1899 to showcase a brief British movie version of "King John," starring Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. The tape also includes early Italian versions of "King Lear" and "The Merchant of Venice," American versions of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Twelfth Night," and British treatments of "The Tempest" and "Richard III" (produced in 1911, "Richard III" is the most recent film in the collection).Naturally they lose something without the words, though the movies are so short that that would not have had much room for soliloquies anyway. These are visual impressions of the plays, and some of them are quite striking. The use of tinting effects and especially hand-stenciled color suggests an early form of Technicolor. Laura Rossi provided the original score that ties the pieces together. (Information: 800-603-1104.)

A three-cassette British production, "The Silent Revolution: What Do Those Old Films Mean?" (Facets Video, $20 per tape), begins in 1900 and runs through the early 1930s. The first cassette addresses the social impact of British and American productions at the turn of the century. The second one focuses on Danish and French films; the third tape examines sexual politics in Soviet cinema and populist German movies, including silent works by Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer. (Information: 800-331-6197.)

Warner Home Video is releasing three Humphrey Bogart movies never available on tape before: "The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse," "Black Legion" and "The Wagons Roll at Night" ($15 apiece). They're part of an 18-film Humphrey Bogart Collection series that also includes special-edition $25 DVDs of "Casablanca" and "The Maltese Falcon." The former includes a featurette, "You Must Remember This"; the latter features a Bogart documentary, "Becoming Attractions: The Trailers of Humphrey Bogart," made up largely of trailers that tried to suggest a different Bogart persona at different stages of his career.

Also part of this series is a $25 DVD that includes two versions of "The Big Sleep" (one never widely released, the other substantially reshot for public consumption), plus a documentary analyzing how director Howard Hawks redid it to play up the chemistry between Bogart and his co-star, Lauren Bacall. Also new on DVD is another Bogart-Bacall classic, "Key Largo." Available only as $15 tapes are "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," "Dark Passage," "To Have and Have Not" and "They Drive By Night."