Among Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray releases are three from Robert Altman, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us and the never on DVD Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

1973’s The Long Goodbye starred Elliott Gould as an early 1970s incarnation of Raymond Chandler’s private detective, Philip Marlowe, previously played by Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Montgomery, James Garner and others, and subsequently played by Robert Mitchum and James Caan among many more.

Leigh Brackett, who was one of several screenwriters on 1946’s The Big Sleep in which Bogart immortalized the character, was the solo screenwriter this time around. The film features award winning cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond and terrific performances from Gould, Nina Van Pallandt and Sterling Hayden.

1974’s Thieves Like Us was a remake of Nicholas Ray’s 1949 classic, They Live by Night with Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall, John Schuck, Bert Remsen and Louise Fletcher in the roles previously played by Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, Howard Da Silva, Jay C. Flippen and Helen Craig. The Altman is grittier, the Ray more romantic, but both versions of Edward Anderson’s novel about depression era bank robbers on the run should be seen and enjoyed.

1983’s Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean is an absorbing film version of the play of the same name that Altman directed on Broadway the year before.

Set in the dining section of a five and ten cent store, we get to peak in at the employees of the fading gathering place as they were at the time of James Dean’s death on September 30, 1955 and as they are on the twentieth anniversary of the event. Sandy Dennis, Cher, Kathy Bates, Sudie Bond and Marta Heflin play the main characters along with Mark Patton in the earlier period and Karen Black in the later period. Dennis, Cher, Black and Patton are terrific and a young Bates shows definite evidence of future greatness. Dennis, Cher and Black’s characters all have secrets that are exposed in the film’s shattering climax. It’s another Altman gem.

The Gone Girl of the 1960s, Otto Preminger’s 1965 film, Bunny Lake Is Missing was the highly anticipated film version of a first time best-selling novel by a new female author. Carol Lynley is the American tourist in London who claims her daughter has been kidnapped, but does the daughter really exist? Laurence Olivier is the police superintendent who investigates. Keir Dullea, Martita Hunt, Anna Massey, Clive Revill, Finlay Currie and Noel Coward have prominent roles in the film which has just been released on Blu-ray by Twilight Time.

Olive Films has released a stunning Blu-ray of Billy Wilder’s Fedora, the 1978 film in which the director returned to Sunset Boulevard territory.

William Holden, the young protagonist of Sunset Boulevard is a washed up director here, attempting a comeback by trying to convince a Garboesque reclusive star to return to the screen in a new version of Anna Karenina.

At this point in his career, Wilder was no longer the superstar director he had been form the 1940s to the 1960s. His most recent film, the ill-advised 1974 remake of The Front Page had been a critical and commercial failure. Aside from Holden, he had difficulty casting Fedora from Tom Tyron’s novella. Both Faye Dunaway and Marlene Dietrich who he wanted for the principal female roles hated what Tryon had written. Marthe Keller and Hildegard Knef were eventually cast and José Ferrer, who had beaten Holden for the 1950 Best Actor Oscar for Sunset Boulevard with his performance in Cyrano de Bergerac, was cast as a villainous doctor. The finished film was another flop for Wilder, but it does have its fans.

Universal has quietly been stepping up its DVD releases of long-delayed pre-1949 Paramount films, many of which have been sought by classic film fans for years.

Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, filmed in 1935 by Stuart Walker, like the novel itself, was not one of the great films made from a Dickens work, but it is a solid one with first-class performances by the likes of Claude Rains, Douglass Montgomery, Heather Angel, David Manners, Francis L. Sullivan, Valerie Hobson, Zeffie Tilbury and Ethel Griffies.

William A. Seiter’s 1936 film, The Moon’s Our Home is a delightful romantic comedy featuring the only on-screen pairing of Margaret Sullavan and Henry Fonda, who had been briefly married from December, 1931-March, 1933. She’s an actress, he’s a writer, who detest one another until fate takes over. Charles Butterworth, Beulah Bondi, Henrietta Crosman and Walter Brennan lend their usual fine support.

Irene Dunne, who rose to prominence in the original touring version of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat, had her last major singing role in the 1937 Kern and Hammerstein musical, High, Wide and Handsome. The plot, about the singing daughter of a con man and an aspiring oil baron played by Randolph Scott is secondary to the score, most of which is carried by Miss Dunne. It includes the standards, “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” and “Why Would I?”, as well as the title song. It was Oscar nominated for its special effects.

Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotton were at their best in William Dieterle’s 1945 film, Love Letters for which Jones received her third consecutive Oscar nomination. A modern reworking of Cyrano de Bergerac, Jones is an amnesiac who may have murdered her husband when he doesn’t live up to the ideals of his love letters, which were actually written by wartime buddy Cotton. Gladys Cooper, Ann Richards and Cecil Kellaway are superb in support.

Irving Reis’ 1948 film of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons came straight on the heels of Miller’s first Tony award for his play about a self-made businessman who ships defective airplane engine parts to the U.S. Army that causes the deaths of twenty-three men. Exonerated after blaming the crime on his partner, the truth comes out just as his returning soldier son is about to marry the ex-partner’s daughter. Edward G. Robinson had one of his best roles as the protagonist with strong support from Mady Christians as his wife and Burt Lancaster as his son.

This week’s new releases include Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and The Hundred-Foot Journey.