Among the Warner Archive’s new releases is a film I haven’t seen in nearly fifty years, and with luck will never see again.

I remembered not liking Frank Tashlin’s The Alphabet Murders very much, but I had forgotten how really bad it was. Tashlin spent forty years in Hollywood from1933 to his death in 1972, writing and directing mostly farces, few of them any good, of which this one is the absolute nadir.

A loose adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The A.B.C. Murders, this is not an Agatha Christie film, it’s a Tony Randall film. We know this from the outset as Randall breaks the fourth wall to speak to us first as Randall, then as a badly miscast Hercule Poirot. It goes downhill from there, a total waste of Randall’s time as well as Anita Ekberg’s, Robert Morley’s and ours. If its Christie’s Poirot you want, re-watch Albert Finney in Murder on the Orient Express, Peter Ustinov in Death on the Nile or David Suchet in the long-running Poirot TV series in which The A.B.C. Murders is done right.

Warner Archive does better with newly released films from film legends Fredric March and Shirley Temple, three each, all of which are new to the collection except for one, which is a re-mastered edition of an earlier release.

Mervyn LeRoy’s film of Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse was nominated for seven 1936 Oscars and won four of them including the first Best Supporting Actress award, given to Gale Sondergaard. While the film is worth seeing, it doesn’t hold up as well as similar films from Hollywood’s Golden Age.

The character of Anthony Adverse is an orphan abandoned by his guardian, the husband of the boy’s mother who had killed her lover, the boy’s father, in a duel. He grows up to make his fortune as a slave trader, eventually redeemed by a missionary. The girl he loves as a boy becomes a famous opera star and mistress of Napoleon Bonaparte. March and Olivia de Havilland are perfectly fine in those roles and are strongly supported by Claude Rains and Edmund Gwenn, but what Gale Sondergaard as villain Rains’ equally evil mistress does to earn an Oscar remains a mystery. Blanche Yurka in a similar role as Madame DeFarge in the contemporaneous A Tale of Two Cities is far more sinister and far more memorable.

Irving Rapper’s film of the biographical One Foot in Heaven earned a 1941 Oscar nomination for Best Picture, one of the rare films to be nominated in that category and no other. Marketed as a comedy in the vein of the then-popular Broadway play Life With Father, it is not a comedy, but a fine dramatic film with comic elements. March as the minister moving from parish to parish and Martha Scott as his wife are excellent, as is the supporting cast which includes Beulah Bondi, Gene Lockhart, Laura Hope Crews, Harry Davenport and Frankie Thomas as the minister’s son on whose book the film is based.

The best looking of the new March releases is the re-mastered edition of Rapper’s 1944 film The Adventures of Mark Twain, which was nominated for three Oscars including Max Steiner’s memorable score.

March is once again excellent as the famed author, well supported by Alexis Smith, Donald Crisp and C. Aubrey Smith.

The earliest of the Temple films is Harold S. Bucquet’s Kathleen from 1941, made when she was 12. The film, except for several annoying fantasy sequences, is a pleasant time-filler that shares a major plot similarity with The Sound of Music.

Temple is supported by Herbert Marshall as her father, Laraine Day as the psychologist who moonlights as her nanny, Gail Patrick as her father’s fiancée, and Felix Bressart as a loveable antiques dealer. It’s a bit odd seeing Day, who was Marshall’s daughter a year earlier in Foreign Correspondent, playing his love interest in this, directed by the man who directed her to her death in the earlier Dr. Kildare’s Wedding Day.

Two years after her marriage to first husband John Agar when she was just 17, Temple plays a girl of that age planning a wedding to Airman Guy Madison in Mexico in William Keighley’s Honeymoon. The young lovers are aided by U.S. Embassy employee Franchot Tone in this pleasant little comedy.

The most substantial of Temple releases is 1949’s Adventure in Baltimore, directed by Richard Wallace.

Set in 1905, Temple plays the daughter of liberal-minded minister Robert Young, an aspiring artist with ideas the people of her father’s parish find questionable. She causes a scandal when she submits a life study of her scantily clad next door neighbor, real-life husband Agar, to a local exhibit. Young, Temple, Agar, Josephine Hutchinson as Temple’s mother, and Johnny Sands, her boyfriend in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, as her brother here, all turn in strong performances. Albert Sharpe, direct from playing the title role in the original Broadway production of Finian’s Rainbow, adds to the fun.

The week’s most prominent new release is The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, a must for fans of the series. Non-fans might be slightly bored by the film’s first hour which tends to drag. The second hour, however, picks up considerably with several suspenseful action sequences setting us up for the conclusion of the trilogy, which has become a film quadrilogy.

Worth checking out is Michael Berry’s border drama Frontera with stellar performances by Ed Harris as a former sheriff whose wife has been tragically killed, and Michael Pena and Eva Longoria as Mexicans trying to enter the U.S. via the Arizona border. Harris’ real-life wife Amy Madigan co-stars as his accidentally-killed spouse.

This week’s new releases include Penguins of Madagascar and the Blu-ray upgrade of The Wild One .