DVDS 5-disc set highlights British director

The set includes some of Alan Clarke's television and film work.
By TERRY LAWSON
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Alan Clarke was one of the best directors you've never heard of, primarily because he worked in English television.
But his fans include some of Great Britain's finest actors, including Tim Roth, Ray Winstone ("Sexy Beast") and Gary Oldman, all of whom appear in films included in "The Alan Clarke Collection" (Blue Underground, $99.95).
Also included is director Gus Van Sant, who named his recent film "Elephant" in tribute to the film of the same title in this collection.
Originally shown on the BBC, "Elephant" (3 stars) explores the trouble in Northern Ireland by looking at 18 killings committed by the IRA, and, like Van Sant's Columbine-inspired drama, steadfastly refuses to draw conclusions or wring its hands over social ills.
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The British director's reputation as a tough-minded realist was made by 1977's "Scum" (3 stars), a television drama starring a young Winstone as a "borstal boy," a detainee in one of Britain's notoriously cruel juvenile prisons of the era. When the BBC, which had commissioned it, refused to show it, it became a news story, and the notoriety aided Clarke in remaking it as superior 1979 feature film (4 stars), also included here, with almost entirely the same cast.
He was back to TV for 1982's "Made In Britain" (4 stars), the first drama to seriously explore the growing violence of racist skinheads and Britain's introduction to the dynamo that is Tim Roth. Equally important and brutal is 1988's "The Firm" (3 stars) starring Gary Oldman as a middle-class bloke whose alter ego is that of a ringleader of soccer hooligans.
The five-disc set, which includes interviews with Oldman (whose first film as a director, "Nil by Mouth" starred Winstone and owes a serious debt to Clarke) and Roth (ditto for his first directing effort, "The War Zone"), ends with a 1991 documentary "Director: Alan Clarke," done in England the year after his death.