Warner Bros. has given four of its Oscar winning classics well-earned Blu-ray upgrades.

The Jazz Singer was nominated in only one category at the 1927/28 inaugural Oscars, for Best Adapted Screenplay, but the studio received a special Academy Award (they weren’t yet the Oscars) “for producing The Jazz Singer, the pioneer outstanding talking picture, which has revolutionized the industry.”

The Jazz Singer wasn’t the first talking picture as is popularly believed, but it was the first successful one, so successful in fact that it did indeed revolutionize the industry. Sound films, to be precise, go back as far as 1895. Warner Bros.’ first Vitaphone (discs synchronized with moving pictures) film was 1926’s Don Juan featuring full orchestral accompaniment and sound effects. It was released along with several shorts including one in which an opera singer sings and one in which the New York Philharmonic Orchestra is seen playing in all their glory. In the build-up to the release of The Jazz Singer, a myriad of shorts, mostly featuring singers, were released. The most popular of these was A Plantation Act featuring “the world’s greatest entertainer” Al Jolson singing three of his signature songs. Unfortunately Jolson could not be cast in The Jazz Singer as a contract had been signed with George Jessel who had originated the role on stage. However, when Jessel learned he would also have to talk and sing as well as act in what he had been led to believe would be a silent film, he asked for more money giving Warner Bros. the opportunity to to cast the bigger star.

Jolson, who had been a Broadway star since 1912 as well as a recording and radio superstar, was not as he has been called in recent times “a white man who made fun of black people”. Although he often appeared in blackface, he was not a minstrel. He did not imitate black people. His use of blackface, as was common at the time, was to highlight his eyes, mouth and hands so that people in the back rows could see him better. Nevertheless the notion has persisted to the point where it has damaged the reputation of both the legendary star and the landmark film. It shouldn’t.

Once the less cumbersome process of putting sound directly on film was established, Vitaphone was abandoned and in 1931 Warner Bros. re-edited The Jazz Singer to put the sound directly on the film. This is the way the film had been shown until the 2007 80th Anniversary DVD restoration which was sourced from the original Vitaphone discs. The result was an incredible recreation of the magic initial audiences felt when the film was first shown from 1927 to 1929 as it became the inaugural attraction for newly designed theaters equipped for Vitaphone.

The film itself has a plot that was considered creaky even then, but it is handled with verve and skill by Jolson, his leading lady, May McAvoy and especially Warner Oland as Jolson’s estranged father. Oland, later the screen’s definite Charlie Chan, was a consummate actor who was as believable as the stubborn, bearded cantor as he was as the incomparable Chinese-American detective.

The Blu-ray upgrade improves upon the already astounding DVD picture and sound and includes all the extras from the 80th Anniversary release. The second and third discs in the set have not been upgraded. They’re on the reissued standard DVDs and include a wealth of material on the history of sound on film.

An enormous hit in its day, Grand Hotel is the only Oscar winning Best Picture in the history of the Academy Awards to have won without being nominated in any other category.

The film is based on a best-selling novel by Vicki Baum, which was purchased by MGM and first presented as a Broadway play to drum up interest. It became the most anticipated film of 1932 as the MGM publicity machine worked overtime to sell it as the first all-star film. Since the advent of sound, most films were made with one or two stars. This one had five, with two major co-stars. The stars were Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery and Lionel Barrymore, the co-stars Lewis Stone and Jean Hersholt.

The most anticipated pairing was that of Garbo, then the screen’s most intriguing actress, and John Barrymore, the great Broadway actor of his generation and a matinee idol on both stage and the silent screen. Garbo plays a tired ballerina, John Barrymore an impoverished baron. Both are beautifully photographed, but, alas, neither is at their best. Even Garbo, when viewing the film in later years, felt her over-acting was a bit much. The film is stolen by Crawford and Lionel Barrymore.

Crawford plays a stenographer whose past as a nude model and prostitute is so subtly handled that even today it goes over most people’s heads. The actress, who is radiantly photographed, has never looked more beautiful on screen. Nor has she ever given a better performance, equally good perhaps, but never better. Lionel Barrymore, who could ham it up with the best of them, is held pretty much in check, winning audience sympathy as a dying bookkeeper with controlled dignity. Beery, on the other hand, is a loud, obnoxious bore in one of his least effective performances as a scheming industrialist

Extras include an informative making-of documentary.

One of the most successful and acclaimed films of its era, Mrs. Miniver received twelve Oscar nominations and won six. The box office bonanza was conceived by MGM at the urging of President Roosevelt to stir American interest in helping the British fight Hitler. By the time of the film’s release, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. was forced into war in the Pacific, sending troops to England shortly thereafter.

The film, which is about the change in life in a British village at the outset of World War II, offers at its heart, two unforgettable love stories – a mature one between long-married Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon and another between their son Richard Ney and Teresa Wright, the grand-daughter of local aristocrat Dame May Whitty. An amusing subplot involves stationmaster Henry Travers and his prize rose named after Garson’s character. All five were Oscar nominated for their performances with Garson and Wright winning.

The film fell out of popularity in the more cynical 1970s, but has won newfound respect with the passage of time. It’s an England that never was, to be sure, but it’s a lovely portrait of life as maybe it should be if it isn’t. William Wyler’s meticulous direction and the film’s superb craftsmanship on all fronts deserve the many accolades the film has received over the years.

The film looks and sounds better than ever on Blu-ray, but there are no extras.

An unlikely Best Picture Oscar winner, 1989’s Driving Miss Daisy, based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning off-Broadway play, is basically a series of vignettes about a stubborn old Southern Jewish lady who ages from 72 in 1948 to 97 in 1973 and her black chauffer. What makes it memorable is the smart dialogue and the performances of the film’s stars, Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. Tandy, a Broadway legend, had been a character actress on screen since the early 1940s but had never had a starring role on film. She beat out a number of screen legends including Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Anne Bancroft, Shirley MacLaine, Maggie Smith, Angela Lansbury, Ann Sothern, Elizabeth Taylor and Vanessa Redgrave for the part. She became at the age of 80 the oldest actress to win an Oscar, a record that could be broken this year by soon to be 86 year-old Emmanuelle Riva in Amour.

The Blu-ray carries over all the extras from the previous DVD release.

Newly released on both Blu-ray and standard DVD, first time feature director Craig Zobel’s Compliance is a film about stupid people doing stupid things, which isn’t to say that the film itself is stupid. Although I’m sure it was not the film-maker’s intention, it does seem to suggest that people who work in fast food restaurants are awfully dumb.

The film is about one of seventy reported incidents in which fast food workers are duped into trusting a prank caller who claims to be a police officer. Ann Dowd, who won the 2012 National Board of Review award for Best Supporting Actress, and who has been nominated for other awards as well, is convincing as the fast food manager who believes the caller when he has her “assist” him in apprehending one of her employees for “stealing” money from a customer. You wait for almost the entire length of the film for the woman to wake up and come to her senses. She remains in denial even after the horrifying escalating situation has ended.

The film should be required viewing for all fast food restaurant employees.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has been in a number of films in the last few years, most of them intelligent, well-made comedies and dramas. Premium Rush isn’t one of them.

The film, newly released on Blu-ray and standard DVD is an unbelievable bunch of nonsense about a crooked cop, played by Michael Shannon who seems to have cornered the market on oddball characters, who chases bike messenger Gordon-Levitt all over Manhattan in an effort to obtain a lottery ticket worth $50,000 that Gordon-Levitt has to deliver by 7 P.M. to save the life of female friend’s young son. It plays like a third rate TV procedural reject.

New releases this week include Blu-ray upgrades of How Green Was My Valley and Hannah and Her Sisters.