Universal has been busy upgrading many of its classics for Blu-ray release in this, its 100th Anniversary year.

First up is Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Released in December, 1962, this isn’t quite yet its 50th anniversary, but it comes close enough for the new release to be labeled a 50th Anniversary Edition. The Blu-ray, as well as the improved DVD, additions include all the extras from the 2007 Special Edition. Also included on the Blu-ray is an informative nine minute documentary on the restoration process.

One of the extras is the running commentary by Mulligan and producer Alan J. Pakula, recorded just months before his sudden death in 1993 for the Laser Disc release of the film which should need no introduction to film lovers. Other extras include several documentaries on star Gregory Peck from his Oscar acceptance speech to his AFI award acceptance speech to a lengthy documentary on his life and times.

At the heart of the film are the performances of child actors Mary Badham, Phillip Alford and John Megna, Badham and Alford as Peck’s children and Megna as a visiting cousin. Since the film’s story is told from the perspective of the children, it is not surprising that that these young actors give three of the best child performances of all time.

Peck, who continued to mentor Badham into his 80s, as she tells us in a poignant on-screen interview from 1999, was himself the father of five and often played loving fathers or father figures.

Peck’s first major success was 1944’s The Keys of the Kingdom in which his missionary Father Chisholm was father figure to an entire village and then some. It earned him the first of his five Oscar nominations.

His second came as the literal poor Florida farmer-father in the fondly recalled 1946 family classic, The Yearling. His scenes with Claude Jarman, Jr. are among the highlights of the film.

He was a father again in Elia Kazan’s 1947 film of Laura Z. Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement. Dean Stockwell, who had previously played his son in 1945’s The Valley of Decision, was once again his son in Gentleman’s Agreement, the year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, for which Peck earned his third nomination for Best Actor.

Peck’s fourth nomination came as the father figure of Army pilots in 1949’s Twelve O’clock High in which he cracks under the strain. It’s no wonder then that he was the only choice to play Atticus finch, the poor but proud Southern lawyer in the film version of Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, finally earning his first Oscar on his fifth nomination.

It’s difficult to recall any actor at any time as having given a better portrayal of a father of young children and Oscar would seem to agree.

Wallace Beery was the only other actor to win an Oscar for playing the father of a young child prior to Peck. He won his Oscar way back in 1931/32 for playing the prizefighter father of young Jackie Cooper in King Vidor’s 1931 classic, The Champ while Spencer Tracy won back-to-back Oscars for playing surrgate fathers in 1937’s Captains Courageous and 1938’s Boys Town, quickly followed by Robert Donat who played perhaps the greatest surrogate father of them all in 1939’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

In more recent years, Dustin Hoffman (Kramer vs. Kramer) and Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful} won for playing loving fathers to young children while Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood) won for playing one who wasn’t exactly a role model.

There have been only two actors who won Oscars in supporting roles for playing the fathers of young children. They were Donald Crisp as the father of twelve year-old Roddy McDowall in John Ford’s 1941 Oscar winner, How Green Was My Valley, and James Dunn as Peggy Ann Garner’s wistful alcoholic dreamer dad in Elia Kazan’s 1945 film of Betty Smith’s beloved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Paramount has issued a new to Blu-ray edition of the 1970 tearjerker, Love Story. “What can you say about a 25 year-old girl who died?” That’s the opening line of the film. What can you say about a 42 year-old movie that a lot of people loved and still do, but I didn’t and still don’t? Only that you get what you get.

Erich Segal, the film’s screenwriter, based his male protagonist on a combination of two later-to-be famous Harvard roommates, Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones, who has a small role in the film. The screenplay was novelized and became a literary sensation in the months before the film’s release which made overnight sensations of former model Ali MacGraw and TV actor Ryan O’Neal. The film’s theme song became an international success. The film, despite a lukewarm critical reception, was nominated for seven Academy Awards. MacGraw, whose strident performance is a bit hard to take, was actually the expected winner, ultimately losing to Glenda Jackson in Ken Russell’s critically acclaimed film of D.H. Lawrence’sWomen in Love.

A more current sensation, the British TV series, Downton Abbey harkens to a period in time that goes back even further than the 1930s of To Kill a Mockingbird and the late 1960s of Love Story.

Set in the England of George V, the series’ first season covered the period leading up to World War I while the newly released DVD/Blu-ray second season set covers the war and its immediate aftermath. The series follows the format established four decades ago by TV’s Upstairs, Downstairs and wittily brought up to date by Julian Fellowes’ screenplay for Robert Altman’s 2001 film, Gosford Park. With Fellowes’ genius scripts for the new series focused on the landed gentry and the men and women who cater to them, it’s not surprising that the series keeps winning award after award.

The outstanding cast is headed Hugh Bonneville as the lord of the manor; Elizabeth McGovern as his American born wife and the incomparable Maggie Smith as Bonneville’s acid-tongued mother. With a number of mostly unknowns who won’t be unknown for long supporting them. Shirley MacLaine joins the cast in the third season as McGovern’s mother.

This week’s new DVD releases include the second release in Universal’s 100th Anniversary collection, the Oscar winning All Quiet on the Western Front, the Blu-ray release of which includes the rarely shown silent version of the film which was filmed simultaneously. Also out this week is the critically acclaimed 2011 film, Take Shelter.