We tend to believe, in this day of Netflix and video on demand, that we have access to just about every movie ever made, but the truth is that hundreds, maybe thousands, of films simply fall through the cracks of the video world, too obscure or unpopular or simply unknown to risk a DVD release.

Looking for Jonathan Demme's "Citizens Band" or Alan Rudolph's "Welcome to L.A."? How about Peter Bogdanovich's "Nickelodeon" (to say nothing of his "At Long Last Love")? Stanley Donen's "Lucky Lady"? Ken Russell's "Lisztomania" or "Valentino"? Altman's "Brewster McCloud" or "Streamers"? Blake Edwards' "Gunn" or "The Tamarind Seed"? Michael Apted's "Stardust"?

With such "blind spots" in mind, I was pleased to hear that Legend Films, (http://www.legendfilms.net/) an outfit specializing in releasing colorized versions of public domain titles, recently made a deal with Paramount to release a few of its titles from the '70s and '80s that never merited a DVD release. We're not necessarily talking about obscurities here: the first batch of release included the Richard Pryor vehicle "Some Kind of Hero," John Sayles' "Baby It's You" and the always controversial "Mandingo," all getting their first DVD exposure.

Thanks to Legend's release, I was finally able to catch up with one of the oddest films of the early '70s, Jacques Demy's "The Pied Piper," barely released in 1972 by a studio that clearly had no idea how to handle it.

Imagine the excitement of the studio executives when the film went into production: A classic fairy tale starring feel-good folkie Donovan and Jack Wild, the young lad who leaped briefly into stardom in "Oliver" and on the children's TV series "H.R. Pufnstuf." A rare English language film from the director of one of the most romantic films of the 1960s, "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg." A "G" rating! Clearly this was aimed as a youthful fantasy along the lines of "Willy Wonka," but with just enough counter-cultural panache to get the hipper young audiences as well.

And how their jaws must have dropped and their hearts fell when they actually saw the finished project. For Demy's "Pied Piper," set in the time of the Black Death and based on a tale that has always had somewhat creepy overtones, is a very grim thing, despite the storybook colors and bright costumes and youthful innocence of the cast. (Wild is considerably more restrained than usual, but Donovan never looks entirely comfortable.) And if the idea of plague-infested rats being marched to a mass suicide doesn't quite spell "family classic," there's also a sickly child-bride engaged to an unfaithful soldier (a very young looking John Hurt), corrupt and scheming church officials and an execution - by burning - with clear anti-Semitic overtones (on the part of the film's lawmen, not the filmmakers).

But for all the gloom, the film is curiously engaging, not in the least because of Demy's typically light touch. Demy's adaptation, co-authored by the director, Andrew Birkin (who went on to work on other historical fictions like "The Name of the Rose" and "Perfume") and frequent Bertolucci collaborator Mark Peploe, plays like a conventional costume fantasy that somehow keeps crossing a line into reality, its picture-book images somehow wandering into the real and ugly truths of the medieval world.

(A footnote: "The Pied Piper" was one of a dozen or so of the films produced by Goodtimes Enterprises, the British company created by David Puttnam and Sanford Lieberson that was responsible for such other trippy genre hybrids as "Performance," "Bugsy Malone" and - from the list above - "Stardust" and "Lisztomania." Pioneers of a limited yet highly entertaining form of uniquely British surrealism, the Goodtimes film are unique mementoes of their era, too often neglected by film histories.)

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