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Beggars of Life, not Wings, the first Oscar winner, was the film William Wellman always cited as his favorite among his silent films. It was the Oscar-winning writer-director’s last before turning to talkies, as well as the last Hollywood film made by Louise Brooks before she went to Germany to make the legendary Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl for G.W. Pabst.

Long considered a lost film, Beggars of Life resurfaced in the 1960s and gained cult status in the late 1980s after Brooks’ death. Kino Lorber has released a magnificent Blu-ray of the film, restored by the George Eastman Foundation, with two commentary tracks, one by William Wellman, Jr., and the other by Thomas Gladysz, founding director the Louise Brooks Society.

The film itself is a precursor of Wellman’s beloved 1933 film Wild Boys of the Road, as well as Preston Sturges’ 1942 masterpiece Sullivan’s Travels. All three films feature young girls riding the rails masquerading as boys. In this one, Brooks plays a girl on the run for killing her abusive guardian, with Richard Arlen as her protector. Wellman had given Arlen his first starring role in Wings and was at the time equally as popular as Brooks, but neither was as big a name as Wallace Beery who gets top billing for his supporting turn as Oklahoma Red, the king of the hobos. Beery, who would become an even bigger star in such early talkies as Min and Bill and The Champ, for which he won an Oscar, is a total delight as a heavy with a heart of gold. All three actors do their own stunts, although a double is used for Brooks’ several falls from the trains. It’s based on the memoir of real-life hobo Jim Tully, portrayed in the film by Arlen.

Seven years ago, Kino Lorber released a restored Blu-ray of Orson Welles’ 1946 film The Stranger. Now Olive Films has done it one better, issuing its own Blu-ray of the film Welles disavowed in 1958, with a commentary track by Nora Fiore, better known as internet guru Nitrate Diva. Fiore is correct in stating that Welles was wrong in his assessment of the film, which holds up very well. Granted, the best scenes cinematically are those at the beginning of the film in which Welles’ Citizen Kane-like shadows take center stage. The film’s more melodramatic later scenes, though, are still compelling, and the film is justly renowned as the first Hollywood film to feature documentary footage of the Holocaust.

Oscar-nominated for Best Original Story, Edward G. Robinson receives top billing as an investigator from the War Crimes Commission who travels to a small town in Connecticut in search of a notorious Nazi. His only clue is the former concentration camp director’s fascination with clocks. It doesn’t take the audience long to figure out the Nazi in hiding is a college professor played Welles, newly married to an unsuspecting Loretta Young. Richard Long co-stars as Young’s younger brother and Robinson’s confidant, with an excellent supporting cast that includes Konstantin Shayne and Philip Merivale.

Kino Lorber comes to the rescue yet again with the release of Robert Mulligan’s 1963 film Love with the Proper Stranger, long missing on DVD and Blu-ray. The film stars Natalie Wood in the role that earned her the third and final Oscar nomination of her career, following Rebel Without a Cause and Splendor in the Grass. Steve McQueen, straight from his breakout role in The Great Escape, co-stars under the skilled direction of Mulligan, straight from his own Oscar nomination for To Kill a Mockingbird. It was a highly anticipated film at the time, and a huge commercial hit with Wood as the straight-laced Italian-American girl left pregnant by a one-night stand with musician McQueen who doesn’t remember her. The film co-starred Edie Adams as McQueen’s current girlfriend and marked the screen debut of Tom Bosley as the nebbish Wood’s family tries to steamroll her into marrying. Although the film is remembered as a romantic comedy, it doesn’t really get into full comic mode until it moves toward the film’s end. That’s not a deterrent to our enjoyment, however, as there’s plenty to like in this filmed-in-New-York work that garnered four other Oscar nominations beyond the one for Wood at her best.

Two recent films, newly released on Blu-ray and standard DVD, that were marketed as comedy-dramas, but also put the emphasis on drama, are The Big Sick and The Hero.

The Big Sick, from a screenplay by married couple Valerie Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani, traces their real-life courtship with Nanjiani playing himself and Zoe Kazan playing Gordon. The early scenes in which the two stand-up comics tentatively fall in love is heartfelt even if the stand-up scenes themselves are mostly groaners. The film doesn’t really kick into gear until forty-five minutes in, when Kazan’s character is stricken with a mysterious illness and put into a medically induced coma. Enter Ray Romano and Holly Hunter as Kazan’s parents. Romano, who started out as stand-up comic himself, and Hunter, who rose to prominence thirty years ago in the comedy classics Raising Arizona and Broadcast News, are pure gold with their perfect comic timing. Hunter is especially funny and moving at the same time as she puts a heckler in his place during one of Nanjiani’s performances.

The Hero is one of those films for which its comic designation is totally incongruous. While the film has a few comic moments, it is mostly a downer about an actor approaching his 72nd birthday, who had one major starring role in a film made decades earlier and is now best known as the voice behind a barbeque sauce commercial. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, the actor played by Sam Elliott, has just a short time to say goodbye to his estranged wife and daughter and his latest squeeze. Elliott, a fine actor, who similarly had just one major starring role in 1976’s Lifeguard, plays the actor with real-life wife Katharine Ross (The Graduate, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) given just one brief scene as his estranged wife.

The latest screen version of Wonder Woman received an imposing 92 rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a less imposing, but still strong, 78 rating on Metacritic. The high ratings were largely due to the film’s deft balancing of realistic drama and superhero derring-do. I concur with the former, but have a few reservations about the latter.

Patty Jenkins’ first film since 2003’s Monster is nicely appointed with superb World War 1 vintage costuming, art direction, and costume design. The scenes between Gal Gadot as the Amazon princess and Chris Pine as her American hero are well handled, as are some of the early sequences involving Connie Nielsen as her ruling mother and Robin Wright as her warrior aunt. Later scenes with Danny Huston as a nasty German warmonger and David Thewlis as a British aristocrat, are also well done, but the film’s climactic reliance on CGI was a bit too much for me. Still, as modern superhero movies go, this is one of the better ones.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray upgrades of The Piano Teacher and Brigadoon.

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