Kino Lorber ends the year with a slew of new releases including Broken Lullaby, Because of You, The Midnight Story, and Mass Appeal.

Ernest Lubitsch’s 1932 film Broken Lullaby was the third teaming of Phillips Holmes and Nancy Carroll. Carroll had been nominated for an Oscar for their first pairing in 1930’s The Devil’s Holiday. The two were even better together in 1931’s Stolen Heaven, the year Holmes also gave stellar performances in Howard Hawks’ The Criminal Code and Josef von Sternberg’s An American Tragedy.

Billed third behind Lionel Barrymore and Carroll, Holmes is the protagonist in Broken Lullaby, a French solider suffering from what today would be called PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder) from his killing of a German soldier at the end of World War I. The soldier, he discovers, was a musician like himself, someone he knew about from having attended the same university. Looking to assuage his guilt, he travels to the small German town where the man he killed lived and is buried. He is discovered praying over his grave by the man’s mother (Louise Carter) who assumes Holmes was a friend of her late son.

Holmes ingratiates himself to the man’s parents (Carter and Barrymore), and his grieving fiancé (Carroll), and eventually becomes accepted by the locals before confessing his secret to Carroll. One of the great pacifist films of the era, along with All Quiet on the Western Front and Westfront 1918, the film was a box-office failure despite strong reviews. Lubitsch, whose other 1932 films were the hits, One Hour with You and Trouble in Paradise, was so upset over the film’s failure that he vowed never to make a serious film again. The future director of The Shop Around the Corner and To Be or Not to Be among others, kept his word.

Holmes’ and Carroll’s careers both fizzled by 1938, the last year either one appeared on the screen. Carroll had a comeback of sorts on TV in the 1950s and early 1960s, dying in 1965 at 61. Holmes acted on stage before joining the Canadian Air Force at the beginning of World War II. He was killed in a military air collision in 1942 at 35, one of the first show business casualties of the war.

Joseph Pevney’s 1952 film Because of You is considered a film noir, but it’s more of a soap opera. Loretta Young’s penultimate film has her playing a dimwitted blond playgirl whose gangster boyfriend (Alex Nicol) is caught in a robbery for which she is arrested as an accessory even though she had nothing to do with it.

While in jail, Young studies nursing and becomes a brunette. While on probation, she acts as a nurse’s aid where she falls in love with shellshocked World War II veteran Jeff Chandler. The two marry while he is still in the dark as to her background. They have a daughter and Nicol returns, getting the unwitting Young involved in another robbery with her three-year-old daughter along for the ride having been kidnapped by Nicol. Chandler divorces her and gets sole custody of their daughter. And that’s just the beginning of their troubles!

The film isn’t great, but it is never boring. Frances Dee gives a lovely performance as Chandler’s sister who remains friends with Young after the divorce. Dee would make just two more films before retiring from the screen herself.

The prolific Pevney would make a number of films before going into television where he directed many series from the 1950s through the 1980s, most notably the original Star Trek.

Pevney’s 1957 film The Midnight Story was one of four released by Universal-International that year. The others were Istanbul, which came before it, and Tammy and the Bachelor and Man of a Thousand Faces, which came after.

The Midnight Story opens with the murder of a Catholic priest. Not just a priest, but the priest who was orphan, now San Francisco patrolman, Tony Curtis’ mentor. Curtis thinks he knows who killed him, but the detectives don’t believe him. He quits the police and ingratiates himself into the family of the man he suspects (Gilbert Roland), falling love with his cousin (Marissa Pavan). Good location work and strong performances from all three stars elevate this one beyond the ordinary.

Because of You and The Midnight Story are part of Kino Lorber’s Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema V along with Dark Side of the Law, which I haven’t reviewed.

Catholic priests are the focal point of Glenn Jordan’s 1984 film Mass Appeal in which Jack Lemmon gives one of his best performances as a popular California priest who risks the enmity of the dean of the local seminary (Charles Durning) by supporting the rebellious deacon (Zeljko Ivanek) temporarily assigned to him. Milo O’Shea (The Verdict) received a Tony nomination for the Broadway version featuring just him and Michael O’Keefe (The Great Santini) in Ivanek’s role under the direction of Geraldine Fitzgerald.

Although the film was among the National Board of Review’s top ten of the year, it failed to receive a single Oscar nomination.

Warner Archive ends the year with the Blu-ray release of MGM’s 1952 film Ivanhoe.

Ivanhoe, directed by Richard Thorpe (The Great Caruso), was a surprise Oscar nominee for Best Picture over MGM’s more successful Singin’ in the Rain, something the film has never quite lived down.

The Blu-ray does justice to the film’s beautiful cinematography. A faithful adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s 1819 novel with strong performances from Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, Emlyn Williams, Guy Rolfe, Finlay Currie, Felix Aylmer, and others, it does spend an awful lot of time on jousting matches but is easily the best film of its type aside from Michael Curtiz’s 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Thorpe would next direct Taylor opposite Ava Gardner in 1953’s Knights of the Round Table based on Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th Century novel.

This week’s new Blu-ray releases include Lady in a Cage and No Way to Treat a Lady.