So much for director Steven Soderbergh’s assertion that the made for TV movie, Behind the Candelabra would be his last film. He’s already at work on The Knick, a mini-series with Clive Owen due next year.

Behind the Candelabra was a film he tried to get made for theatrical release but no one other than HBO was interested. We can’t know what awards traction the film might have had theatrically, but as a TV movie it earned 15 Primetime Emmy nominations and won 11. Michael Douglas is better than anyone could have expected as flamboyant entertainer Liberace and Matt Damon matches him every step of the way as Scott Thorson, the boy toy with whom he had a six year relationship beginning in the late 1970s. Damon at 42 may be a bit long in the tooth to be playing an 18-24 year-old but he convincingly plays the part as though he actually were half his real age. It’s a tougher role to play than that of Liberace but all eyes are on Douglas whenever he’s on stage. His is a flawless performance as Soderbergh and his crew skillfully aid Douglas and Damon’s performances with CGI makeup and a hand double for Douglas’ piano playing. The film may be a little short on depth but not show biz pizzazz. An almost unrecognizable Debbie Reynolds appears as Liberace’s daunting mother.

Behind the Candelabra is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

The closeted Liberace’s affair with Thorson was taking place at the same time as American audiences were beginning to embrace gay relationships on screen. The French farce La Cage aux Folles had a successful five year run in Paris when the property was bought by an Italian producer who turned it into a French-Italian co-production in 1978. Journeyman French director Edouard Molinaro was assigned to direct Italian box-office favorite Ugo Togmnazzi brought in to replace playwright-star Jean Poiret. Michel Serrault was signed to repeat his stage role as the flamboyant Albin.

Molinaro hired acclaimed French writer Francis Weber to enhance the screenplay, giving the characters and their situations more heart than in the play which had been pure farce. Serrault, who had no trouble playing the farcical elements, found it difficult to play the heavily dramatic scenes. If Molinaro found Serrault difficult, he found Tognazzi impossible. The actor who thought the film was “crap” refused to say his lines in anything other than Itaalian and further refused to say the lines as written. Molinaro and Weber had to rewrite all his dialogue to be dubbed by a French actor to Tognazzi’s lip movements. The film was dismissed by French critics, but found great success in America, so much so that the film initially intended just for art house showings, had to be dubbed to be shown to wider audiences where it became one of 1979’s biggest hits. Molinaro received an Oscar nomination for Best Director and the film was nominated for Best Screenplay as well. In 1983, Jerry Herman’s musical version became one of Broadway’s best loved musicals, which has had two successful revivals to date. It was successfully remade by Hollywood as The Birdcage in 1996.

If I have one quibble with the excellent Criterion release on both Blu-ray and standard DVD, it’s that the film has lost its English dubbed soundtrack which was an option on the old MGM DVD. But then you don’t need the dubbing to get the sight gags.

Criterion has also released a Blu-ray upgrade of another classic foreign film of the late 1970s, Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata with Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann. This was the first and only collaboration of the two Bergmans. It was ironically both the last film made specifically for theatrical release by Ingmar Bergman as well as the last theatrical film of Ingrid Bergman.

Ms. Bergman has one of her great roles as a world famous concert pianist, a selfish mother who has never been there for either elder daughter Ullmann or younger daughter Lena Nyman. True to form, she leaves abruptly after a night of recriminations hurled at her by Ullmann who in seven years since her mother last deigned to visit she has gotten married, given birth to a son who drowned before his fourth birthday and taken in the dying younger sister the mother abandoned to a nursing home. Bergman’s character is supposed to be a monster, but the actress pulls out all the stops to provide more humanity than is in the script much allegedly to the director’s chagrin.

Although it’s not indicated on the box cover or in Criterion’s marketing, the English dubbed soundtrack by Bergman, Ullmann and the other actors is an option on this release.

Also available from Criterion is the Blu-ray upgrade of 1965’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold with Richard Burton, Claire Bloom and Oskar Werner in Martin Ritt’s fine film of John Le Carre’s classic novel. The black-and-white film looks splendid in the format.

Twilight Time has released a brilliantly restored version of John Ford’s 1939 classic, Drums Along the Mohawk, still regarded as the best film about the days preceding the Revolutionary War. Told in a series of vignettes, Henry Fonda has one of his best salt-of-the-earth roles as a young settler, with Claudette Colbert as loving wife and the incomparable Edna May Oliver as the old lady who takes them in after their house is burned to the ground. Oliver’s Oscar nomination was the film’s only nod, and sadly, the only one the descendant of John and John Quincy Adams ever received in her illustrious screen career.

The Blu-ray release of Drums Along the Mohawk includes Becoming John Ford, the excellent 2007 documentary prepared for Fox’s John Ford at Fox boxed set, as an extra.

Fox itself has released the 1949 smash hit, A Letter to Three Wives on Blu-ray.

The story revolves around a letter in which an unseen Celeste Holm advises three women, Jeanne Crain, Linda Darnell and Ann Sothern, that she has run off with one of their husbands, Jeffrey Lynn, Paul Douglas and Kirk Douglas, respectively, but which one?. The film unfolds in segments, each showcasing one of the couples with the Darnell and Sothern segments coming off better than Crain’s. Thelma Ritter, in a role written expressly for her by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, shines in both of those segments.

Mankiewicz won Oscars both for writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives, an accomplishment he would repeat with the following year’s All About Eve.

Also released on Blu-ray by Fox is the 1958 gem, The Fly with David (Al Hedison) as the scientist who goes into a time machine with a fly and emerges with their matter mixed – his body ends up with the head and an arm of the fly while his head and arm become attached to the fly. Patricia Owens as his distraught wife, Vincent Price as his brother and Herbert Marshall as a police inspector provide marvelous support.

Despite the stark black-and-white cover art of the Blu-ray, the film is rich in color.

This week’s new releases include 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman and Foyle’s War: Set 7.