Two days after winning five Oscars, Paramount released Martin Scorsese’s Hugo on home video in three iterations: DVD, Blu-ray and 3-D Blu-ray.

Scorsese’s film excels on two levels, first as a children’s adventure, then as a lesson in film history. The problem is that the two tend to exist on separate levels.

Asa Butterfield, the impressive child star of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and Nanny McPhee Returns stars as Hugo Cabret, the young orphan who lives in a train station in 1931 Paris where he keeps the clocks running after the death of his father (Jude Law). He has also inherited his father’s love of movies and gadgets. Unable to rescue his father from a burning building, he was able to carry out an automaton, a complex mechanical device invented by the Greeks in the Middle Ages but at their zenith of popularity from 1860 to 1910. This particular automaton is in the shape of a small man and resembles what we would now call an android. It is, however, in a state of disrepair and requires small mechanical parts to restore its functionality. Hugo discovers that a toy vendor in the train station uses parts for his toys that are identical to the parts he needs for the automaton and begins to steal them. The vendor (Ben Kingsley) discovers what he has been doing and gives him a job cleaning his shop to pay for his crime. He also confiscates Hugo’s book of drawings made by his late father. Hugo refuses to tell the old man what he needs the parts for. He does, however, let the old man’s grand-daughter (Chloe Grace Moretz) in on the secret. Eventually it is discovered that the old man is pioneer film-maker Georges Melies, who made over five hundred short films between 1896 and 1913, but who has become a recluse. The focus of the film then switches to Melies, who is restored to prominence.

The film features a number of fine supporting performances from the likes of Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour and Emily Mortimer as train station vendors; Helen McCrory as Melies’ wife and Christopher Lee and Michael Stuhlbarg as distinguished librarians. The usually irritating Sacha Baron Cohen is less obnoxious than usual, but still relies on too many sight gags, most of them related to a trick wooden leg.

Much admired for its judicious use of 3-D effects, the film works just as fine in regular two-dimension.

Extras include a documentary on Melies.

Kino, which has been stepping up its Blu-ray production of late, has released a superlative Blu-ray of Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street from a Library of Congress print. Utilizing the same transfer as its previously lauded standard DVD, the film looks even more smashing on Blu-ray.

Lang’s 1945 film noir masterpiece has an interesting history. It’s a remake of Jean Renoir’s 1931 controversial French film, La Chienne (The Bitch) which was not shown in the U.S. until 1975. Not only was the title apparently too ribald for American sensibilities of the day, so was the plot which even in the remake was too much for three states which banned it. One of them was surprisingly New York where the ruling was overturned and the film finally released in 1946.

While the plot is virtually the same, updated from post-World War I Paris in Renoir’s version to Depression Era New York in Lang’s version, the two directors’ approach is different. Renoir filmed it as a rebuke to the French justice system whereas Lang filmed it as pure film noir.

The three stars of Lang’s previous highly successful film noir, The Woman in the Window, Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea have the principal roles with Rosalind Ivan virtually reprising her role of Charles Laughton’s shrewish wife in The Suspect as Robinson’s here. Whereas critics and audiences alike were disappointed in the Production Code forced ending of The Woman in the Window, no one but the censors were disappointed in the realistic ending ofScarlet Street.

Robinson plays a timid bank cashier who falls for prostitute Bennett, believing her lie that she is an out-of-work actress and that her pimp (Duryea) was her former roommate’s boyfriend. Manipulated by the bitch, he begins to steal from both his wife and the bank to support her. Having had a life-long hobby as a painter, he stores his paintings in her apartment, which she and her pimp pass off as paintings done by her. When the wife’s former husband shows up and gives him an easy out of the marriage, he decides to move in with Bennett, which sets up one the most satisfying dénouements in film history.

Extras include an audio commentary by Lang biographer David Kohl.

Olive Films, which has for some time now been releasing films licensed to them from Paramount, have recently began putting our their new releases on Blu-ray and have gingerly begun re-issuing previous releases in the higher end format as well.

New releases include such diverse titles as The Buccaneer; Boeing Boing and Nijinksy, while the previously released Where Love Has Gone has been given an upgrade.

Cecil B. DeMille, after the monumental success of his 1956 remake of The Ten Commandments, decided to remake his 1938 film The Buccaneer with the stars of that film, Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson and Yul Brynner as pirate Jean Lafitte with Brynner’s role this time the more prominent. However, advanced age and ill health forced him to relegate direction of the film to his son-in-law, Anthony Quinn, whose only directorial effort it would to be.

The 1958 film looks stunning, but is dramatically weak. It is a virtual remake of the 1938 version with Fredric March as Lafitte, with the exception that Andrew Jackson, played by a minor actor in that film is now played by an actor of stature. The standout performance, though, is that of Charles Boyer as a Napoleonic general now in Lafitte’s employ. Akim Tamiroff had played the part in the original. Bote films have excellent production values. The original was nominated for an Oscar for its cinematography, the remake for its costume design.

An under-rated comedy, 1965’s Boeing Boeing was based on a French farce, but plays well in its Americanized version with Tony Curtis as a playboy balancing several stewardesses whose routines are interrupted both by a change in airline schedules and the arrival of his friend Jerry Lewis. This was Lewis’ last film for Paramount and the first in which he plays a fairly sophisticated character. The film, though, is pretty much stolen by Thelma Ritter as the wise-cracking maid, a role for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. Director John Rich went on to distinguish himself as a multi-awarding director of classic TV comedies.

Executive Producer Harry Saltzman began a film based on the life of Vaclav Nijinksy in 1970 with a screenplay by Edward Albee, direction by Tony Richardson and a cast headed by Rudolph Nureyev as the legendary ballet star, Paul Scofield as impresario Sergei Diaghilev and Claude Jade as Nijinky’s wife Romola. Romola’s refusal to cooperate resulted in Saltzman abandoning the unfinished project. Ten years later Romola published a book, the rights to which which Saltzman purchased. That along with Nijinky’s own diary enabled Hugh Wheeler to derive a new screenplay.

This new Nijinksy was directed by Herbert Ross, who three years earlier had reecived an Oscar nomination for his direction of The Turning Point set in the modern day ballet world.

The new version was not any more to Romola’s liking than the previous one, but she was powerless to stop it this time. Her main objection was that the film focused on her husband’s homosexual affair with Diaghilev and made short shrift of her marriage, ending with Nijinky in a strait-jacket and omitting her account of their future domestic bliss and the birth of their two daughters.

The ballet sequences are handled as expertly here as they were in Ross’ earlier effort. The acting is first rate, with Alan Bates giving another finely wrought performance as Diaghilev. George de La Pena, later a Broadway star and now a University dance instructor, makes an intriguing Nijinksy and Leslie Browne, more than a bti lacking as an actress despite her Oscar nomination for The Turning Point redeems herself in that regard this time around.

The Johnny Stompanato murder and its ensuing controversy was the basis for the trashy 1964 “women’s picture”, Where Love Has Gone which featured Susan Hayward in a role obviously based on Lana Turner; Joey Heatherton as her daughter on trial for the murder of her mother’s lover and a grey wigged Bette Davis as Hayward’s malicious mother.

Davis was still fuming from Hayward’s remake of her classic Dark Victory as Stolen Hours and was determined to wipe the floor with her. Her attempts were thwarted by Hayward who had script approval and refused to allow Davis to change any of the film’s purple dialogue. The result is that neither actress comes across at their best, but they’re fascinating to watch.

None of the Olive releases have any special features.

This week’s new DVD releases include the first season of the acclaimed TV series, Game of Thrones, the recent remake of Footloose and Blu-ray upgrades of The Deer Hunter and To Catch a Thief.