From the 1930s through the early 1960s, film distribution was different than it is now. Instead of major films opening in wide release, all major films, not just a select few, would have limited initial releases followed by wide distribution in neighborhood theatres. In New York City, neighborhood theatres were primarily owned by RKO and Loew’s. RKO theatres would get 20th Century-Fox; Warner Bros., Universal, Republic and RKO releases when they finished their initial runs, accompanied by a minor film that could be from one of those studios or one of the minors such as Monogram or Allied Artists. RKO was also the distributing arm of Walt Disney and Samuel Goldwyn as well as films made at RKO itself. Loew’s, originally owned by MGM, would get MGM, Paramount, Columbia and United Artists films. Films that played neighborhood theatres would generally run their double features for seven days, Wednesday through Tuesday. Occasionally, however, when a weak major film would play the theatres, the chain would substitute a lesser program from Sunday to Tuesday or just on Monday and Tuesday to close out the week.

In September, 1957, Fox’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and its co-feature was withdrawn after four days and another program substituted for an unusual Sunday through Wednesday run, to be replaced by Warner Bros.’ The Curse of Frankenstein and a co-feature that would run from Thursday through the following Tuesday. This program consisted of two films from NTA (National Television Associates), which was not a theatrical film distribution company but a distribution company for television. The two films on the program were two previously released films the company had purchased for future broadcasting. They renamed them Battle Stripe and Armored Attack.

Battle Stripe long ago reverted to its original title of The Men, a 1950 film from Stanley Kramer Productions originally distributed through United Artists. Directed by Fred Zinnemann, the film starred Marlon Brando (in his film debut) and Teresa Wright. It has long been available on home video. Armored Attack is making its home video debut on Blu-ray and standard DVD from Olive Films.

Armored Attack is a butchered version of 1943’s The North Star which earned six Oscar nominations on its original release but had during the later red scare years been disowned by its producer, Goldwyn, and its distributor, RKO. Goldwyn did not renew its copyright and the original film fell into public domain allowing poor copies of the film to be distributed years ago on VHS. It has never been on DVD or Blu-ray until now. The butchered version, which was copyrighted by NTA, has never been on home video before.

Olive is releasing both versions of the film in its distribution deal with Paramount, which now owns the copyrighted Armored Attack, passed from NTA to Republic to Paramount. Because of the copyright, it is this butchered version that is the focus of the new release. The newly restored original version is being released as an “extra” but make no mistake, the version worth seeing is the original which provides a fascinating look at the benign propaganda that was imposed on 1943 Hollywood.

In the early days of World War II, the U.S. government had approached Hollywood about making films more sympathetic to the Soviet Union than it had been since the Bolshevik revolution. The U.S.S.R. was our ally in fighting the Nazis. To sweeten the deal, the government arranged to have U.S. product released in Russia for the first time since the 1920s. Only two ther such films were actually made, 1943’s Mission to Moscow, which is available from Warner Home Video; and 1944’s Song of Russia which has never been released on home video.

The North Star, written by Lillian Hellman; directed by Lewis Milestone; photographed by James Wong Howe and scored by Aaron Copeland with songs by Copeland and Ira Gershwin, was a big deal. Set in a small town in Ukraine, the film depicted an idyllic village torn apart by a Nazi invasion. It boasted an all-star cast that included Anne Baxter; Dana Andrews; Farley Granger (in his film debut); Jane Withers and a young actor named Eric Roberts (not Julia’s big brother) as the young heroes and Walter Huston; Walter Brennan; Dean Jagger; Ann Harding; Ruth Nelson and Esther Dale among their equally heroic elders. Erich von Stroheim played the principal villain, a Nazi doctor who experimented on children, using them for blood transfusions for wounded German soldiers, which sometimes killed them.

The butchered version is thirty minutes shorter than the original, eliminating almost all the early scenes and beginning with the Nazi invasion. Even more disturbing, it has an annoying narration that drowns out dialogue and ends with tacked on footage of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, comparing the Communists to the Nazis rendering the butchered version an apologia for the original film.

Olive has also newly released Milestone’s 1948 film, Arch of Triumph, a notorious flop from author Erich Maria Remarque who had also written All Quiet on the Western Front, Milestone’s earlier film triumph. The new film gave us Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman as political refugees in Paris during the early days of World War II. This ended up far from repeating the success of the two stars’ beloved earlier pairing, Gaslight, having cost $5 million while bringing in just $1.5 million at the box office. Charles Laughton is miscast as a despicable Nazi on Boyer’s trail.

Another 1948 film newly released by Olive is Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, a screwball comedy featuring William Powell in one of his best late career roles as a wealthy Bostonian who catches a fish while on vacation in the Caribbean that turns out to be a mermaid. Not just any mermaid, she’s played by Ann Blyth at her loveliest. Your tolerance for the film depends on how much you can suspend credulity for the length of the film. Blyth, for example, perfectly understands English but can’t speak it.

Available for some time now, although I’m just catching up with it, is Olive’s Blu-ray release of The Otto Preminger Collection which included three of the director’s most critically lambasted late career films.

Hurry Sundown, previously released on standard DVD by Paramount, is a highly watchable if trashy melodrama about an opportunistic land owner in 1940s Georgia (Michael Caine) trying to buy out sharecroppers John Phillip Law and Robert Hooks so he can sell to a developer. The sex scenes between Caine and Jane Fonda and Law and Faye Dunaway were hot stuff in the day. Also on hand are Diahann Carroll as a schoolteacher; Frank Converse as a young minister; George Kennedy as the local sheriff; Beah Richards as Hooks’ saintly mother and Burgess Meredith’s as a bigoted judge.

Barely released in L.A. in late 1968 and as the second half of a double bill in New York in March, 1969, Skidoo mixes the bizarre with the genuinely funny. A gang leader known as God (Groucho Marx) has called retired gangster Jackie Gleason back to rub out would-be informer Mickey Rooney before he can testify before Congress. Featuring Carol Channing as Gleason’s wife; Frankie Avalon as a petty gangster and John Phillip Law as a hippie among others, the film includes such eye-poppers as Channing’s striptease; naked football players and dancing garbage cans between numerous scenes fueled by LSD. Nilsson sings the film’s entire credits.

Incomprehensible to me, the critics actually were kinder to 1971’s Such Good Friends, a ludicrous mix of medical melodrama and intended screwball comedy.

While comatose husband Laurence Luckinbill lies dying from a botched mole removal operation, wife Dyan Cannon learns that Luckinbill had been having an affair with her best friend, Jennifer O’Neill. She retaliates by having an affair with O’Neill’s husband, Ken Howard. The film’s highlights include Cannon imagining a then 63 year-old Burgess Meredith dancing naked at a garden party and Cannon fellating obese doctor James Coco while he is on the phone talking to a patient. Nina Foch plays Cannon’s society mom.

More satisfying are three Blu-ray/DVD combo packs from Criterion: Robert Rossen’s esteemed 1959 character study, Pickpocket; Peter Weir’s unsettling 1975 mystery, Picnic at Hanging Rock and DavidCronenberg’s1981 horror film, Scanners which makes more effective use of Jennifer O’Neill.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray upgrades of Witness for the Prosecution andThe Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.