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If you ever find yourself wandering the DVD aisles of a big-box electronics store, uncertain why Northern Exposure: The Complete First Season (Universal, $59.98) is important enough to be packaged in a mini orange hunting jacket, or perhaps wondering how often you'd actually watch Friends: The Series Finale (Warner, $14.98) - if you can't get over how much space is devoted to Star Trek box sets, or how many times one studio can repackage Independence Day (Fox, $19.98) - you may find the following information shocking:

There are movies, great movies, important movies, that have never been released on video. Not on DVD. Not on VHS. I'm talking about movies never released on home video at all - ever.

In other countries, sure.

In this country, never.

For instance, Billy Wilder may be movie royalty, but Paramount has never released one of his best films, the cynical 1951 newspaper picture Ace in the Hole. Also, Robert Altman's California Split, Bob Dylan's infamous directorial debut Renaldo and Clara, Otto Preminger's 1959 Porgy and Bess starring Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge, the 1947 troubled youth picture Dangerous Years, featuring Marilyn Monroe's first speaking role - not a one is available on video.

You can spend a full day overdosing on multiple sets of the TV show Profiler, but Nicholas Ray's cortisone exploitation debacle, Bigger Than Life, starring Walter Matthau and James Mason?

Nope. Not even for laughs.

And because Song of the South remains a racist skeleton in Disney's closet, entire generations have never even heard of Uncle Remus. The irony is that video killed off the repertory theaters that might have taken up the slack, and so these neglected films remain in cinematic purgatory, though the reasons for their neglect tend to be benign: lack of interest (or profit potential); the studio's print deteriorated; the video distribution rights are trapped in a tangle of legalities.

Whatever.

For a long time Luchino Visconti's masterpiece The Leopard ($49.95) - finally seeing the light of day in a couple of weeks thanks to the Criterion Collection - was arguably the best movie still not available on video. (The only serious competition for that dubious crown, Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, was released last year, also by Criterion.) But to see The Leopard now, likely the first time for many of you, is to wonder how a film so sprawling and poignant - "the Sicilian Gone With the Wind" was the typical shorthand description - could eventually become so obscure and forgotten to movie history.

Why is this only reaching video now? Indeed, we learn in the hourlong appreciation that's part of the DVD extras that in 1963 when The Leopard was first released it looked as if Visconti would never be able to live down the film's infamy: How could one of Italy's great filmmakers have blemished so Italian an epic by casting Burt Lancaster in the lead role, speaking Italian through an American accent?

At 3 1/2 hours, and with a $3 million budget (then a whopping amount for a European film), The Leopard was a scandal, a famously ill-fated meeting between the art house and the Hollywood studio system. The original novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was an epic about the decline and fall of the Sicilian aristocracy as told through its fading prince (played by Lancaster in mutton chops), and an international best-seller. Tomasi di Lampedusa was Sicilian royalty and based the story on the life of his great-grandfather; the leopard of the title is direct from his family's coat of arms. And Visconti himself had aristocratic blood. The match appeared ideal, and 20th Century Fox agreed to cover the budget if Visconti agreed to cast an American actor in the lead.

At the 1963 Cannes Film Festival the movie won the Golden Palm. What happened next, in America, was much different: Reeling from the cost overruns of Cleopatra, Fox predictably freaked when Visconti turned in this sprawling, foreign-language tale of melancholy and decay. (At the time, there were persistent rumors that the studio execs didn't actually know it was going to be in Italian.) They lopped 40 minutes off its original 205 minutes. They dubbed Lancaster's voice. Visconti disowned the U.S. version, and in the end, reviews were as bad as expected.

In 1980, a few years after the director's death, a 185-minute restored version toured art houses, but Fox sat on the home video rights, until now. At least the studio chose the right video label.

I'm not sure there is much justification for removing a classic from circulation for 40 years, for tinkering with a masterwork's rightful place in movie history. But Criterion's generous three-disc edition of The Leopard is almost worth whatever reasons Fox could have had. The set includes both the restored 185-minute Italian cut and the dubbed American version, in new digital transfers positively humid with Sicilian sun and dust. When the film moves indoors - to Prince Salina (Lancaster) working his least-appealing political connections in a last-ditch effort to keep his family name alive - your TV screen becomes overstuffed with the lavish and the decadent, and Lancaster's eyes fill with regrets.

His feudal prince knows time has passed him by. Visconti doesn't shy from the idea that royalty like Salina exploited Italy's working class. But like the novel, he's deeply sympathetic to the man, who understands what will become of an entire way of life and knows he's too late to do anything. It's this crush of mixed emotion that drives the last act, a majestic 45-minute ballroom scene. Lancaster stands in his library puffing a cigar, studying the painting Death of a Just Man. He walks home alone and finds a priest and in the film's final moments, stares into the night sky, as if searching the stars for an answer to his own obsolescence.

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FLOATING BUTTERFLIES AND WEATHERMEN: And you thought our annoying fascination with '60s nostalgia had finally given way to an annoying fascination with '70s nostalgia (even though it had already been replaced with an annoying fascination with '80s nostalgia). Fortunately, The Weather Underground (Docurama, $24.98) finds a nugget from that often-told '60s-'70s narrative that's a bit lesser told: the story of a radical faction of the Students for a Democratic Society that became convinced the only way to speed up the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam was the violent overthrow of the Nixon administration. As a former member explains, that kind of thing makes complete sense when you're up to your eyeballs in LSD. Inevitably perhaps, a cloud of regret hangs over this gripping documentary by filmmakers Sam Green and Bill Siegel. There's still fire in the eyes of these now older, very straight-looking professors and lawyers, and you don't doubt they still believe in the causes they once bombed government offices in name of - only that they alienated their smartest allies in the process.

One criticism lobbed at director Michael Mann was that his biopic of Muhammad Ali wasn't nearly enough of a bomb thrower. Ali: The Director's Cut (Columbia, $24.96, available Tuesday) doesn't go very far in correcting that. It only adds six minutes of new footage, and reshuffles a couple of scenes. The only significant extra is a commentary track from the obsessive Mann himself. But it's a film I've come to admire even more in the three years since its release. It's too short, too safe, too flawed - and it's distinctly Mann: serious and more complicated than it lets on. This Ali still isn't exactly the greatest, but I wouldn't want it any other way.

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BETWEEN MIDDLE-EARTH AND A HARD PLACE: One director's cut you might want to hold out for is Peter Jackson's reportedly four-hour version of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (New Line, $29.95). The movie, you've probably heard, is quite brilliant, as alive and vibrant and smart as the smallest indie made by students in the streets with their handheld cameras. The disc, however, might include a slew of mini and major documentaries, along with a preview of the upcoming Battle for Middle-Earth video game. But as with the first two films, this initial two-disc set is a stop-gap measure. In November, New Line will release a four-disc set with a lot of additional footage.

Haven't you learned by now?

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NOT EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND: It's only May, but my vote for the most seemingly anesthetized performance of the year goes to Ray Romano in that midwinter blah, Welcome to Mooseport (Fox, $27.98). Who knew you could make a comedy in an election year about a small town man (Romano) running against an incumbent president (Gene Hackman) and still have nothing to say? A far more believable premise (and a far more fun picture) is Bubba Ho-Tep (MGM, $27.98), a low-budget horror comedy that tells the story of how Elvis (played by our cult movie Sean Penn, Bruce Campbell of The Evil Dead films) and JFK (played by Ossie Davis; don't ask) team up to fend off the mummies feeding on their fellow nursing home residents.

They say it's a true story.

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