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This Gun for Hire, The Big Clock, The Landlord, The Bedroom Window, and The House of Games have all now been given Blu-ray upgrades.

Alan Ladd had been in films since 1932, mostly in uncredited roles, when talent agent Sue Carol took charge of his career and the actor himself, marrying him in 1942, the year of his breakthrough performance as the tough-as-nails hitman in Frank Tuttle’s This Gun for Hire, a property that Paramount had been sitting on for six years.

Taken from a Graham Greene novel, the plot of This Gun for Hire is a bit convoluted, but it was the perfect vehicle for the type of film that would come to be known as film noir. Ladd was fourth billed below Veronica Lake as a nightclub singer whose fiancรฉ Robert Preston is the local prosecutor, the only two actors billed above the title. Laird Cregar (two years before The Lodger) is the mob boss who hires Ladd to kill blackmailer Frank Ferguson and his girlfriend and then double-crosses him. He’s also the owner the nightclub in which Lake is performing.

Preston (Beau Geste) and Lake (Sullivan’s Travels) had no chemistry together, but Ladd and Lake in their one scene together sizzled, so much so that Paramount had the screenwriters add scene after scene for the two to appear in together. It would be the first of seven films in which the two appeared together, the most famous besides This Gun for Hire being 1942’s The Glass Key and 1946’s The Blue Dahlia.

Commentary on the Shout Select 4K restoration is provided by film historians Alan K. Rode and Steve Mitchell who also provided the commentary on The Glass Key and The Blue Dahlia, both of which were previously released by Shout Select.

Films noir don’t come any finer than 1948’s The Big Clock, directed by John Farrow (Wake Island), starring Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, and both Farrow’s wife (Maureen O’Sullivan) and Laughton’s (Elsa Lanchester).

Milland, in his best role since winning the Oscar for 1945’s The Lost Weekend, is a magazine editor who is adept at finding people no one else can for his magazine. His publisher (Laughton) gives him the task of finding the unknown man who was seen with a murder victim (Rita Johnson) the night before. The woman was Laughton’s secret mistress who he himself has killed, and the man who was with her just before she was murdered was Milland himself. O’Sullivan, in her first film in six years, is Milland’s wife. Lanchester is the film’s comic relief as an eccentric artist who can identify Milland but takes a liking to him and helps protect him from Laughton’s wrath as best she can. George Macready (Gilda) and Harry Morgan play Laughton’s evil henchmen.

If the plot seems familiar, that’s because it was rehashed for Roger Donaldson’s now better known 1987 film No Way Out with Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman. Extras include commentary by film scholar Adrian Martin and an appreciation of Laughton by Simon Callow, actor and author of the Laughton biography A Difficult Actor.

Producer-director Norman Jewison first hired Hal Ashby as his editor on 1965’s The Cincinnati Kid. Two years later he would win an Oscar for editing Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night. When Jewison was asked to direct 1971’s Fiddler on the Roof in Europe, he relegated the direction of 1970’s The Landlord to Ashby as his first directorial effort.

The Landlord introduces the kind of quirky comedy that would prove to be Ashby’s trademark over the remainder of the 70s in such films as Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, and Being There. It provided Beau Bridges with one of the best roles of his still burgeoning career as a 29-year-old rich guy who moves out of his parents’ home to become landlord of a dilapidated building in the Brooklyn ghetto. Lee Grant, who had one of her best roles as the widow of the murder victim in In the Heat of the Night, received an Oscar nomination as Bridges’ caustic mother. She and Bridges are matched by Pearl Bailey, Diana Sands, and Louis Gossett, Jr. as tenants of the building with Bridges becoming romantically involved with Sands.

The film remains a treat. Adding to the fun on the Kino Lorber release are separate newly recorded on-camera interviews with 92-year-old Jewison and 93-year-old Grant.

Ten years before Curtis Hanson won his Oscar for his screenplay of 1997’s L.A. Confidential, the writer-director caused a sensation with the thriller The Bedroom Window starring Steve Guttenberg, Elizabeth McGovern, and Isabelle Huppert.

Guttenberg is having an affair with Huppert, his boss’ wife, who one night in his apartment looks out the window and sees a rapist about to murder one of his victims (McGovern) while Guttenberg is out of the room. When he returns, the two watch as neighbors help the victim. She convinces Guttenberg that he tell the police that he witnessed what she did because she is unable to come forward without jeopardizing her marriage. He does, and the perpetrator is arrested and put on trial where Guttenberg’s testimony falls apart leading to a cat and mouse game between him and the rapist leading to several murders before it’s all over.

The Kino Lorber release includes commentary by film historian and critic Peter Tonguette,

The same year as Hanson’s The Bedroom Window, writer-director David Mamet made his directorial debut with House of Games starring his then wife Lindsay Crouse (Places in the Heart) and frequent star of his plays, Joe Mantegna, in a psychological character study of a vulnerable therapist (Crouse) and a manipulative cardsharp (Mantegna). Mamet’s screenplay was nominated for a Golden Globe as well as several other awards.

Extras on the Criterion Blu-ray are all imported from the 2007 Criterion DVD.

This week’s new releases include Blu-ray upgrades of Ring of Bright Water and The Bostonians.

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