In its fifth year, the Warner Archive continues to release DVDs of long unavailable films we thought we’d never see in the format. A case in point is the release of The Hildegarde Withers Mystery Collection, a collection of all six of the films made from Stuart Palmer’s novels and short stories filmed in the 1930s by RKO. Previously only the first film in the series, 1932’s Penguin Pool Murder had been available and that was hard to find.

Palmer’s first novel, published in 1931, gave mystery fans an American version of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, a caustic spinster schoolteacher who doubled as an amateur sleuth. The character was based on Palmer’s high school teacher and character actress Edna May Oliver whom he had seen on Broadway in Show Boat. Fortunately for him, and for us, Oliver was a contract player at RKO and was cast in the role. All films in the collection are 65 minutes long and were produced as programmers or films that would be shown as the second feature on a double bill. The first one, though, had all the markings of a major film. It was produced by Daryl F. Zanuck and scored by Max Steiner, both of whom would go on to legendary careers away from RKO.

The mystery itself, the murder of a man who is found in the penguin tank at the New York Aquarium, is unusual even if the denouement is easy to figure out once a major clue is provided at the half-way mark. What makes it fun beyond the location filming at the aquarium, which resided in Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan from 1896 to 1957 and has since resided in Coney Island, is the banter between Oliver’s Miss Withers and the various characters, particularly Inspector Piper, played by the equally wonderful James Gleason.

Oliver and Gleason are just as wonderful in the second and third installments, 1934’s Murder on the Blackboard and 1935’s Murder on a Honeymoon. Then, however, Oliver left RKO and was replaced in the fourth installment, 1936’s Murder on a Bridle Path with Helen Broderick and the fifth and sixth installments, 1936’s The Plot Thickens and 1937’s Forty Naughty Girls with ZaSy Pitts. Broderick and Pitts were gifted actresses, but they were not Edna May Oliver and the series suffered, running out of steam long before Palmer’s writings ever did. His last Hildegarde Withers novel was published after his death in 1968. A seventh Hildegarde Withers film was made in 1972 with Eve Arden, planned as a pilot for a series that never materialized. It would take another dozen years for TV to give us a series about a retired schoolteacher-sleuth when Angela Lansbury debuted as Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote.

Continuing Warner Archive’s occasional release of previously released DVDs in pan-and-scan versions, they have now released a widescreen version of 1998’s Without Limits, one of two dueling biographies of Steve Prefontaine, the Olympic runner who died in a car crash at the age of 24. There had been an earlier version the year before called Prefontaine, directed by Steve James with Jared Leto and R. Lee Ermey. Both versions are good but this one directed by Robert Towne with Billy Crudup and Donald Sutherland is even better, so if you only see one, this is the one to see.

Criterion continues to release both films new to their collection on Blu-ray as well as upgrade previous releases to the new high definition standard. Cases in point include the newly upgraded Lord of the Flies and The Ice Storm and the new to Criterion Babette’s Feast featuring all new English subtitles.

Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm was to be his first film completely in English, but the offer to direct 1993’s Sense and Sensibility in England was an offer he couldn’t refuse, so The Ice Storm became his second.

Filmed on location in New Canaan, Connecticut and briefly, Manhattan, 1997’s The Ice Storm was an immediate hit with the critics, but its box office was disappointing. It would take another two years before a film about suburban malaise to take the public by storm. That film, 1999’s American Beauty would go on to win multiple awards including a Best Picture Oscar.

The Ice Storm takes place over the Thanksgiving weekend of 1973 when Watergate is heating up and the country is becoming disillusioned with Washington. The adults in the film, including Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Jamey Sheridan and Sigourney Weaver are behaving like children and the children, Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood and Katie Holmes among them, are behaving like adults. Although the film features a great deal of comic levity, the ending is devastatingly sad.

Danish writer Karen Blixen is best known to American audiences as the character played by Meryl Streep in the Oscar winning Out of Africa. Her literary masterpiece was Babette’s Feast which was filmed in 1987 by Gabriel Axel and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film of that year.

The film is a religious allegory about two kind but cranky old ladies who want to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of their father, a severe minister whose church, though supposedly Lutheran, was really a severe sect of his own making. All the church’s parishioners are now elderly and just as cranky as his daughters. Babette, the French Catholic woman (Stephane Audran) they took in when she was down on her luck, returns their kindness by preparing a feast for the celebration, bringing a joy to the sisters and the flock they had never known, teaching them in the process about grace, sacrifice and sensual experience. The film is a one-of-a-kind gem, but should not be seen on an empty stomach.

Based on Sir William Golding’s 1954 classic, Peter Brook’s 1963 film of Lord of the Flies is another allegory, although a much harsher one. After a crash landing, the surviving boys must learn to fend for themselves. They break off into two factions, one finding and building shelter, the other just having fun. They represent the difference between civilization and savagery with the final confrontation making the point abundantly clear. It was remade to lesser effect in 1990.

Danny Boyle’s films have always balanced style and substance. While the style often eclipsed the substance, there was always enough of the latter to make the work interesting. That is, until now.

Boyle’s Trance is all style, with no substance. Sure, there’s a story, but it’s so bizarre, so ridiculous as to render the whole thing a waste of time. Ostensibly about a stolen painting, it’s really about loss of memory and mind control with several senseless killings and a will-he-or-won’t-he ending we couldn’t care less about. The film, which is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD, wastes the talents of James McAvoy, Vincent Cassel and Rosario Dawson.

This week’s new releases include Blu-ray upgrades of Peggy Sue Got Married and Bus Stop.