Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection on Blu-ray, Universal has released Blu-ray compilations of Frankenstein: Complete Legacy Collection and The Wolf Man: Complete Legacy Collection, which expound on two of the classic monster characters.

The Frankenstein collection, in addition to the original 1931 Frankenstein and 1935 Bride of Frankenstein included in the four-year-old set, includes Son of Frankenstein, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

The Wolf Man collection, in addition to the original 1941 film duplicates Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein, and Abbott and Costello Meet the Wolf Man from the Frankenstein collection, adds two films unique to this collection, 1935’s Were-Wolf of London and the underrated atmospheric 1946 mystery She-Wolf of London.

Warner Archive continues its stream of Blu-ray releases of films previously available only on standard DVD with Love Me or Leave Me, the excellent 1955 biography of singer Ruth Etting and her gangster boyfriend/husband Marty the Gimp, played by respectively by Doris Day and James Cagney, both of whom are at their very best. This was unquestionably Day’s finest musical and her finest dramatic performance. Cagney, who doesn’t sing or dance in this one, gets to give one of his most powerful performances as the loutish Marty, second only to his Cody Jarrett in 1949’s White Heat in intensity. It earned him his third and final Oscar nomination.

Cameron Mitchell is also excellent as Etting’s accompanist, Meryl Alderman, called “Johnny” in the film, who would become her second husband. Extras include three of the many shorts Etting starred in during her Hollywood years.

Criterion has released a beautifully restored Blu-ray of Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum.

Mizoguchi (1898-1956) was one of Japan’s master directors, whose Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff were staples of 1950s international cinema. Film buffs and historians have, however, since 1979b been gradually warming to the idea that his masterpiece is not either of those long-regarded triumphs, but 1939’s Chrysanthemum, which did not reach the U.S. until forty years later.

Chrysanthemum is about the life of an actor both on stage and off. It is also more subtly the film about the oppression of women, not in feudal Japan, but in the country’s more recent history. Set in the late 1890s, the film begins with a Kabuki production of a play in which a wealthy farmer kills his aging wife in order to marry a much younger woman. The film’s protagonist, a struggling actor, makes an inelegant entrance in the production in which his father, a celebrated Kabuki actor, is the star. Off stage, the struggling actor who is desperately trying to follow in his father’s footsteps, has fallen in love with the servant who takes care of his baby brother. The family finds this unthinkable and dismisses her, but all she lives for is pleasing him. Will the two ever find lasting happiness? You’ll have to watch the film to find that out.

Kino Lorber has released Blu-ray upgrades of two disparate earlier DVD releases, Jean Negulesco’s 1948 film noir Road House and Melville Shavelson’s 1968 family comedy Yours, Mine and Ours.

Ida Lupino, a year after leaving Warner Bros., was two years away from becoming one of Hollywood’s then-few female directors. She plays a woman best described as a drifter in Road House, a role usually reserved for men. She becomes the center of a triangle that includes the stalwart Cornel Wilde and the maniacal Richard Widmark. Celeste Holm, who gets star billing over Widmark thanks to her recent Oscar win for Gentleman’s Agreement, has a thankless role as an employee of the titled road house where Lupino has become the star attraction.

Lupino, whose family went back centuries in the theatre in England and, before that, Italy, had played singers before, but her voice was always dubbed. Here she gets to sing herself, one of the songs she sings, “Again,” even made the hit parade in early 1949. Along with 1941’s Ladies in Retirement, 1943’s The Hard Way, and 1947’s The Man I Love, it is one of the few films in which she is the film’s indisputable star instead of just a player in a strong ensemble.

Lucille Ball at 53 was twenty-one years older than the real life character she is playing in Yours, Mine and Ours and Henry Fonda at 63 is equally too old for his part, but it all works thanks to a breezy script and the stars being augmented by a strong supporting cast in this winning blended family classic in which she plays a widow with eight children and he plays a widower with ten.

Van Johnson as a family friend and Tom Bosley as their doctor get top billing in support, but it’s the kids, especially Tim Matheson, Mitch Vogel, and Eric Shea, who are the standouts in the supporting cast. Future stars Morgan Brittany and Tracy Nelson are also cast as members of the large family, but have less to do.

Still potent after all these years, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit – The Seventeenth Year has been released on standard DVD.

The highlight of this season was the introduction of Andy Karl as the new detective sergeant on the squad led by now-lieutenant Mariska Hargitay. The character’s father is Hargitay’s boss, played by Peter Gallagher. Karl, the veteran of many Broadway musicals, recently received back-to-back Tony nominations for playing the lead in Rocky – The Musical and the gigolo in the revival of On the Twentieth Century, in which Gallagher starred opposite Kristen Chenoweth.
There is an underlying sense of dread throughout the 17th season, which plays itself out in the season’s final episode which ends with an excruciating death scene and a police funeral.

This week’s new releases include Beauty and the Beast: 25th Anniversary Edition and the U.S. Blu-ray debut of Fanny.