New DVDs - Cassavetes's "Too Late Blues" - "The Lawless" - NYTimes.com It's curious how "Too Late Blues," the 1962 film that was John Cassavetes's second feature-length work as a director, seems to have vanished from the Cassavetes canon. As one of the founding fathers of cinematic modernism in the United States, Cassavetes has been the subject of countless critical studies, yet most pass in silence over this sophomore effort. It's almost as if it had never existed. Yet "Too Late Blues," which can now be seen in a fine new edition (on Blu-ray and standard definition DVD) from Olive Films, is unmistakably a personal work, filled with the same faces (Seymour Cassel, Val Avery, Marilyn Clark), themes (the lure of emotional instability, alcohol as an agent of social leveling, artistic integrity as an absolute value) and most crucially, the eccentric tempos and peculiar narrative gaps that would inform his mature style in great films to come like "A Woman Under the Influence" (1974) and "Love Streams" (1984). The problem may be that "Too Late Blues" plays directly into one of the most enduring American folk tales: the one about the young genius from the East Coast who succumbs to the lure of Hollywood, where his work is gutted of all originality and he is forced to capitulate to the demands of crass, West Coast commercialism. Memorably satirized in Joel and Ethan Coen's "Barton Fink," it's a morality tale with enough of an element of truth (think of all the Sundance winners who have vanished into the maw) to survive generations of telling. Yet in the real world results are often mixed: Orson Welles left Broadway for Hollywood and ended up hitting a brick wall; George Cukor went west and discovered himself as an artist. After the critical success of his pioneering independent production of 1959, "Shadows," Cassavetes found backing for his next project at Paramount. He had Montgomery Clift and Gena Rowlands in mind for the lead roles. The studio insisted instead on Bobby Darin, as the brilliant and intransigent jazz musician Ghost Wakefield, and Stella Stevens as Jess Polanski, the emotionally damaged singer with whom Ghost has a troubled affair. The casting may have been a compromise, but it proved to be a productive one. Darin, already a member of Cassavetes's circle (he makes an unbilled appearance in "Shadows"), reveals an intensity beyond his "Dream Lover" pop-star image, and Ms. Stevens is heartbreakingly vulnerable in a role that points directly to Ms. Rowlands's distressed heroines in "A Woman Under the Influence" and "Opening Night." This is a movie that arrives with a chip firmly planted on its shoulder. It isn't hard to read Cassavetes's own fierce independence into Ghost, who would rather play gigs in the park, for an audience of the birds and squirrels, than perform someone else's music in a swank nightclub. Cassavetes even imagines the moral consequences (dire) of his own selling out, by having Ghost retreat from his art and into the arms of a wealthy female patron, a thinly disguised symbol of the entertainment industry at its most exploitative. But if Cassavetes was spoiling for a fight, he didn't get one. Frantic at one moment and entropic the next, "Too Late Blues" sways entirely to the erratic beats of Cassavetes's own inner music. Narrative momentum is suspended for long sequences in which the characters take time out for a softball game or drink themselves silly; storytelling points that many directors would consider crucial are blithely omitted; and characters act out of the illogic of their own impenetrable natures rather than following clearly signposted motivations. One quintessential Cassavetes moment comes during Ghost's audition for a crass record producer (Avery). At first the producer seems to despise Ghost's avant-garde masterpiece - a down-tempo number with a warbled vocal from Ms. Stevens's character, which does indeed sound like an Yma Sumac B side - but then, without any perceptible transition, he's suddenly in love with it and insists on signing Ghost to a contract. Such apparently unmotivated reversals lie at the heart of Cassavetes's cinema. For him human behavior isn't the predictable result of pat psychologies but a continuous flow of irresistible impulses. Expressing his own dissatisfaction with "Too Late Blues," Cassavetes complained of having too little time to develop the script and being confined to a four-week shooting schedule (normal for a studio film of this budget and scope). Daily production schedules were no more to his liking than schematic characters; he needed to feel his way to the end result, making and unmaking his films as he went along. Although it isn't a perfect film, "Too Late Blues" provided a necessary step in Cassavetes's evolution as an artist, helping him to comprehend and develop his own method. But a Cassavetes film it remains, and perhaps one day it will be recognized as one. Olive Films, Blu-ray $29.95, DVD $24.95, not rated The Lawless Another recent release from Olive Films, "The Lawless" (1950) bears some suggestive similarities to "Too Late Blues." It was the second film of a gifted young director, Joseph Losey, who had made his name in New York theater, and was produced by Paramount's B unit on a tight, 21-day schedule. Often misclassified as film noir, it's a model of the social problem film as it emerged from World War II, as returning veterans found that the egalitarianism of Army life did not carry over into the civilian world. Macdonald Carey stars as a former war correspondent who has bought a newspaper in a midsize Southern California city in hopes of rediscovering the peace and quiet of Middle American life. Instead he finds himself caught up in a drama of racial prejudice, as the townspeople go on a rampage against a Latino boy (Lalo Rios) unjustly accused of starting a fight at a dance hall. After the theatrical stylization of his first feature, "The Boy With Green Hair" (1948), Losey here slips easily into the new, location-based realism of the postwar years, and if the screenplay (by Daniel Mainwaring, under his "Geoffrey Homes" pseudonym) can be a bit didactic, the performances are graceful and warm, with some particularly fine work from Gail Russell as the Mexican-American reporter who reawakens Carey's conscience. Olive Films, DVD $24.95, not rated SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS Robert Downey Jr. continues as an action-hero version of the armchair detective in Guy Ritchie's sequel to his 2009 "Sherlock Holmes." With Jude Law as Dr. Watson, Jared Harris as Professor Moriarty and Noomi Rapace, Rachel McAdams and Eddie Marsan. Mr. Downey's "imperiousness is hard to distinguish from boredom, and he seems to be in a hurry to spit out his lines, take his lumps, throw his punches and collect his paycheck," A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times in December. Warner Home Video, Blu-ray/DVD combo $35.99, DVD $28.98, PG-13 GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE The directing team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor takes over the franchise about a bounty hunter (Nicolas Cage) literally from hell. With Ciaran Hinds, Idris Elba and Christopher Lambert. "We now know why it has been such a mild winter in much of the United States," Neil Genzlinger wrote in The Times in February. Nicolas Cage has been warming the atmosphere by riding around with his head and motor vehicles on fire again. Sony, Blu-ray 3-D/Blu-ray combo $45.99, Blu-ray $35.99, DVD $30.99, PG-13 GOOD DEEDS Tyler Perry wears a suit in this story of a successful businessman who falls in love with a single mother (Thandie Newton) who works on a cleaning crew in his building. With Gabrielle Union, Brian White and Rebecca Romijn. Lionsgate, Blu-ray $39.99, DVD $29.95, PG-13 IN DARKNESS From the Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, the story of a petty thief (Robert Wieckiewicz) who, during the Nazi occupation of Lvov, hides Jewish families in the city's sewer system. "Even a true story can follow the familiar conventions of film narrative, and this tale of a righteous gentile selflessly assisting in the survival of a handful of persecuted Jews is no exception," Mr. Scott wrote in The Times in December. Sony, Blu-ray/DVD combo $35.99, DVD $30.99, R ACCIDENT Louis Koo as a professional assassin who specializes in staging killings to look like accidents. When bad things start happening to members of his own team, he wonders if someone isn't turning the tables on him. From Hong Kong, directed by Pou-Soi Cheang and produced by Johnny To. (Shout! Factory, Blu-ray $26.97, DVD $19.93, not rated)