Richard Widmark's Tommy Udo (center) is a friend of the disabled in Kiss of Death (Photo: 20th Century Fox)

Today's Times offers up possibly the strangest DVD review in the medium's young history, with Wendell Jamieson fusing his impression of Fox's third "Film Noir Collection" with a city history lesson and the story line for his own imaginary New York noir.

It could be my acute ADD, but I had to read it twice to parse it all. That is not to imply you should not give it a try yourself; after all, where else but The Times would you find arcane-but-ingenious journalistic tidbits like this:

The Dark Corner features an explosive set piece in a skyscraper called "The Grant Building." (Clifton) Webb lures (William) Bendix here, telling him he has a dentist appointment on the 31st floor, and then shoves him to his death through a conveniently opened, oversize window.

The Grant Building shown in the movie is actually 500 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of 42nd Street. It was built in 1931 and designed by the firm of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, who also designed the Empire State Building. The elevators today look as if they were redone in the 1990's, but the 31st floor itself is quite noir - orange-yellow marble walls, stone floors inlaid with brass, old glass mail shoots. And there is a dentist on the floor, Dr. Scott M. Fine, D.D.S.

"Oh my God," he said, when told of the coincidence. His suite, which he has leased for 10 years, was specially designed for a dentist when the building went up, he said - it came with all the intricate plumbing necessary for those little sinks.

"The windows are nice windows," he said between patients. "They are large enough to hurl someone out of, but I don't know if you can open them up that wide anymore."

Jamieson also gets into a bit about Kiss of Death, a "surprisingly sexy Lucille Ball" and nicely explicates the general class conventions undergirding the noir genre without crossing into bitchy, Caryn James territory. The release of Otto Preminger's Where the Sidewalk Ends, with its contrived, Hollywoodized NYC, is not quite the revelation that he says it is (1937's Dead End--filmed entirely in a studio--boasts a far more edgy authenticity for its time), but it is the film's first time on video, so I guess we will let it slide.

If anything, the piece reminds us what we are really missing: Someday, some genius will reissue Sweet Smell of Success with dueling commentaries by Tony Curtis and Richard Johnson. And then we can die, I suppose.