Dominic Cooke is one of the leading directors of contemporary London’s plays and musicals. His production of Follies starring Imelda Staunton was filmed and given a limited release as National Theatre Live: Follies in 2017, the same year as Cooke’s first film, On Chesil Beach, was released. Cooke’s planned full-length film version of Follies has been in pre-production since November 2019. In the meantime, he has directed 2020’s The Courier, newly released on Blu-ray and standard DVD by Lionsgate,

The Courier is a fascinating true story cold-war spy thriller set in the early 1960s. It begins with Soviet agent Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) so concerned about world safety and impending nuclear war that he writes a letter to the CIA and hands it to an American tourist imploring him to give it the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. He does so. CIA agent Emily Donovan (Rachel Brosnahan) gives it to Britain’s MI6 agent Dickie Francis (Angus Wright) who recruits mild-mannered British salesman Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) to be their spy and contact with Petrovsky. Over the course of the next two years, Petrovsky will provide MI6 with over 5,000 photographs including the buildup of Soviet missiles in Cuba which leads to a standoff between the U.S. and USSR in October 1962 when Petrovsky and Wynne are arrested.

This is the third spy thriller in which Benedict Cumberbatch has starred following Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Imitation Game, for which he received his first and only Oscar nomination to date. He is every bit as good here as are Ninidze (TV’s Homeland), Bresnahan (The Finest Hours), and Jessie Buckley (Chernobyl) as Wynne’s wife.

The film, which plays out very much as a James Bond thriller, was shown at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and had its theatrical premiere on March 19, 2020, which would have been Wynne’s 100th birthday. It was one of the last films to receive a theatrical release before the shutdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Coincidentally, released by Kino Lorber on Blu-ray and standard DVD, Irving Pichel’s 1946 spy thriller, O.S.S. about the development of the CIA with the aid of MI6, was the first film to feature many of the James Bond tropes that would become familiar to audiences beginning in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The screenplay was by Richard Malbaum who wrote thirteen of the sixteen James Bond films produced between 1962 and 1989, starting with Dr. No. Malbaum’s first spy film was Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Foreign Correspondent for which he was an uncredited contributor.

This one stars Alan Ladd (This Gun for Hire) as the principal spy, but it’s his co-star Geraldine Fitzgerald (Ten North Frederick) who anchors the film as his courageous female partner. Patric Knowles (The Adventures of Robin Hood) heads the supporting cast as their handler, a precursor to Bond’s M.

Unique to the film are the many Bondian gadgets given to the agents of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) that would later become the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency).

Also released on Blu-ray and standard DVD by Kino Lorber are the romantic drama Peter Ibbetson, the romantic comedy Desire, and the third film version of the perennial tearjerker Back Street.

Henry Hathaway’s Peter Ibbetson was the second film he directed with Gary Cooper in 1935. The first was the unforgettable Lives of a Bengal Lancer, released last year by Kino Lorber. This one is completely different, an ethereal love story that begins with the great child actors Dickie Moore (Out of the Past) and Virginia Weidler (The Philadelphia Story), who grow up to be Cooper and Ann Harding. Ida Lupino (High Sierra) is the other woman in Cooper’s life.

Frank Borzage’s 1936 romantic crime comedy, Desire, stars Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in their first film together since Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco six years earlier. Produced by Ernst Lubitsch, this one is a light comedy that has more in common with Lubitsch’s 1932 film Trouble in Paradise and Borzage’s 1937 film History Is Made at Night, than it does the von Sternberg opus. The title is not a reference to the chemistry between the film’s stars but of jewel thief Dietrich’s desire for a string of pearls. Cooper pays her dupe.

Fannie Hurst’s 1931 novel Back Street was first filmed in 1932 with Irene Dunne and John Boles, two years before Hurst’s equally famous 1933 novel Imitation of Life was filmed with Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers. Back Street was remade in 1941 with Margaret Sullavan and Charles Boyer. Imitation of Life would be remade in 1959 with Lana Turner and Juanita Moore. Two years after that, Back Street was remade for a third time with Susan Hayward and John Gavin.

Although the first two versions of Back Street are considered genuine screen classics, the third version is not, but it is nevertheless an engrossing film to watch thanks to the bravura performance of Ms. Hayward as the businesswoman who falls in love with a married man whose wife refuses to give him a divorce, thus setting up a “back street” apartment where the two continue their clandestine affair for years. Vera Miles, who played Gavin’s romantic interest in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho the year before, plays his vicious wife in this.

Paramount Presents as its latest releases two classic films that have been released on DVD and Blu-ray before, but which, in their sparkling new 4K transfers, have never looked better.

George Stevens’ 1951 film A Place in the Sun, starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters, has been given a 70th Anniversary release just months after its first Blu-ray appearance in Australia’s perfectly fine Imprint release, which makes it a bit of a headscratcher, but Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville, previously released by Criterion in a 2K 2016 release, shows a marked improvement.

The Altman film, which intertwines twenty-four characters, was Altman’s most successful film since 1970’s M*A*S*H and would remain his most acclaimed film until 2001’s Gosford Park. It was nominated for five Oscars, and won one for Keith Carradine’s song, “I’m Easy,” sung to the various cast members with whom his character was having simultaneous affairs. The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Director, and Supporting Actresses Ronee Blakley and Lily Tomlin.

This week’s U.S. Blu-ray releases include The Emperor Waltz and Fitzwilly.