Speaking of Gary Cooper, I wish I could more highly recommend Lionsgate’s “2-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition” of “High Noon,” which is nothing of the sort, though it’s a comparative bargain at $15 (discounted to $10 at Amazon and others). This is basically the 50th anniversary single-disc “Collector’s Edition” repackaged on two discs. Aside from a brief featurette on Tex Ritter and a clip of Ritter performing the title song on “The Jimmy Dean Show,” the features (and the commentary track, which features my erstwhile colleague Jonathan Foreman and the late John Ritter, as well as the children of Gary Cooper and Fred Zinneman, but no relatives of Stanley Kramer, mysteriously credited as producer on the box) are all recycled from its three previous DVD iterations, including a Leonard Maltin documentary from 1998. The crisp-but-not spectacular transfer is apparently also from that old edition by Artistan, which was bought out by Lionsgate years ago. I hear Paramount, which owns “High Noon” as part of its Republic Pictures library, won’t spring for a new transfer until the title hits Blu-ray. The Republic titles, which Paramount announced it was going to release itself a couple of years ago before having second thoughts and re-licensing them to Lionsgate, have been trickling onto DVD at an agonizingly slow pace. “Only the Valiant,” a Cagney Brothers western with Gregory Peck directed by Raoul Walsh, is out next month, and I hear the much-requested Ava Gardner-Robert Walker “One Touch of Venus” and “Arch of Triumph” starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, are in the pipeline. “We release them at a pace we think the marketplace can absorb,” a Lionsgate rep told me.