Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza is a film that it took two viewings for me to appreciate.

Initially, I dismissed it as an improbable take on California teenagers in 1973, but on second viewing found the breezy relationship between 15-year-old actor-turned-entrepreneur Cooper Hoffman and 25-year-old Alana Haim, his former babysitter, now his “not my girlfriend” girlfriend, quite endearing.

It turns out that Hoffman’s film, like Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, a fellow nominee for last year’s Best Picture and Directing Oscars, is a memory piece. It’s based on Anderson’s memories of the era as well as those of producer Gary Goetzman, the former actor whose life the central character is based on.

Goetzman, with Tim Matheson, played one of Lucille Ball’s 18 children (half hers, half Henry Fonda’s) in 1968’s Yours, Mine and Ours. Matheson and Ball are spoofed in the film in which they are played by Skyler Gisondo and Christine Ebersole.

Also spoofed in the film are William Holden and Sam Peckinpah, with names changed, played by Sean Penn and Tom Waits, and Jon Peters, using his real name, played by Bradley Cooper, with his permission.

Hoffman, who plays the Goetzman character in the film is the son of Anderson’s friend and frequent collaborator, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. He was once babysat by Haim at Anderson’s house when he was 13. She is the youngest member of the rock group Haim. The actors playing her parents and sisters in the film are her real-life parents and sisters. Her mother is a former art teacher who Anderson had a crunch on.

The plot revolves around young Hoffman’s success with selling waterbeds, a phenomenon that lasted from 1971 through the late 1980s, and later, his running of a pinball establishment. According to notes on the film, pinball was outlawed in Los Angeles in 1939 and reinstated in 1973. Research shows that the ban was placed in 1942 and lifted in 1974, but it is close enough.

The title Licorice Pizza comes from a record store chain of that name. The songs played in background are all songs that could have been heard on records purchased at the store at the time.

Anderson based the film’s style on 1973’s American Graffiti and 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It’s one of the director’s best films, up there with Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood.

Universal has released the joint MGM-Focus Features film on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Paramount has released John Ford’s 1962 film The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, on 4K Ultra High-Definition Blu-ray, a rarity for classic black-and-white films. While some reviewers have carped that the film’s digital transformation, which eliminates the film’s grainy texture, is heresy, but it looks perfectly fine to me.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was John Ford’s last great western, shot in black-and-white on Paramount soundstages unlike the great Ford color films such as 1948’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and 1956’s The Searchers that were filmed in majestic Monument Valley. The reason given at the time was budget constraints, but many thought the real reason was to camouflage the advanced ages of the film’s stars, John Wayne (54) and James Stewart (53), playing characters thirty years younger. They were roughly the same ages as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis who famously acted their real ages in the same year’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? . In his next film, Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation, released just two months later, Stewart played a grandfather.

Stewart plays a young lawyer, Wayne a seasoned cowboy, and Lee Marvin the titled outlaw in the film. Vera Miles, who plays the girl torn between Stewart and Wayne, was no spring chicken either at 32. She had acted in films with both actors before. She was Stewart’s wife in 1959’s The FBI Story and the girl Wayne’s nephew married is 1956’s The Searchers.

The mists of time, however, have been kind to the film. The film, which is about the wrong man building his life’s reputation on a lie, while the man who should have gotten credit, lived, and died in obscurity, has grown in stature in the ensuing years. As the film’s famous quote says, “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Kino Lorber has released Giuliano Montaldo’s 1971 film Sacco and Vanzetti on Blu-ray.

The film deals with the infamous 1920 arrest and trial of the Italian immigrants for a robbery and murder that they didn’t commit. Racist DA Cyril Cusack (Fahrenheit 451) works with unsure and lying witnesses to convict them with the help of equally racist judge Geoffrey Kean (The Spy Who Loved Me) because of their known anarchist beliefs. Shoemaker Sacco (Riccardo Cucciollo) and fishmonger Vanzetti (Gian Maria Volonté) are defended by Milo O’Shea (The Verdict) and William Prince (Cyrano de Bergerac) but even after Prince finds the real killers, the already convicted duo is denied a new trial by the same racist judge. After seven years of appeals, backed by demonstrations across the country, they are executed.

The powerful English language Italian film draws unsettling parallels to today’s U.S. politics. Joan Baez’s haunting “Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti” plays throughout the film. Audio commentary is provided by Alex Cox (Sid and Nancy, Repo Man).

Warner Archive has released Victor Fleming’s 1941 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on Blu-ray. Blu-ray production on Rouben Mamoulian’s superior 1931 version has been delayed due to the ongoing pandemic but should be out later this year. If you only want one Blu-ray version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic, wait for that one. This one, which Fleming directed immediately following The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, is an abomination. Its production values are top-notch, but Spencer Tracy in minimalist makeup and Ingrid Bergman as the prostitute Ivy, now a barmaid because prostitutes were verboten under the production code, are an embarrassment. He grimaces and shouts, she screams and shouts in roles that the usually sublimely subtle actors are ill-suited for.

This week’s new releases include the eagerly anticipated Blu-ray debuts of Flower Drum Song and Jude.