New DVDs: 'Tammy Wynette,' 'Steel Trap,' 'Beau Brummell'

"TAMMY WYNETTE: LEGENDARY PERFORMANCES." (1967-81. NOT RATED. SONY BMG. $14.98.)

I had no intention of watching this entire DVD. I popped it into the machine only because I realized that I'd never actually seen Tammy Wynette in performance, only heard her. Well, she was brilliant. She arrived as an artist fully formed, in her early 20s, having already endured poverty, child labor, a marriage (with kids) and a divorce.

The DVD, which consists of television performances over the course of 14 years, begins with Wynette singing on Southern TV stations, and there's no mistaking that hers was an authentic voice of rural poverty.

She was, from the beginning, a brilliant singing actress. She had great intelligence and a quiet but unmistakable toughness. And her voice was amazing. In her earliest performances, she keeps sending the sound mix into distortion because her voice is overpowering the equipment. Even as her wigs got bigger and the music took on a schmaltzy quality, she was amazingly consistent in her focus and emotional honesty.

It's funny how artists can get written off in convenient shorthand. For those not fans of country music, Wynette is merely the voice of "Stand By Your Man" (albeit a great song), but she was much more -- a poet of marital misery, who co-wrote some of her best-known songs. When Wynette sang it, she meant it.

The special features are modest but helpful: snippets from 1980s interviews, footage from her 1978 wedding and scenes of her induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, months after her premature death in 1998 at age 55.

-- Mick LaSalle

"STEEL TRAP." (2007. NOT RATED. WEINSTEIN CO. $19.99.)

This is a by-the-numbers slasher film from Dimension Extreme, a distributor owned by the Weinstein Co. that specializes in bloody shockers. Dimension offers a couple of George A. Romero's movies, including his latest, "Diary of the Dead," but most of what it issues is more along the lines of "Teeth" (which is, the company says, about "a high-school virgin who unknowingly has a set of mutant teeth between her legs").

"Steel Trap" presents the usual deranged killer, this time in black mask and jumpsuit. His victims are guests at a New Year's Eve party in a high-rise. After an intro that characterizes the soon-to-be victims as extremely unpleasant folks, they are invited to a VIP party on the building's 27th floor. That's when the real fun begins, as the guests are dispatched in various gruesome ways.

The main extras are a "making of" featurette and commentary by director and co-writer Luis Camara ("Endgame").

-- Walter Addiego

"BEAU BRUMMELL: THIS CHARMING MAN." (2006. NOT RATED. ACORN MEDIA. $24.99.)

Had he been born in a later age, Beau Brummell could have been the ultimate metrosexual. This BBC production, based on Ian Kelly's biography, seems at first a rather slight entertainment. What, after all, is there to recommend this fashion plate of Regency England, beyond the fact that he advocated full-length trousers instead of knee pants, was a sycophantic pal of the Prince of Wales and a friend to bad-boy poet Lord Byron?

As portrayed by James Purefoy, Brummell seems at first like an airhead dandy. In fact, as he revolutionized male attire, eschewing powdered wigs, makeup and silks, he made foppishness passe in favor of the style he dubbed dandyism. But after working his way into the prince's good graces, Brummell loses his status, his money and his connections through inevitable hubris. As he does so, his character -- or perhaps his absence of character -- actually becomes more interesting.

The BBC film features superb performances by Purefoy, Hugh Bonneville as the prince, Matthew Rhys as Lord Byron and the great character actor Philip Davis as Brummell's long-suffering servant. Director Philippa Lowthorpe and screenwriter Simon Bent brilliantly sketch in the decadent details of Brummell's relationship with Byron and his sister, not so much as a way of probing Brummell's sexuality but as a way of underscoring the sad emptiness of a hollow, decorative life.

-- David Wiegand

"CLASSE TOUS RISQUES." (1960. NOT RATED. THE CRITERION COLLECTION. $29.95.)

Lino Ventura was one of those actors whose image alone onscreen constituted a kind of existential statement. In this 1960 film -- another brilliant rediscovery by Rialto Pictures and the Criterion Collection -- he plays a gangster, wanted for murder, who decides to come back to France after hiding out for years in Italy. Italy has gotten too hot for him, so he figures he'll take his chances back home.

Disaster strikes almost immediately, and the movie becomes the story of a man coming to terms with the waste of his own life. About the only thing he has left is a certain dignity in the face of his own shame. He got himself into this game, and now he's going to play this hand until the bitter end.

Ventura, an Italian-born French actor, is fascinating onscreen in a way that calls to mind Humphrey Bogart or Jean Gabin: Somehow, just being there, he means something. The film also features an important early performance by Jean-Paul Belmondo.

The film marked the directorial debut of Claude Sautet, who went on to a great career in French cinema. Extras include archival interviews with Ventura and Sautet, an interview with the novelist and screenwriter Jose Giovanni and a booklet of essays. The transfer is up to Criterion's usual impeccable standard.

-- Mick LaSalle

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)