when, WHEN, **WHEN** will we get this film on DVD????

All those titles (Things to Come, the Holmes) are in public domain, that's why the existence of pristine copies is so great. I'm surprised at your assessment of the Holmes copies you got at Amazon -- they couldn't be the MPI restorations, which aren't horrible at all, but of top quality -- they even restored the missing Universal logos, war bond tags, and used the cleanest elements they could find. Excellently done, especially for a series that's been degraded with steadily worse copies in public domain for over 50 years! Unfortunately lots of crummy p.d. copies still abound. Same with "Things...", so be careful which edition you order so you don't end up with another lousy p.d. rip-off. (Buy from a site like Amazon or DVD Planet where you can check the box and distributor so you can be sure it's from Image -- part of their Wade Williams Collection.)

TCM has some films -- the Holmes series, and some others like a couple of films starring Fibber McGee and Molly and Lum and Abner (really!) -- where the prints they use come from some outfit calling itself National Film Archives or something like that -- their opening logo is a reel of film rolling across a photo of what looks like a group of flags outside the United Nations, while solemn, portentous music intones as if this were a state funeral. Anyway, they obviously adopted a bogus name to make them sound like an official repository of the nation's film heritage. Actually, it's just a movie junk shop, with bad prints they clearly don't give a damn about, sort of the Alpha Video of TCM.

I'm sure TCM does make an effort to run the best print AVAILABLE--and that is where the problem lies. A very good friend of mine works for Warner Home Video, and the budget they have for restoration of the movies they control which isn't big enough to cover every worthy title. When a film is very successful, such as "Wizard of Oz" and the recently restored "The Searchers," Warners, who owns the rights to these films, will pay to do a restoration--and usually it is a wonderful job (look at the new "The Searchers.") But a black & white film that wasn't overly successful in its initial release doesn't get high priority (unless it features a major star like like John Wayne). These films have to wait until there is a demand for them. (Obviously Turner isn't going to pay for the restoration of a film they no longer own.)

In fact, the best VIDEO versions available to TCM for a film such as "The Big Sky" are probably the ones made by Turner back when he acquired the MGM, RKO and other film libraries over 20 years ago. TCM doesn't run film prints, so what we are seeing is probably a D2 digital composite video made off the best existing film elements back then--which may have been a fine grain, a dupe negative, the original negative, or a release print--perhaps even a 16mm print from the 50s that the the studios made to send to local stations to run on their film chains--or a combination of several of these. At best, the studios weren't very good at preserving thier films, and RKO--who distributed "The Big Sky"--were the worst when it came to preservation, so who knows what the TCM version was made from.

Hopefully the TCM screenings of "The Big Sky" will interest enough people to start demanding a full on restoration of the movie--it's a film that I believe should be in the Library of Congress list of films "worthy of preservation." Maybe Kirk or Michael Douglas can exert some pressure--these stars have a surprising amount of clout when it comes to getting a restoration made. If there is a pristine French and/or Spanish version as has been reported, it probably is due to the fact that the German company Kinowelt has distribution rights overseas, and probably own a first class fine grain positive which they used to make their own video release. As long as good archival materials exist somewhere, the situation isn't hopeless--it just takes a show of interest to get the ball rolling.