My Man Godfrey has been given a beautiful 4K restoration for its Blu-ray debut by Criterion. The look of it is leap years beyond Criterion’s previously released DVD which was itself a marvel considering that the film had been a victim of public domain hell after Universal goofed and failed to renew its copyright in 1974.

This is the classic for which the term “screwball comedy” was coined. It was also the first film that was nominated for Oscars in all four acting categories. It was nominated for six Oscars overall, including Best Director and Best Screenplay but ironically failed to win a nomination for Best Picture. Film scholars and historians still bristle at Carole Lombard’s Best Actress loss to Luise Rainer in The Great Ziegfeld, 1936’s Best Picture winner which, like My Man Godfrey, was one of that year’s five smash hits starring William Powell.

Released in April 1936, MGM’s The Great Ziegfeld starred Powell as the legendary Broadway producer with Myrna Loy as his second wife, actress Billie Burke (The Wizard of Oz), and Rainer as his first wife, stage star Anna Held. A month later came MGM’s comedy-mystery The Ex-Mrs. Bradford in which Powell starred opposite Jean Arthur in lieu of Loy in a film in the same vein as their beloved 1934 masterpiece The Thin Man.

Powell leaped at the chance to make My Man Godfrey for which he insisted on the casting of ex-wife Lombard over director Gregory La Cava’s choice of Constance Bennett on loan-out to Universal. Although the couple had been divorced for several years, they remained friends with Lombard now romantically linked to Clark Gable who she would marry in 1939. Powell, himself, was now linked romantically to Jean Harlow with whom he would make his fourth film of the year, MGM’s Libeled Lady, also starring Loy and Spencer Tracy, released in October. His fifth film of the year would be MGM’s After the Thin Man opposite Loy, released to both critical acclaim and box-office success on Christmas Day.

Of all of Powell’s great successes in 1936, My Man Godfrey is the one that keeps astounding audiences the most in its deep humanity as well as its simplicity and hilarity.

Powell is perfect as the “forgotten man” found on a garbage heap in Hooverville who endears himself as the butler in the home of rich eccentrics Eugene Pallette, Alice Brady, and their daughters, Gail Patrick and Lombard. It’s Lombard, though, who is the film’s heart and soul as the exasperatingly ditzy but never dumb heroine. Only Irene Dunne in Leo McCarey’s 1937 comedy classic The Awful Truth ever came close to matching her effortless mix of silliness and sophistication in this as well as in 1937’s Nothing Sacred, 1939’s Made for Each Other, and 1942’s To Be or Not to Be, the latter released after her tragic death in a plane crash returning from selling U.S. war bonds shortly after the outbreak of World War II.

Brady and Mischa Auer as a houseguest who does a great gorilla imitation were the other Oscar-nominated players. Oddly, Pallette, who has the film’s wittiest as well as most sarcastic lines, was overlooked. La Cava would go on to win another nomination for his direction of the following year’s Stage Door.

Joan Crawford’s legendary starring career pretty much ended with 1957’s The Story of Esther Costello. Her role in 1959’s The Best of Everything was a supporting one. 1962’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was truly a comeback film, but, unlike co-star Bette Davis who resurrected her career with her performance in that, Crawford followed it with a supporting turn in 1963’s The Caretakers, after which she had just one more real shot at sustaining her star power.

1964’s Strait-Jacket, which has dueling Blu-ray releases from Shout! Factory and Mill Creek, is in some ways as cheesy as any horror film from William Castle, but in others a compelling mystery, which is played to the hilt by Crawford and Diane Baker as the daughter she has been separated from since being confined to a mental institution for twenty years following the axe murders of her husband and his mistress when Baker was three.

Crawford chews the scenery, but it’s all in good fun as someone in a Crawford mask commits new axe murders. Leif Ericson, Rochelle Hudson, John Anthony Hayes, Edith Atwater, Howard St. John, and George Kennedy co-star.

The Shout! Factory edition has tons of extras including a three-person commentary and an interview with Anne Helm who was fired from the film and replaced by Baker at Crawford’s insistence. The Mill Creek release is a no-frills edition but is a twofer that also features Berserk!, Crawford’s less successful 1967 film co-starring Ty Hardin.

Warner Archive has released a stunning Blu-ray edition of John Milius’ Big Wednesday, his well-regarded 1978 surfing film starring Jan-Michael Vincent, William Katt, and Gary Busey as popular surfers of the 1960s and early 1970s. Katt’s real-life mother, Barbara Hale, plays his mother here. They would reunite for 1985’s Perry Mason Returns in which Hale reprised her iconic secretary Della Street opposite Raymond Burr’s legendary lawyer and Katt played the son of Private Detective Paul Drake.

Lionsgate has released a 30th Anniversary Blu-ray edition of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1988 film Tucker: The Man and His Dream. The story of Preston Tucker, the maverick car designer and his ill-fated challenge to the auto industry with his revolutionary car concept, remains a difficult film to watch given its outcome in which the good guy is beaten by the system. It is nevertheless a compelling story with superb performances from Jeff Bridges, Joan Allen, Martin Laudau, Dean Stockwell, Frederic Forest, Mako, and others.

Landau was nominated for an Oscar for his performance and Stockwell won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performances in both this and Married to the Mob. He was Oscar-nominated for the latter.

The popular Canadian TV series Murdoch Mysteries has for the third year in a row released a Christmas movie separate from the full season package released a month earlier. This year’s movie is called Murdoch Mysteries: Home for the Holidays. In it, Murdoch and his wife travel across the country to spend the holidays with his brother and his family while the rest of the regulars deal with the mayhem back in Toronto. It’s available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

This week’s new releases include the long overdue release of The Farmer’s Daughter and the Criterion release of A Raisin in the Sun.