Not only have home video releases slowed down, but the processing plants that print DVDs and Blu-rays have also slowed down or gone out of business. That’s one of the reasons for the slowdown of Warner Archive releases.

Half of their January releases were delayed until early February and only a measly three Blu-ray upgrades of classic films were released late in the month. They were Mogambo, Tarzan and His Mate, and Stranger on the Third Floor.

Mogambo is John Ford’s 1953 remake of Victor Fleming’s 1932 film, Red Dust, which was released by the archive in late January.

A smash hit in its days, Red Dust was set on a rubber plantation in French Indochina (Vietnam) with Clark Gable as the plantation owner and Jean Harlow and Mary Astor as the women complicating his life. Gable reprises his role in the remake, but this time he is a big game hunter in Kenya and the women complicating his life are Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly.

Filmed mostly on location in Kenya, Mogambo looks spectacular in this presentation meticulously restored from 4K scans of the original Technicolor negatives.

The title is a made-up word, allegedly meaning “great” but that was made up for the film’s trailer. Produced by Sam Zimbalist (Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur), it is the most spectacular film ever directed by Ford who made it between The Quiet Man and The Long Gray Line, both of which co-starred Maureen O’Hara who was Ford’s choice for the Harlow role given to Gardner by MGM over his head.

Gardner, who was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her performance, is good as the Broadway showgirl stranded in the African jungle, but she is not nearly as good as Harlow was in the Pre-Code original in which her character was clearly meant to be a thinly disguised prostitute.

Gable, still a strong leading man 21 years after the original, is once again at the top of his craft in what was only the third color film of his career, his most famous being of course, Gone with the Wind, which was the first of the three. The 1951 flop, Across the Wide Missouri, was the second.

Kelly is also excellent in Astor’s old role as the wife of the anthropologist who is as attracted to Gable as he is to her. Doanld Sinden has the Gene Raymond role of her husband.

Kelly received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her performance having won a Golden Globe for it earlier in the year. She would win for the Oscar for Best Actress for The Country Girl the following year.

1934’s Tarzan and His Mate was the second in the MGM franchise starring Johnny Weismuller as Tarzan and Maureen O’Sullivan as his Jane. It was the only film directed by Cedric Gibbons, the head of MGM’s art department, who received 39 Oscar nominations and 11 Oscars for his art direction in his long career. He was aided in his direction of Tarzan and His Mate by Jack Conway and James C. McKay.

More spectacular than its1932 predecessor, Tarzan the Ape Man directed by W.S. Van Dyke, Tarzan and His Mate was the last Pre-Code film in the franchise. The skimpy costumes worn by Weissmuller and O’Sullivan would become decidedly more modest in the next Tarzan film and all the ones that followed.

The film features thousands of wild animals, including elephants, lions, hippos, rhinos, and at least one crocodile. It also features a highly controversial extended nude swimming scene with Jane. O’Sullivan used a body double for that, not she said, out of modesty but because of her claustrophobic fear of swimming underwater. She did, however, do many of her stunts as did Weismuller.

Co-starring along with Neil Hamilton, Paul Cavanagh, and various African natives, are white dwarfs in blackface as African pygmies, some of whom are said to have been among the munchkins in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz.

Stranger on the Third Floor is a 1940 RKO second feature that is credited with being the first film noir. It was the first of just three films directed by writer Boris Ingster (The Amazing Mrs. Holliday) who later became a TV producer (The Man from U.N.C.L.E. ).

The film stars John McGuire as a reporter who witnesses a murder for which he becomes the star witness. After the accused (Elisha Cook, Jr.) is convicted and sentenced to death, McGuire begins to have doubts and suspects that a stranger (Peter Lorre) he saw outside his third-floor walk-up apartment could be the murderer.

Margaret Tallicher, who plays McGuire’s girlfriend, was a tented actress who only made a handful of films before retiring to raise her five children with her legendary director-husband, William Wyler.

Newly released on Blu-ray, Richard Linklater’s 2025 film, Blue Moon features an Oscar-nominated performance by Owen Hawke as diminutive lyricist Lorenz “Larry” Hart who with Richard Rodgers wrote some of Broadway’s greatest scores before Rodgers found even greater success with Oscar Hammerstein II as his lyricist.

The film takes place in an off-Broadway bar on March 31, 1943, the night that Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! opened. An after-party for Rodgers & Hammerstein was being held upstairs from the bar where Hawke as a very inebriated Hart trades barbs with Bobby Cannavale as the bartender, Margaret Qualley as a sophisticated college student, Andrews Scott as Rodgers, David Rawle as a young George Roy Hill, Simon Delaney as Hammerstein, and Cillian Sullivan as “Stevie” Sondheim.

Allegedly based on a true story, it is nevertheless also nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Hmmm.

Happy viewing.