On stage, the still-running 2005 Broadway musical Jersey Boys is a crowd-pleasing jukebox musical in which the hit songs of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons take center stage with background information supplied by each of the four actors playing Valli and the other members of the group. On film, the background information takes center stage with the music more or less pushed to into the background. The problem is that the group’s background story is just not that interesting, at least not the way director Clint Eastwood chooses to tell it.

The film opens when Valli, played by 39-year-old actor John Lloyd Young who originated the role on Broadway, is supposed to be 16. That would be fine if the opening scenes only lasted a few seconds or even minutes the way such scenes last in other biographical films. The problem is that the early scenes go on and on with Young photographed in long and medium shots with his head down most of the time so as not to show his age, distancing himself from the audience. Add to that the fact that these early scenes are mostly pointless exercises about juvenile shenanigans involving minor mob figures that take us away from the main story, and it just seems pointless. For most of the film we have no idea what year we’re in or how old the characters are unless you’re familiar with the dates of the group’s hits and know that Valli was born in 1934.

Dramatically the film hits high points only twice, when dealing with the tremendous debt one of the group’s members has run up with the mob and when one of Valli’s three daughters dies of a drug overdose. In real life Valli was married three times, had six biological children and several stepchildren, three of whom died at a young age.

The biggest problem with the film, though, is that the music just doesn’t soar until the last five minutes of the film when the entire cast takes to the street to perform Valli’s 1975 hit, “December 1963 (Oh What a Night)” after the group has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990 when Valli would have been 56. He is now 80.

The four principals, Young, Erich Bergen, Vincent Piazza and Michael Lomenda do well enough with their under-written roles and certainly sing well enough to seamlessly mimic the real group but none of the supporting cast stands out, not even Christopher Walken as a benign mobster who does all he can to help the boys.

Jersey Boys is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Tis the season for selling all things Christmas related and the DVD companies are no exception. TCM has released a Blu-ray upgrade of the 1940 Christmas film Remember the Night, while Warner Home Video has released Blu-ray upgrades of the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol and the 1945 delight Christmas in Connecticut.

Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray make Mitchell Leisen’s Remember the Night, script by Preston Sturges, a pure joy. She’s a petty thief. He’s a Manhattan Assistant District Attorney prosecuting her for stealing jewelry mid-day on Christmas Eve. Feeling sorry for her after he postpones her trial until after New Year’s, he bails her out of jail and takes her with him on his Christmas visit to his widowed mother and old-maid aunt, played with their usual wit and charm by Beulah Bondi and Elizabeth Patterson. Stanwyck and MacMurray would be re-united for a completely different type of love story four years later as a cold-blooded moll and her insurance agent when she seduces him to murder her husband in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. They’re terrific together in both instances.

Stanwyck is also the star of Peter Godfrey’s Christmas in Connecticut in which she is once again a total delight as a sort of 1940s version of Martha Stewart, a perfect homemaker whose mansion is a dingy apartment and who can’t cook to save her life, but has a friend (Reginald Gardiner) who owns a home in Connecticut, and a chef at a restaurant (S.Z. Sakall) who cooks the dishes she talks about in her magazine articles. Put them together and she has a place to entertain a naval hero (Dennis Morgan) and her magazine empire’s owner (Sydney Greenstreet) for the holidays. Stanwyck and Morgan play the cat-and-mouse lovers extremely pleasantly and Greenstreet, Sakall and the always wonderful Una O’Connor provide the laughs.

The 1938 version of A Christmas Carol alternated with the now better known 1951 version in TV broadcasts for much of the 1950s-1970s, after which the 1951 version almost completely took over TV holiday showings.

Alastair Sim in the 1951 version may be the definitive Scrooge, and that version’s narrative may be closer to Dickens’ original, but the 1938 version is not without its charms. Reginald Owen, a Hollywood stalwart from 1911 to his death in 1972 at the age of 85, played everything from Dr. Watson in 1932’s Sherlock Holmes to Holmes himself in 1933’s A Study in Scarlet to old gentlemen in Mrs. Miniver and Green Dolphin Street to very old gentlemen in Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. He got to play Scrooge by happenstance. The role was to have been played by Lionel Barrymore whose annual playing of the part on radio was always an audience favorite, but Barrymore’s confinement to a wheelchair due to a twice-broken hip and debilitating arthritis caused him to back out of the film version.

Owen is ably supported by Leo G. Carrol as Marley’s ghost, Gene Lockhart as Bob Cratchit and Terry Kilburn as Tiny Tim, among other memorable players.

Barrymore himself, of course, continued to play many memorable roles from his wheelchair, not the least of which was that old curmudgeon, Dr. Gillespie, in the Dr. Kildare series with Lew Ayres from 1938 to 1942. When Ayres left the popular series, Barrymore soldiered on six more films in which Gillespie became the central character. These enjoyable films, which were released between 1942 and 1947, have been culled together by Warner Archive in the Dr. Gillespie Movie Collection.

Warner Archive has also released the 1945 version of The Picture of Dorian Gray on Blu-ray. A favorite of just about anyone who has ever seen it, it’s odd that Warner Bros. would be releasing this Oscar-winning classic (for art direction) through their boutique label rather than through Warner Home Video in the same week that they are releasing the less well-known Christmas in Connecticut, but they must know what they’re doing.

Oscar Wilde’s classic has been filmed numerous times, but none has ever equaled the class and style of Albert Lewin’s version with Hurd Hatfield, George Sanders and Oscar nominee Angela Lansbury at the top of their game, with solid support from Donna Reed, Peter Lawford, Lowell Gilmore and Lansbury’s mother, Moyna MacGill.

This week’s new releases include The Wind Rises and Housebound.