Universal’s 100th Anniversary Collector’s Series continues with the February release of All Quiet on the Western Front, the anti-war masterpiece that is as riveting today as it was 82 years ago.

Called Laemmle’s folly during production because no one thought 22-year-old producer Carl Laemmle, Jr.’s pet project would make a dime, the film became his father’s studio’s first prestige film since the mid-1920s. Hailed by critics and audiences alike, the film was a box-office hit of major proportions and handily won the Oscar as Best Picture of 1929/30.

The film, based on Erich Maria Remarque’s brilliant novel, follows a group of German schoolboys who enlist in the Kaiser’s Army during World War I and quickly become disillusioned by the harsh realities of war. The film made a major star of Lew Ayres, who had his first starring role the year before in The Kiss opposite Greta Garbo.

As the young soldier whose friends are one by one either incapacitated or killed, Ayres was the emotional center of the film. Unfortunately Hollywood really didn’t know what to do with him until George Cukor cast him as Katharine Hepburn’s sensitive alcoholic brother in 1938’s Holiday, after which he became immensely popular in MGM’s Dr. Kildare series. The actor was so affected by his portrayal of the young soldier in All Quiet that he became a conscientious objector during World War II which eroded his fan base. It was only after Olivia de Havilland insisted on him as her co-star in 1946’s The Dark Mirror that word of his heroism as a medic during the war became public knowledge and his career was restored, earning him an Oscar nomination for 1948’s Johnny Belinda and sustaining him at the top of his profession until his death fifty years later.

Ayres wasn’t the only actor of note to appear in the film, however. Character actor Louis Wolheim, who usually played bad guys, was singled out for his portrayal of the gruff but kind-hearted sergeant and was well on his way to a career resurgence in director Lewis Milestone’s next film as the star of The Front Page when he died of cancer and was replaced by Adolphe Menjou.

Ben Alexander, who played the proud possessor of his uncle’s boots, and whose hospital death scene is one of the film’s highlights, became a household name in 1948 as Jack Webb’s partner in Dragnet, first on radio, and then on TV.

Russell Gleason, who plays the friend who inherits Alexander’s boots, was the son of character actors James and Lucile Gleason. Aside from the popular Higgins Family series he made with his parents, his later career was undistinguished. His death from a fall from a hotel window ledge in midtown Manhattan on Christmas night, 1945 was ruled accidental. He was 37 years old.

William Bakewell, who played Ayres’ last friend to die, was a popular juvenile of the early thirties. His career sputtered, but he hung on in bit roles through the 1970s.

Slim Summerville, basically the comic relief as he always was, had a steady career in films until his death in 1946, including a series of B features in which he starred with ZaSu Pitts, who played Ayres’ mother in All Quiet until her appearance in the trailer caused audiences to laugh inappropriately and her scenes to be re-filmed with Beryl Mercer in the role.

Raymond Griffith, who plays the slowly dying French soldier in one of the film’s most memorable sequences, was a child actor who lost his voice after shrieking loudly in a scene in a play when he was 8. The loss of his voice didn’t stop him from enlisting in the Army in 1910 at the age of 15 or from becoming a major silent screen star. Talkies killed his acting career, but not before giving one last, great performance as that dying soldier. In behind-the-scenes roles for the remainder of his career, he died from asphyxia after choking on a piece of meat in 1957 at the age of 62.

The Blu-ray version includes the rarely scene silent version from a Library of Congress print. The silent version, which has a music score unlike the sound version, makes for a fascinating comparison. It’s also edited a bit differently with the long, talky scenes from the sound version necessarily cut short.

To many except the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, one of last year’s outstanding performances was provided by Michael Shannon in Jeff Nichols’ eerily affectingTake Shelter. Shannon plays a young husband and father with a psychotic mother who has begun to have apocalyptic visions that may point to his own mental illness. He builds an elaborate and expensive shelter in his backyard to keep his family from impending doom. Everyone including his wife, the ubiquitous Jessica Chastain, thinks he’s lost his marbles, but has he? Both Shannon and Chastain are terrific and the closing sequence makes for one of the most memorable endings in recent years..

Angela Lansbury was 58 when she first essayed the role of amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher in the hit TV series, Murder, She Wrote. She was 70 when the series ended and 78 by the time she made the last of four TV movies spun the series. On screen, however, she hardly seemed to have aged at all.

All twelve seasons of the series having previously been released on DVD, Universal has now released all four TV movies under the umbrella title, Murder, She Wrote: 4 Movie Collection.

The films took a while to find their footing. The title of the first, 1997’s South by Southwest is a play on Alfred Hitchcock 1959 film, North by Northwest, but is actually a quasi-remake of Hitchcock’s 1938 film, The Lady Vanishes. TV actress Mel Harris guest stars in a slow moving, but convoluted mystery that is nevertheless fairly easy to figure out from the get-go.

The second, 2000’s A Story to Die For, set in the literary world, is slighter better but seems like a stretched out version of what would have played better as a one hour episode of the series. It’s not very involving despite Lansbury’s usual class act and a memorable guest starring turn by Richard Crenna.

Lansbury has a dual role as both Jessica Fletcher and an ancestral aunt in the antebellum South in 2001’s very good The Last Free Man. An old letter from the aunt leads to more letters and her journal which resolve the murder of a plantation owner on his wedding night. Phylicia Raschad and David Ogden Stiers co-star as historians and a pre-stardom Taraji P. Henson has a nice turn as a runaway slave. Gloria Stuart has an interesting cameo as a seemingly batty old lady who holds one of the keys to the mystery.

The last film, 2003’s fast-moving The Celtic Riddle takes place in Ireland where Lasnbury’s Fletcher is an unexpected heir to a cottage left her by a man whose life she saved many years before. Fionnula Flanagan guest stars as the man’s widow.

This week’s new DVD releases include J. Edgar and Martha Marcy May Marlene and the Blu-ray debuts of classics Fort Apache and Anatomy of a Murder.