News of the World was the only major studio release of 2020 considered to have had much of a chance at securing major Oscar nominations. In the end, it only received four for Cinematography, Production Design, Score, and Sound, all of them well earned. It had also been considered a possible nominee for Best Picture, Actor (Tom Hanks), Supporting Actress (Helena Zengel), and Director (Paul Greengrass).

Hanks plays a Texas civil war veteran who undertakes a perilous journey through Texas to deliver a girl, who had been captured years earlier by the Kiowa people, to her aunt and uncle against her will. Hanks, who had been a newspaperman before the war, now makes his living going from town-to-town reading newspapers from around the world to the locals for ten cents a pop. Zengel, whose parents were killed by the Kiowa, had no memory of her real family, and considered herself a Kiowa when her adoptive family is slaughtered. Greengrass, the Oscar-nominated director of United 93 was keen to make the film with Hanks, his Captain Phillips star, because he wanted to finally be able to make a film with a happy ending.

News of the World eventually gets to its happy ending, but there is a great deal of turmoil that Hanks and his young charge go through before they get there. Both Hanks and Zengel turn in memorable performances, especially 12-year-old German actress, Zengel, who had to learn Kiowa as well as brush up on her English. There are good supporting performances, as well, notably those of Ray McKinnon and Mare Winningham as a kindhearted couple, Elizabeth Marvel as an old friend of Hanks who just happens to speak Kiowa, and Fred Hechinger as a young gunman who turns the tables on the bad guys.

The thing that keeps the film from achieving greatness are those bad guys, cliched villains from the get-go. To be fair, they are dispatched in novel ways, so there is that, but movie bad guys are best when they are ambivalent rather than obvious in their intent.

Blu-ray extras include deleted scenes, on-screen interviews with Hanks and Zengel, and an appreciation of western action. Greengrass provides feature commentary.

From Warner Archive comes a beautifully restored Damn Yankees, the 1958 film of the 1955 Broadway smash hit starring Tab Hunter (Battle Cry) as the baseball fan who sells his soul to the devil, and Tony winners Gwen Verdon (Cocoon) as the devil’s vamp and Ray Walston (South Pacific) as the devil himself.

Composers Richard Adler and Jerry Ross were on a roll with back-to-back Tony winners The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees, but unfortunately Ross died of lung disease at 29 shortly into the run of Damn Yankees putting a premature end to their collaboration. Adler, who lived to 90, had a long career, but nothing ever approached the greatness of those two shows with Ross.

The film was co-directed by George Abbott (All Quiet on the Western Front) and Stanley Donen (Funny Face), with Bob Fosse (Cabaret) providing the choreography. Most of the score made it into the film, but the risqué “The Game,” sung by the players, and “A Man Doesn’t Know” and “Near to You,” sung by Hunter’s character and his wife, were dropped. They wouldn’t dare drop the show’s most popular song, “(You’ve Gotta Have) Heart,” sung by the players, nor any of Verdon’s songs from “A Little Brains, A Little Talent” to “Whatever Lola Wants (Lola Gets)” to “Who’s Got the Pain (When They Do the Mambo)” (her duet with Fosse) to “Two Lost Souls” (her duet with Hunter). Walston also gets to perform the devil’s signature ballad, “Those Were the Good Old Days.”

Like its recent release of The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, with the emphasis on the latter, Warner Archive’s Blu-ray restorations are a treasure, the likes of which we have seldom seen.

Also given a brand-new Blu-ray release by Warner Archive is the 1947 film noir Crossfire, which was also the first Hollywood film to deal with antisemitism.

Laura Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement, her best-selling novel about antisemitism in post-war America, had been shopped around to every major studio in Hollywood but no one would touch it until Fox’s Daryl F. Zanuck agreed to produce it, giving it an all-star production that would eventually earn it eight Oscar nominations and three wins. At the same time, producer Adrian Scott had optioned The Brick Foxhole, the first novel by future director Richard Brooks (Elmer Gantry), which was about a homophobic murder, a no-no in Hollywood at the time. Scott and director Edward Dmytryk (The Caine Mutiny) changed the motive for the murder of a bar patron from homophobia to antisemitism. When Zanuck found out about it, he implored RKO’s Dore Schary not to make the film. Not only did Schary refuse, but he stepped up production and released the film 3 1/2 months before Gentleman’s Agreement, stealing some of Fox’s thunder.

Although Gentleman’s Agreement would eventually win out at the Oscars, Crossfire was itself nominated for Best Picture as well as Best Supporting Actor (Robert Ryan), Supporting Actress (Gloria Grahame), Director, and Screenplay. Ryan’s vicious bigot was his signature role, one he continued to play with variation until his death in 1973.

Extras include commentary by film historians Alain Silver and James Ursini with intercepts from Dmytryk and the excellent featurette, Crossfire: Hate Is Like a Gun.

Kino Lorber has released a Blu-ray of 1978’s Crossed Swords from producer Ilya Salkind, who had previously produced 1974’s Three Musketeers and 1975’s Four Musketeers, which were directed by Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night) in his usual frantic style. Unable to get Lester, he hired another Richard, Fleischer (Compulsion), to direct this version of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper in Lester’s style. It doesn’t quite work, but you get to see an all-star cast trying its best. They include Oscar winners Ernest Borgnine, George C. Scott, Rex Harrison, and Charlton Heston, as well as Mark Lester and Oliver Reed, the stars of the Oscar-winning Oliver!

Lester plays the dual role of the prince and the pauper, previously played by Billy and Bobby Mauch in the 1937 classic with Errol Flynn. The action centers around the mischievous look-alike friends trading places and unable to convince their elders that they aren’t really who they were pretending to be when the prince’s father, Henry VIII, dies. It’s all in good fun, but the older version is far superior and deserves a Blu-ray release of its own.

Extras include commentary by film historians, Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell, and Nathaniel
Thompson, as well as a brand new on-camera interview with Lester.

This week’s U.S. Blu-ray releases include The Greatest Show on Earth and Defending Your Life.