Jean-Luc Godard on the Dick Cavett Show in support of 1980's "Sauve qui peut (la vie)" is part of "JLG in USA," The Believer, 2009

It's a blunt, fast movie, as was characteristic of the time, and so Wellman's moments of observational patience sting your eyes. This respect for organic character blooms in "Other Men's Women" (1931), the earliest film in the set and a character drama with amazingly Renoirian textures, loitering around in yet another railroad yard with two engineer buddies (Grant Withers and Regis Toomey), the first an amiable drunk bumped out of his boarding house, the other a happily married man who takes him in. The resulting idyll, with the two men buzzing around generous, nonjudgmental wife Mary Astor, is of course doomed for a fall, which descends silently in the house like poisoned air in the instant of a spontaneous kiss. Wellman is on the balls of his feet throughout, from the beguiling shot atop a moving train watching Withers and colleague James Cagney unthinkingly duck beneath an overpass as they chat, to Astor's shaken attempts to behave as if the world hadn't shifted under her feet, to the recomposed frame-up that ends with a rainy window and the fisted face of a blind man who can no longer tolerate his unfaithful wife's supplications. The trim DVD box comes with two new Wellman docs, a total of nine vintage shorts, and a slew of commentaries and original trailers.

An invaluable, heretofore unavailable DVD ker-splat that you cannot find for shrink-wrapped sale on its own, but only within the current issue of The Believer [for which -- full disclosure -- I also sometimes write], "JLG in USA" is a compilation (assembled by BAMCinematek’s Jacob Perlin) of long-lost ephemera chronicling Godard’s interface with American media and institutions, between the 1968 release of "La Chinoise" and 1980's "Every Man for Himself." Interviewed by Berkeley film students, swapping banter with Dick Cavett, huddling with Andrew Sarris, pitching with Jean-Pierre Gorin the Dziga Vertov Group project that either became "Ici et Ailleurs" (1976) or was never finished at all, hanging out at the Del Mar Beach in San Diego with Alice Waters, Wim Wenders, Jim McBride and Tom Luddy -- here is the Godard many of us never knew, gabbing enigmatically from within a wreath of cigarette smoke, before his notorious semi-hermitage tendencies took hold and left him sheltered in Switzerland. Does "La Chinoise" describe Marxist politics or promote them? "It’s movement, it’s a movie, it’s a movie," he replies, concisely I think; when asked about "normal films," Godard says simply that he is "the most normal moviemaker," because he makes films "naturally," in of course direct contradiction of every commercial principle inherent in the cinema industry. Godard has always struggled between unmediated spontaneity and pedagogy, but here we get to see him vocalize the conflict, even as Cavett admits in a solid hour of interviewing to essentially not "getting" Godard, from "Breathless" on down, and Godard himself dodges the presumptions behind nearly every question with a Keith Moon-ish grin and eyebrow-bounce.

Forbidden Hollywood Collection Volume Three, featuring the pre-Code work of William Wellman (Warner Home Video) is now available on DVD; “JLG in USA” is currently available as part of the March Film Issue of The Believer which is available at newsstands and online at McSweeneys.net.

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