Sometimes the story behind a film is as interesting as the film itself. Such is the case with four films new to Blu-ray, only one of which is making its home video debut.

Described as an Iranian vampire western, Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is none of those in the traditional sense. Although several cast members are Iranian born, and the dialogue is in Iranian, it is in fact an American independent film made on location in Bakersfield, California. While the central character is indeed a vampire, the word is never spoken. The film is a western only in the sense that it emulates a western culture in its fictitious Bad City. There are no cowboys, horses or guns in the film.

Bad City itself is a near ghost town in which drug deals, prostitution and other-worldly characters co-mingle with the town’s native population. Sheila Vand plays the title character, a young woman who feeds on the blood of the bad denizens of the city while befriending the city’s good people. Arash Marandi is the young man who gets mixed up with the good and the bad, and is infatuated with the girl. Will his infatuation lead to something more?

Amirpour’s film is very much in the vein of her favorite director, David Lynch, the stark black-and-white film resembling nothing so much as Lynch’s brilliant color TV epic Twin Peaks. It’s easily the best vampire movie since Let the Right One In

Extras include a graphic novel featuring two stories on the origins of the girl.

Warner Brothers trumpeted the talkie era of moviemaking with 1927’s The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool, but abandoned the musical genre after later such films became box office poison.

Looking to broaden their repertoire beyond the social dramas and gangster films that became the studio’s standard release pattern toward the end of the pre-code era, they turned once again to the musical. This time, however, they would put more into the genre than anyone had yet done.

The film they came up with was 42nd Street, a backstage musical directed by Lloyd Bacon with spectacular dance sequences choreographed and directed by the one and only Busby Berkeley. Based on a novel by Bradford Ropes, the film follows the lives of the show’s director (Warner Baxter), star and her lover (Bebe Daniels, George Brent), producer (Guy Kibbee), juvenile lead (Dick Powell), piano player (Eddie Nugent), and chorus girls (Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, Una Merkel) one of whom replaces the star when she breaks her leg.

The film’s crackling dialogue and witty song lyrics delighted depression era audiences and the dazzling production numbers, which have occasionally been equalized but never surpassed, still have audiences scratching their heads at the wonder of them. The film made stars of Powell and Keeler. It was quickly followed by the Berkeley musicals Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade and Dames.

Extras include an analysis of the film and the Broadway show that followed as well as the book it was all based on.

Jean Renoir was riding high in 1946. Early in the year he received his first and only Oscar nomination for 1945’s The Southerner. He made The Diary of a Chambermaid, signed a deal with RKO, and purchased the film rights to Rumer Godden’s The River. Then he made 1947’s The Woman on the Beach, a notorious flop for RKO. The critical and box-office drubbing of the film, which he blamed on studio interference, got him fired from the studio.

At the same time, Kenneth McEldowney, a Hollywood florist and real estate agent, egged on by his wife, an MGM publicist, had it in his head that he could produce a better film than MGM was then turning out. Having been fascinated by Godden’s novel, he set his sights on turning The River into a film only to discover that Renoir owned the rights. The two collaborated to produce the film which was eventually made and released to great acclaim in 1951. It would be his only film.

With an unknown producer and a director whose reputation was in the dumps, McEldowney and Renoir struggled to attract stars to their location filming in India, but none would come. Renoir’s choice for the film’s protagonist, a World War I veteran with a wooden leg, was Marlon Brando who would play a similar role in first film, The Men. The unknown Thomas Breen ended up playing the role opposite the equally unknown Patricia Walters, Radha and Adirenne Corri. Of the four, only Corri managed to have a viable career. Known mostly for horror films, her most famous role would be as the rape victim in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange twenty years later.

The real star of the film, however, is India itself, beautifully filmed in rich colors the way author Godden remembered it. Walters plays the daughter of an English merchant, Corri the daughter of another well-to-do English family and Radha the Eurasian daughter of an English father and Indian mother. Breen is the American cousin of Radha’s father, Arthur Shields, whose visit turns the girls against one another. A subplot involving Walters’ six-year-old brother and his fascination with snakes is even more compelling.

Extras include a new documentary on the making of the film, but unfortunately not the informative BBC documentary on Godden’s return to India which was part of the original DVD release.

Oscar winner Tony Richardson’s (Tom Jones) first theatrical film in seven years would also be his last, Blue Sky. He died of AIDS in November 1991 while the film was in limbo due to Orion Pictures’ bankruptcy. It would eventually be released in September 1994 and star Jessica Lange would win the Oscar as the year’s Best Actress. In the meantime co-star Tommy Lee Jones had won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar the year before for The Fugitive and featured player Chris O’Donnell had become a star and received a Golden Globe nomination for 1992’s Scent of a Woman for which Al Pacino won an Oscar.

Lange stars as the mentally unbalanced, sexually promiscuous wife of nuclear engineer Jones, an Army Major, in the early 1960s. The opening scene, in which she cavorts topless on a beach in Hawaii is legendary. Her antics lead to Jones’ transfer to a stifling Alabama base where Lange has several mental breakdowns. It is not she, but Jones, however, who ends up in the looney bin after his commanding officer and Lange’s latest lover, Powers Boothe, has her sign commitment papers in order to silence his threats to expose the Army’s unsafe nuclear testing practices that have been hushed up. It’s at this point where the thrust of the story changes and Lange becomes some kind of superwoman, having realized she was duped into signing those papers, who manages to blackmail the Army into setting Jones free. While more than a bit ridiculous, this change of events does not hinder Lange’s bravura performance which is the best of her big screen career.

O’Donnell, who played Lange’s son in 1990’s Men Don’t Leave, plays Boothe and Carrie Snodgress’s son who romances Lange and Jones’ daughter, Amy Locane, who also gives an excellent performance.

There are no extras, not even a trailer, but the film has never looked better than on Blu-ray.

This week’s new releases include Inherent Vice and Paddington.