For his first feature film, French director Serge Bourguinon wanted Hollywood star Steve McQueen to play the traumatized amnesiac who forms a friendship with a lonely 12-year-old girl in Sundays and Cybèle, but producer Romain Pines told him he couldn’t afford McQueen, but he could afford Hardy Kruger.

Waylaid by Pines on his way to film Hatari! in Africa with John Wayne and Howard Hawks, Kruger agreed to meet the director at a famous French restaurant. The two bonded over dinner, during which Bourguinon explained the entire plot to Kruger who agreed to make the film after Hatari!. Six months later when Kruger was ready to do the film he learned that financing had fallen through. He used his Hollywood connections to get the film made.

As late as October of 1962, the completed film still had no distributor. The producer attempted to release the film himself, but no Paris theatre would book the film. Finally, the manager of Manhattan’s Fine Arts Theatre in New York agreed to host the film’s world premiere on Monday, November 12, 1962. The film opened to ecstatic reviews and ran a year at the Fine Arts as it soon would in other theatres throughout the world. Suddenly, five Paris theatres that had turned the film down wanted it. France submitted the film for consideration for that year’s Foreign Film Oscar. It was nominated. Then it won. The following year, when, due to its Los Angeles release, it was eligible for other categories, it received nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay by Bourguinon and Antoine Tudal and Best Score by Maurice Jarre.

The film’s road to a U.S. video release has been even longer in coming. Although available in the U.K. and other countries on VHS and DVD for some time, there has been no U.S. release until now.

Criterion’s beautifully rendered release on Blu-ray and standard DVD does full justice to the black-and-white masterpiece. Extras include separate full-length on-screen interviews in English with Bourguinon, Kruger and former child actress Patricia Gozzi. 86-year-old Kruger (The One That Got Away; The Flight of the Phoenix) is as charming as ever, waxing enthusiastic over the film as though it were made yesterday.

Criterion has also released a newly restored Blu-ray edition of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Fear Eats the Soul was Fassbinder’s tribute to Douglas Sirk’s 1955 film, All That Heaven Allows. Although often erroneously identified as a remake of the Sirk film, Fassbinder’s film has a completely different storyline. Set in Munich, the film is about the unexpected love affair a German widow in her mid-sixties and an Arab man, a Moroccan, in his late 30s.

Brigitte Mira won a German Film Award for her indelible performance. The Blu-ray’s extras, culled from Criterion’s original DVD release in 2003, includes a segment in which the then-93-year-old Mira, looking hardly a day older than she does in the film made nearly thirty years earlier, talks extensively about the making of the film. Todd Haynes, who also made his own tribute to All That Heaven Allows with his 2002 film Far From Heaven, talks at length about both and Fassbinder.

Mira died in 2005, a month prior to what would have been her 95th birthday. Co-star El Hedi ben Salem died in 1976 at 41. Fassbinder died in 1982 at 37.

Sergio Leone will always be remembered for the spaghetti westerns, A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West, but what he always wanted to do was direct a Hollywood-style gangster film. It took him fifteen years to do it from conception to final product, but he finally completed Once Upon a Time in America in 1984. Starring Robert De Niro, James Woods, Tuesday Weld, Elizabeth McGovern, Joe Pesci, Burt Young, Treat Williams, James Hayden, William Forsythe, Danny Aiello, Jennifer Connelly and more, the film was Leone’s masterwork.

Having shot more than ten hours of film, Leone’s original cut ran six hours, which he then cut to four hours and thirty minutes. Deemed unacceptable by the distributors, The Ladd Company and Warner Bros., he cut the film further to three hours and forty minutes. This is the version that won acclaim when shown out of competition at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. He added nine minutes back in for the European theatrical release. The film was re-cut without Leone’s participation to two hours and nineteen minute for its U.S. release. This version, which rearranged the structure from moving back and forth between the 1930s, 1960s and early 1900s to a chronological narrative, pleased no one.

The previous Blu-ray and standard DVD release was the three-hour-and-forty minute version shown at Cannes in 1984. Two years ago, a restored three-hour-and-forty-nine minute version was shown again out of competition at Cannes. Warner Bros.’ new release includes an additional 22 minutes of footage and runs four-hours-and-eleven minutes. This is likely to be the most complete version we will ever see of Leone’s masterwork. The director died five years after completing the film, allegedly of a broken heart because of the way the film was cut in the U.S.

Warner Bros. has also released a 75th Anniversary Blu-ray Edition of Gone With the Wind, but be forewarned, this is the same restored print that was released for the film’s 70th anniversary five years ago. The “extras” this time around aren’t nearly as good those presented in previous releases. They include an “Old South/New South” documentary that is more a public relations advertisement for the places covered than anything else. The deluxe edition is even more absurd. Does anyone need or even want a replica of Rhett Butler’s handkerchief? This edition is recommended for those who don’t already own the 70th Anniversary Blu-ray Edition. For those who do and want the new release anyway, my advice is to replace the extraneous two standard DVDs that come with it with the extras from the previous release.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray upgrades of Holiday Inn and Topkapi.