Paramount Presents has released the theatrical cut of Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film Almost Famous on Blu-ray for the first time.

Crowe’s Oscar winner (for Best Original Screenplay) was previously released on Blu-ray ten years ago in its Bootleg (director’s) Cut only. The new Blu-ray from a 4K film transfer includes both versions of the film that also received two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress (Kate Hudson, Frances McDormand) as well as Best Film Editing. Surprisingly Crowe was not nominated for Best Director despite being nominated for that award by the Directors Guild. In addition, the film itself was not nominated for Best Picture despite a Producers Guild nomination and a Golden Globe win for Best Picture – Musical or Comedy.

The fictitious film is based on Crowe’s real-life account of his life as a young Rolling Stone reporter in the 1970s. Patrick Fugit (Gone Girl) plays the Crowe character at 15, who is given the chance to go on tour with a famous band. Hudson, in her breakout role, is the groupie he falls hard for, and McDormand is his well-meaning but overbearing mother. Zooey Deschanel is his sister. Billy Crudup is the band’s lead guitarist and Jason Lee the band’s lead singer. Anna Paquin, Fairuza Bach, Noah Taylor, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Jimmy Fallon have key supporting roles in this turn-of-the-21st-century comedy treasure.

Paramount Presents has also released upgraded Blu-rays of 48 Hrs. and Trading Places, both from 4K film transfers.

Walter Hill’s 1982 film, 48 Hrs., marked the screen debut of Eddie Murphy as the wisecracking parolee paired with hardnosed cop Nick Nolte in tracking down a killer. The film’s hilarious dialogue between Saturday Night Live comedian Murphy and Nolte in his first comedy role was largely improvised. A huge box-office hit, Murphy’s character was morphed into his character in Beverly Hills Cop, which has produced two sequels to date with another one announced for 2022. Both actors would eventually become Oscar nominees, Murphy for Dreamgirls,and Nolte for The Prince of Tides, Affliction, and Warrior.

John Landis’s 1983 film Trading Places was Murphy’s second film, one that evoked the social conscience comedies of the 1930s and 1940s from the likes of Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, and Preston Sturges. Murphy and fellow Saturday Night Live alum Dan Ackroyd play men on opposite ends of the social scale whose lives are switched in an experiment brought on by a bet between heartless commodities brokers Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche. Denholm Elliott and Jamie Lee Curtis co-star in this still very funny film that brought Elmer Bernstein an Oscar nomination for his score.

Shout! Factory has released a Blu-ray of David Hemmings’ Just a Gigolo.

The film, which is set in post-World War I Berlin, was filmed mostly on location there where it had its world premiere in November 1978. Scorned by critics and the public alike, the film was sporadically released to the rest of the of the world, reaching the U.S. in May 1981.

The film was so roundly criticized that both David Bowie and Marlene Dietrich disowned it, yet watching it now after Bowie, Dietrich, Hemmings, Curt Jurgens, and Maria Schell are all gone, gives it a fascinating perspective.

The film starts out mirroring Cabaret with Bowie as a sort of Michael York character as a former Prussian soldier and Sydne Rome as a definite imitation of Liza Minnelli, with Jurgens’ prince taking the place of Helmut Griem in that film’s romantic triangle. Schell, as Bowie’s mother, takes the place of the worldly-wise landlady from the stager production of Cabaret as originally played by Lotte Lenya (The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. If only the film had stayed with them, but it doesn’t.

Rome is soon discovered by Hollywood as was Dietrich in real life in the 1920s. Bowie then drifts into the life of a gigolo, working for a madam played by Dietrich. One of his clients is Kim Novak, who, according to rumor, was fired from the film before her scenes could be completed. Dietrich, on the other hand, was only given two scenes, and those were filmed, at her insistence, in Paris. She interfaces with Bowie in both, but Bowie had to leave the production to get ready for his 1978 tour so Hemmings, who also plays a supporting role in the film, had to feed Bowie’s dialogue to her to make her scenes work. Still, Dietrich’s warbling of the title song is the film’s highlight. She’s obviously talking about herself when she sings “When the end comes, I know they’ll say just a gigolo. Life goes on without me…” even though it makes no sense when sung by a woman.

You’ll enjoy it if you’re not expecting too much.

Kino Lorber has released the classic westerns Union Pacific and Shenandoah on Blu-ray.

Cecil B. DeMille’s 1939 epic, Union Pacific, about the expansion of U.S. railroads coast-to-coast, was one of his least controversial and well-received films. Barbara Stanwyck leads the cast as the railroad’s fiery Irish immigrant postmistress torn between lawman Joel McCrea and gambler Robert Preston. Brian Donlevy, an Oscar nominee for that year’s Beau Geste, co-stars as the film’s principal villain. It was one of four 1939 westerns that advanced the genre beyond the routine shoot ‘em ups that had dogged it for years. Stagecoach, Jesse James, and Dodge City were the others.

Andrew McLaglen’s 1965 film, Shenandoah, may well be the best western not directed by John Ford, which isn’t surprising as he grew up on the sets of Ford’s films in which his Oscar-winning father, Victor McLaglen (The Informer), played major roles.

James Stewart, in one of his last great roles, plays the widowed father of a Virginia farming family who vows to remain neutral during the Civil War, and does so until his youngest son is kidnapped. Playing Stewart’s sons are Glenn Corbett (The Crimson Kimono), Patrick Wayne (The Searchers), Charles Robinson (The Sand Pebbles), Jim McMullan (Batman & Robin), Tim McIntire (A Boy and His Dog), and Phillip Alford (To Kill a Mockingbird). Rosemary Forsyth (The War Lord) is his daughter, Doug McClure (TV’s The Virginian) his son-in-law, and Katharine Ross (The Graduate) his daughter-in-law. Three of those family members will die violent deaths before the film’s unforgettable reconciliation scene featuring the family’s remaining members.

This week’s U.S. Blu-ray releases include Paramount Presents editions of Nashville and A Place in the Sun.