Lady Macbeth is not based on Shakespeare’s famed Scottish play. It is an adaptation of an 1865 Russian novel called Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov, which in its day was compared to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Transferring the tale to Jane Austen’s England makes the dark goings-on seem out-of-place, though some critics have compared the film favorably to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

Like William Wyler’s famed 1939 film version of Wuthering Heights, William Oldroyd’s film of Lady Macbeth does not tell the whole story of the novel, but does cover its most interesting aspects. Unlike Wuthering Heights, however, the characters here are not very memorable. If you don’t like spoilers, you might want to skip the next two paragraphs.

Florence Pugh, barely out of her teens during filming, doesn’t have the dramatic heft to pull off such a vile character. Sold into marriage to a cold husband, Pugh is not allowed to leave his estate and is constantly under the watchful eye of either her husband or his nasty father. When her husband is off investigating a problem in his mill, she becomes sexually involved with a farm worker and poisons her father-in-law to get him out of the way. When the husband returns, she goads him into attacking her lover, so she can hit him over the head and kill him. After he is reported missing, an aristocratic older woman shows up with her grandson with papers proving he is Pugh’s ward. She claims the child was the husband’s illegitimate son. In the novel, the boy was the man’s nephew.

Pugh takes a liking to the boy, but when she deems him a threat to her ongoing affair, she smothers him. In the novel, she is seen killing the boy through a window and her lover confesses to aiding her in that murder as well as the murder of her husband and the two are banished to Siberia, where more murders and mayhem will ensue before she eventually drowns. In the film, he confesses but she denies involvement. He is carted off to his fate, while she remains alone anticipating the birth of her illegitimate child.

Released only on standard DVD in the U.S., an imported French Blu-ray is available.

Another film that is available only on standard DVD in the U.S., but is available on an imported Blu-ray, is Another Happy Day. This is not a new release, but it is new to me.

The directorial debut of Sam Levinson, son of Oscar winner Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Bugsy), the younger Levinson’s 2011 film is about a dysfunctional family at a wedding, a subgenre of films about dysfunctional families that began with Robert Altman’s 1978 film A Wedding and continues through Noah Baumbach’s 2007 film Margot at the Wedding and Jonathan Demme’s 2008 film Rachel Getting Married all the way to this one. It’s a subgenre of a genre that could use a rest.

Despite my misgivings about the type of film I knew it was, I watched it for the cast and what a cast it has – Ellen Barkin, Ezra Miller, Ellen Burstyn, Demi Moore, Thomas Haden Church, Kate Bosworth, George Kennedy, Jeffrey DeMunn, Diana Scarwid, and more. Barkin and Burstyn won AARP Movies for Grownups awards for their performances, Barkin as Best Actress, Burstyn as Best Supporting Actress. They’re both very good, Barkin as a middle-aged mother of four (including the groom) and Burstyn as her mother who sides with Barkin’s former husband (Church) and his second wife (Moore) in family arguments. Miller, more than 30 years too young for an AARP award, matches them in intensity as Barkin’s drug addicted third child. It’s a pity the film didn’t figure in any other year-end awards, which would have given it more exposure, but it’s nice to have discovered it at long last.

Among the previously released films new to Blu-ray are The Miracle Worker, Junior Bonner, Scarecrow, and The Madness of King George.

First presented as a TV play with acclaimed performances by Teresa Wright and Patty McCormack, the Broadway version of The Miracle Worker rescued Anne Bancroft from a career of supporting roles in A-pictures like Demetrius and the Gladiators and leads in B-pictures such as Gorilla at Large, while at the same time making a star of little Patty Duke. The two reprised their roles of Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller in the 1961 film version, leading to Oscars and sustained careers for both. Bancroft always mused that when she died she would be referred to as the star of 1967’s The Graduate, unlike Duke and every other Oscar winner, whose obituaries would refer to them as the star of their Oscar-winning vehicle. She was right. The Olive Films Blu-ray provides ample reason for wondering why that was so.

Better remembered for the violence of 1969’s The Wild Bunch and 1971’s Straw Dogs, Sam Peckinpah’s 1972 modern western Junior Bonner, about a family of rodeo riders, is his kindest, most gentle film, and in many ways, his best. Steve McQueen had one of his best roles as the rodeo star on the wrong side of 40. Even better are Robert Preston as his ne’er-do-well father and Ida Lupino as his resigned-to-her-fate mother. Lupino was runner-up for both a New York Film Critics and a National Society of Film Critics award for her first big-screen role in 16 years. The Kino Lorber Blu-ray imports the excellent commentary from the previous DVD.

Jerry Schatzberg’s 1973 film Scarecrow, about a cross-country excursion by Gene Hackman and Al Pacino from Northern California to Pittsburgh, Penn., won Schatzberg the Palme d’Or at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. It’s a low-key film that benefits more from Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography than the performances of its two stars, but it does capture them at a time when they were at the top of the Hollywood heap. Hackman made this between The Poseidon Adventure and The Conversation, Pacino between The Godfather and Serpico. Warner Archive did their usual fine job of restoring it for Blu-ray.

Nicholas Hytner’s 1994 film of dementia in high places, The Madness of King George, provided veteran character actor Nigel Hawthorne with his greatest role and gave Helen Mirren, as Queen Charlotte, her first role as a British royal. Both were nominated for Oscars for the film which won for its production design. Olive Films has restored it for Blu-ray.

Not on Blu-ray, but remastered to near-perfection on standard DVD, The Inspector Lynley Mysteries of just a decade ago have been given a pristine look that should bring them the attention they deserve as one of the better of the modern British mystery series.

This week’s new releases include The Glass Castle and the Blu-ray debut of Summer of ‘42.