Last week two by Billy Wilder, this week two by Delbert Mann as Kino Lorber continues to release outstanding United Artists films from the 1950s to the 1970s on Blu-ray.

Mann won an Oscar for 1955’s Marty as did Paddy Chayefsky for his screenplay, Ernest Borgnine for his star-making performance and the film itself. Expanded from an hour-long teleplay with Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand as the Bronx butcher and Brooklyn schoolteacher who meet and fall in love at dance hall on a Saturday night, Borgnine, the heavyset villain of From Here to Eternity and Bad Day at Black Rock and Oscar nominated Betsy Blair, best known as Mrs. Gene Kelly, captivated audiences with their performances in the film heavily promoted by producer Burt Lancaster.

The character driven film was considered the little film that could, winning its Best Picture Oscar over four films with much more extensive production values, namely Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing; Mister Roberts; Picnic and The Rose Tattoo and such legendary films as East of Eden; Rebel Without a Cause and Summertime which received nominations in other major categories.

The film received a total of eight nominations including one for Joe Mantell as Borgnine’s loser buddy and featured top support form Esther Minciotti as Borgnine’s widowed mother and Augusta Ciolli as his unwanted aunt. They’re all fine, but Borgnine is the major reason for the film’s success in his heartbreaking portrayal of the lonely butcher.

Mann received a second Oscar nomination for his 1958 adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables, also produced by Lancaster and his producing partners, Harold Hecht and James Hill. Nominated for seven Oscars, the film lost Best Picture to Gigi but won Oscars for Best Actor David Niven and Best Supporting Actress Wendy Hiller. The Blu-ray incorporates Mann’s engaging voiceover originally recorded for the film’s laser disc release and later carried over to the DVD release.

The play was presented in two parts, each featuring a couple at an out-of-season British seaside hotel. The film wisely combines the two into one seamless story with the emphasis on Niven’s phony major who is exposed as a dirty old man and Deborah Kerr, receiving the fifth of six losing Oscar nominations, as the mousey mother-dominated spinster with whom he develops a rapport. Rita Hayworth, then married to co-producer Hill, and Lancaster play the bickering ex-married couple.

Hiller is the hotel’s manager with whom alcoholic Lancaster had been having an affair. Better than all of them is Gladys Cooper as Kerr’s domineering, trouble-making mother who gets her come-uppance in the film’s extremely satisfying conclusion. Why she didn’t get and Oscar nod to go with the ones she already had for Now, Voyager and The Song of Bernadette remains one of Oscar’s greatest mysteries. Cathleen Nesbitt, Felix Aylmer and May Hallatt also do extraordinary work as other guests of the hotel. Only Rod Taylor and Audrey Dalton as young lovers are under-utilized.

Mann’s own unabashed favorite cast members were Cooper and Nesbitt, both of whom were extraordinary beauties in the 1910s and 20s. Cooper was the British pin-up queen of World War I in a photo in which she daintily raises her skirt above her ankles and Nesbitt was famously engaged to poet Rupert Brooke who was killed during the war. Both became superb character actresses when their looks faded. Cooper later earned her third Oscar nomination for My Fair Lady, a role Nesbitt created on stage. Cooper’s Tony nominated roles in Broadway’s The Chalk Garden and A Passage to India would prove Oscar fodder for nominee Edith Evans and winner Peggy Ashcroft, respectively.

Also releasing on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber is 1961’s Paris Blues with Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier as expatriate American jazz musicians living in Paris who have affairs with American tourists Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll. Newman was at the time the go-to actor for playing self-absorbed, aloof characters. He would earn an Oscar nomination for a similar character in the same year’s The Hustler and another one for Hud two years later. He would lose that one to his co-star here, Poitier who, like here, played a much more likeable character in Lilies of the Field.

The film received its single Oscar nomination for Duke Ellington’s memorable score.

Criterion has released a great looking Blu-ray upgrade of 1983’s The Big Chill.

Lawrence Kasdan’s film is an engrossing look at a group of college radicals fifteen years after the fact as they get together for the funeral of a friend. None of them have lives that any of them expected, some good, some not so good. Glenn Close and Kevin Kline are the married couple hosting the get-together. She’s a doctor, he’s a businessman. Their friends include a TV actor (Tom Berenger); a People reporter (Jeff Glodblum), a drug dealer (William Hurt); a lawyer (Mary Kay Place) and an aspiring writer with a rich husband (JoBeth Williams). They are joined by the girlfriend (Meg Tilly) of the dead man. The film is buoyed by a rousing rock soundtrack in which the actors don’t just listen to the songs, but participate in them.

The film received Oscar nominations for Best Picture; Screenplay and Supporting Actress (Glenn Close). It is, however, Mary Kay Place who gives the film’s most memorable performance in a role that Close and JoBeth Williams both wanted.

Extras include a get-together by the cast made for the DVD release fifteen years after the film was made and a new documentary with the actors, director and director’s wife who was responsible for the music selection commemorating the film’s thirtieth anniversary last year. They’re both fascinating and informative. The one downside of the release is an asinine essay by twenty-something Lena Dunham addressing her contemporaries with the incongruous revelation that “these are your parents” as if today’s youth had no idea what life was like for people in the 1960s and 1980s.

Olive Films has released two so-called women’s films on Blu-ray and DVD for the first time.

André De Toth’s 1947 melodrama, The Other Love, features Barbara Stanwyck as a terminally ill concert pianist being lied to by her well-meaning doctor, David Niven, while carrying on a dangerous love affair with race car driver Richard Conte. The film, from a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, is crafted like a murder mystery and keeps you guessing till the end. I

Max Ophuls’ 1949 film, Caught, has a better reputation, largely based on its production values, but it is, at heart, is a fairly typical film of the genre.

Barbara Bel Geddes is the social climber who regrets her marriage to psychopath Robert Ryan when it is seemingly too late. Will the love of good doctor James Mason save her? If you don’t know the answer to that one, you haven’t seen very many of these so-called women’s films.

This week’s new releases include Divergent and God’s Not Dead.