Denmark’s Excalibur Media has released an all-region Blu-ray of Franco Zeffirelli’s 1999 film, Tea with Mussolini with English packaging, a long overdue upgrade of the director’s biographical film starring Cher, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith, and Lily Tomlin.

While the film is based on Zeffirelli’s own experiences growing up in Florence, names have been changed to protect the innocent. Zeffirelli is called Luca in the film.

The film begins in 1934 Florence where a diverse group of cultured English and American ladies live and meet for tea each afternoon. The group is led by Maggie Smith as the widow of the British Ambassador to Italy. Prominent in her group are Judi Dench as an artist and singer, Lily Tomlin as an exuberant American archaeologist, and wealthy eccentric American Cher who was a friend of illegitimate Luca’s late American mother.

Also in the group is Luca’s Italian father’s secretary Joan Plowright who he has entrusted to see that Luca, played by Charlie Lucas as a child, stays in his strict school. When he runs away for the umpteenth time, she takes him into her home unbeknownst to his father and teaches him Shakespeare leading to his lifelong fascination with the theatre. He is soon adopted by the entire group of ladies.

In 1935, Luca’s father finds out about the deception and sends him off to a business school in Austria.

The shifting political climate has serious consequences for the unconventional group of ladies who are initially allowed to remain in Italy as the country is at this point neutral in the war between Germany and other countries which don’t yet include England and the U.S.

In 1939, Italy now on Germany’s side in the war, rounds up the English women and Tomlin and houses them in an Army barracks in San Gimignano in Siena. Cher, thanks to her wealth, is allowed to stay in the palatial home of the local gentry. Luca, now played by 17-year-old Baird Wallace, returns to act as an emissary between Cher and the ladies while also interacting with the Italian underground.

The ladies are moved to a local hotel with Maggie Smith thinking it’s because she once had tea with Mussolini. Unbeknownst to her and the other ladies it is Cher who is paying the bills.

Intrigue follows including the betrayal of Cher by her Italian lover to the Nazis leading to her escape with the help the underground and Luca’s joining a Scottish group of soldiers as the allies enter Italy signaling the end of the war.

Maggie Smith won a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress for her performance, although for many it is Joan Plowright’s performance that stands out even more among the excellent cast of previous Oscar winners (Smith, Dench, Cher) and nominees (Plowright, Tomlin). Both Smith and Dench went on to receive additional Oscar nominations in the coming years while all five ladies continued to receive recognition from other awards bodies over the next quarter century.

Warner Archive has released four more classic films on Blu-ray, namely 1934′ sManhattan Melodrama, 1938’s The Mad Miss Manton, 1941’s Out of the Fog, and 1953’s The Master of Ballantrae

MGM’s Manhattan Melodrama, directed by W.S. Van Dyke, is by far the best-known film of the group. It is the movie that notorious gangster John Dillinger watched before exiting the theatre to an FBI ambush.

An Oscar winner for Best Original Story, the film starred Clark Gable and William Powell as boyhood friends who go separate ways, Gable becoming a gangster and Powell a D.A. Myrna Loy is the woman who loves them both.

It was the only film that Gable and Powell made together as well as the start of a long lasting teaming of Powell and Loy. Their next film would be The Thin Man

RKO’s The Mad Miss Manton, directed by Leigh Jason, combines screwball comedy and murder for a pleasant outing that was the first teaming of Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda three years before The Lady Eve.

Stanwyck is a madcap heiress and Fonda an enterprising newspaper editor. Sam Leven is the local police inspector and Hattie McDaniel is Stanwyck’s intrepid maid.

Warner Bros.’ Out of the Fog, directed by Anatole Litvak, is a stark adaptation of a Group Theatre play that gains much from James Wong Howe’s moody cinematography and the supporting performances of Thomas Mitchell, John Qualen and Eddie Albert.

Stars John Garfield as an amoral gangster and Ida Lupino as an easily duped girl are both hard to take as is the usually terrific Aline MacMahon as Mitchell’s shrew of a wife and Lupino’s mother.

Warner Bros.’ The Master of Ballantrae, directed by William Keighley from Robert Louis Stevneson’s novel benefits greatly from Jack Cardiff’s cinematography and the performances of Errol Flynn, Roger Livesay, and Anthony Steel in Flynn’s last swashbuckler.

Filmed in Scotland, England, and Sicily, it is the only color film of the four new Warner Archive releases.

Australia’s Via Vision has released two sets of Audie Murphy films that Murphy made for Universal between 1959 and 1966 on region free Blu-rays.

Three of the films are westerns, and one is the only comedy Murphy made.

The comedy is 1957’s Joe Butterfly, directed by Jesse Hibbs who directed Murphy’s autobiographical To Hell and Back two years earlier.

Murphy and George Nader have top billing as YANK Magazine writers, but the film belongs to Burgess Meredith as an enterprising Japanese black marketeer. While portrayals of Asian characters by Caucasian actors often make us wince, Meredith delivers one of the better ones. He is as far from Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s as you can get.