Shelley Duvall and Keith Carradine in Thieves Like Us • Rent it at Netflix. • Buy it at Amazon.

This is a remarkably good day for long-awaited discs of much-beloved greats. There's Fox's release of the great, great Peter Cook/Dudley Moore Faust variant, Bedazzled, directed by Stanley Donen. (Dave Kehr's review of it in the New York Times hits the nail squarely on the head.) There's Jules Dassin's great prison drama Brute Force on Criterion. (I'm working on a blog post about a great sort-of urban legend about that movie; look for it soon.) But the release I'm most excited for is Robert Altman's 1974 Thieves Like Us, for my money as great a piece of elegiac beauty as McCabe and Mrs. Miller and a very elusive home video item — the last good version was a late '90s laser disc.

Altman's '30s-set tale of a young escaped convict (Keith Carradine) and his not-quite-redemptive love for a young woman he meets on the lam (Shelley Duvall), is quiet, lyrical, occasionally sardonic, and ultimately tragic, and it contains some of the most gorgeous visuals Altman and cinematographer Jean Boffety ever put on celluloid. And this disc is a great transfer of said images.

Thieves Like Us

Altman's relaxed commentary, taken from the old laserdisc, is at its most engaging when he discusses the beauties and pitfalls of shooting in Mississippi and trying to recreate the depression era there on a low budget. He frequently mentions the Edward Anderson book the movie is based on (Altman and Joan Tewksbury revised an already-extant Calder Willingham script for the picture), but doesn't hold up Thieves up against 1948's They Live By Night, the great Nicholas Ray-directed noir that adapts the same book. That's because, as Altman reveals, he never saw it all the way through, and wasn't even aware of its existence when he decided to film Anderson's book. Hence, the loose-limbed, often improv-driven Thieves is no remake — its tone and its angle and its attitude, not to mention its look, are all entirely different from Ray's. But the movie is just as memorable and moving, and cinephiles are blessed to have both. (The Ray film, by the way, will be out on DVD in July as part of Warners' next film noir box.)