Warner Archive’s latest batch of Blu-ray upgrades includes two early Best Picture Oscar winners, The Broadway Melody and Cimarron.

Released in Los Angeles and New York in February 1929, and to the rest of the country in June of that year, MGM’s first talkie, The Broadway Melody, went on to become the biggest box-office hit of 1929. The screen’s first “all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing” film was a revelation to audiences of the day and easily won the year’s Best Picture Oscar. However, unlike the previous year’s winners, Wings and Sunrise, and the following year’s winner, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Broadway Melody has not stood the test of time. Along with other early screen musicals it inspired, it quickly went out of fashion. It took the more sophisticated and much more spectacular 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 to revive the genre a few years later.

The plot of The Broadway Melody revolved around a song-and-dance man played by former vaudevillian Charles King who comes between a pair of struggling vaudevillian sisters played by former silent screen stars Bessie Love and Anita Page. Oscar-nominated Love, who was third billed, has the strongest role as the older of the two women who gives up both a Broadway role and the man she loves to her younger sister while still struggling to make it to Broadway herself.

Director Henry Beaumont, who previously directed Page in the well- received Our Dancing Daughters, was nominated for his direction.

The film, whose score includes both the title song and “You Were Meant for Me” was the main inspiration for 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain which spoofed such early talkies. The title song for that film, however, came from another 1929 musical, The Hollywood Revue, which was also Oscar nominated for Best Picture of the year.

The film’s stars continued to work in films albeit in smaller roles. King, who died of pneumonia at 54 while entertaining the troops in London in 1944, was last seen in 1943’s A Guy Named Joe. Page, who died in 2008 at 98, was last on screen as Elizabeth Frankenstein in 2010’s Frankenstein Rising. Love, who died in 1986 at 87, was last on screen in 1983’s The Hunger. She is probably best remembered as the voice of the answering service lady in 1971’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.

The film does at least look better than ever on Blu-ray. Special features include several musical revues of the era.

Edna Ferber’s best-selling novel was the source material for RKO’s sprawling 1931 film, Cimarron, which like The Broadway Melody, is not highly regarded today. It was, however, the only western to win a Best Picture Oscar for 59 years until Dances with Wolves won in 1990.

The film’s best sequence is its opening one which recreates the 1889 Oklahoma Land Rush. Silent screen star Richard Dix had the lead as the pioneer who becomes editor of the Osage newspaper after its former editor is murdered. His character is based on Temple Houston, the real-life gunfighter and lawyer son of Sam Houston. Irene Dunne, in only her second film, played his resourceful wife. It is she who runs the newspaper while he is off on his many wanderlusts, the last one of which lasts ten years at the end of which Dunne becomes one of Oklahoma’s first female members of Congress. Both stars were Oscar nominated for their performances as was director Wesley Ruggles.

The supporting cast includes Estelle Taylor, William Collier Jr., Roscoe Ates, George E. Stone, and the redoubtable Edna May Oliver in one of her most memorable scene-stealing roles.

Despite winning the Oscar, the film did not make its money back until it was re-released in 1935. Most film buffs agree that the 1960 remake with Glenn Ford and Maria Schell in the leads, previously released on Blu-ray, is the better version.

Blu-ray extras for the new release include classic cartoons and a short subject.

Also newly released on Blu-ray by Warner Archive are several 1950s films.

1954’s The Last Time I Saw Paris is the film version of F. Scott Fitzgerlad’s short story, Babylon Revisited, set in Paris following the end of World War I. Richard Brooks’ film updates the action to the end of World War II. Filmed on the leftover sets of 1951’s Oscar winner An American in Paris, the film looks lovely but is an exercise in unrelieved tedium as Van Johnson and Elizabeth Taylor fall in and out of love. Donna Reed, fresh from her Oscar-winning role in From Here to Eternity, co-stars as Taylor’s older sister. Walter Pidgeon, playing against type, is the girls’ bohemian father.

Extras include the cartoon Touché, Pussycat and the original theatrical trailer.

1955’s Helen of Troy, based on Homer’s Iliad, was the first film to be released internationally on the same day, January 26, 1956. Directed by Robert Wise between Executive Suite and Somebody Up There Likes Me, it starred Italian actress Rosanna Podesta as the most beautiful woman in Greece and Lithuania-born, Paris-raised actor Jacques Sernas as Trojan prince Paris in this popular spectacle.

Looking better than it ever did, Blu-ray extras include three vintage making-of behind-the-camera segments from the Warner Bros. Presents TV series hosted by Gig Young.

1956’s The Fastest Gun Alive, based on a short story by Frank D. Gilroy (The Subject Was Roses) with a screenplay by Gilroy and director Russell Rouse (D.O.A. ), is a taut western in the tradition of High Noon with a memorable surprise ending.

Broderick Crawford is the hot-headed gunslinger who goads men with a reputation for being a faster gun into a duel in which he is the victor. His latest sights are on an unnamed fast gun in another town played by Glenn Ford. Jeanne Crain is his worried wife and Russ Tamblyn, in one of those scenes that has nothing to do with anything else in the film, steals the whole show with a barn dance that outdoes his gymnastics in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

Extras include two Tom & Jerry cartoons and the original theatrical trailer.

Happy viewing.