Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week Brute Force and The Naked City have received long overdue U.S. Blu-ray releases from Criterion. The films were the two biggest hits of American writer-director Jules Dassin’s Hollywood career which lasted from1940 through his blacklisting during the filming of 1950’s Thieves’ Highway. After his move to France in 1952, Dassin became an…

New This Week Death on the Nile, newly released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber, was the second of four elaborate films made from the works of Agatha Christie by the producing team of John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin whose credits ranged from 1968’s Romeo & Juliet to 1984’s A Passage to India. Home video rights…

New This Week The Sign of the Cross, newly released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber, is a historically important film from 1932 that resurrected the career of producer-director Cecil B. DeMille, made a star of Claudette Colbert, and saved Paramount from bankruptcy. The prolific DeMille, one of the founders of Paramount, hadn’t had a hit…

New This Week Tender Mercies earned Robert Duvall his only Oscar out of seven nominations for his portrayal of a broken-down middle-aged country singer on the mend. Previously nominated for The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and The Great Santini, and subsequently for The Apostle, A Civil Action, and The Judge, his was that rare situation in…

New This Week Gone with the Wind was pulled from HBO Max in June, a month after it was added to the streaming service, citing the need for “an explanation and a denouncement” of the movie’s depictions of race relations. It quickly went to number one on Amazon’s list of best-selling DVDs and Blu-rays. Although…

New This Week The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum began life as a novel by Nobel laureate Heinrich Bohl based on the pacifist author’s arrest by the German government and pillorying by the press for his alleged involvement in violent anti-Vietnam War protests. It was a novel to the extent that the middle-aged writer made…

New This Week Girl Crazy was the last and best of the four MGM musicals that Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland made between 1939 and 1943. It was the second of three film versions of the 1930 Broadway musical starring Ginger Rogers and introducing Ethel Merman. Unlike the 1940 Rooney-Garland musical Strike Up the Band,…

New This Week Marriage Story was my fifth favorite film of 2019, behind 1917, Parasite, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, and The Irishman. The first three were previously released on Blu-ray and DVD as were Little Women, Jojo Rabbit, The Joker, and Ford v Ferrari, the other four films comprising the 2019 films nominated for…

New This Week Hair was a worldwide sensation on stage. The rock musical, which debuted off-Broadway in late 1967, quickly moved to Broadway in early 1968 and soon expanded all over the world. The Original Cast Recording was also a phenomenon and the 2009 Broadway revival was a tribute to its timelessness. In the meantime,…

New This Week Hud is a film that collectors have long wanted to see released on Blu-ray but remains, like many other films from Paramount, unreleased in the U.S. There is, however, a perfectly fine region-free Australian Blu-ray from Shout Entertainment that was released under license from Paramount Pictures International in September 2019. Ironically, it…

New This Week San Francisco was both the highest grossing film of 1936 and the first of three films for which one of its Oscar nominations was later declared to be category fraud. That, however, was technically not the case as Spencer Tracy in San Francisco, Luise Rainer in The Great Ziegfeld, and Stuart Erwin…

New This Week The Cameraman was both Buster Keaton’s next-to-last silent film and his last overall great film. Keaton reached the height of his popularity with 1924’s Sherlock, Jr., 1926’s The General, and 1928’s Steamboat Bill, Jr., which were produced independently with the help of his brother-in-law, powerful producer Joseph M. Schenk, who sold Keaton’s…

New This Week American Madness is the last of Frank Capra’s classic Columbia Studios comedies of the 1930s to be released on Blu-ray, this one from Sony. Its original DVD release was part of a 2006 package that also included It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can’t Take It with You,…

New This Week It Started with Eve is the jewel in the crown of Kino Lorber’s Deanna Durbin Collection I containing the first three of nine planned Blu-ray upgrades of the 1938 Oscar winner’s classic films. Durbin first came to attention at the age of 14 in the 1936 short Every Sunday with Judy Garland.…

New This Week The Love of Jeanne Ney, one of G.W. Pabst’s earliest films, was an international success for Germany’s UFA Studios. Released in Germany in December 1927 and the U.S. in July 1928, the film’s style was heavily influenced by that of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Frtiz Lang’s Metropolis, as well as Russian director…