Paramount has released long overdue Blu-ray upgrades of four of its best, if not necessarily best-known, films of the last forty-two years. Here at last are great looking Blu-rays of 1981’s Gallipoli, 1985’s Young Sherlock Holmes, 1996’s Big Night, and 2007’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Peter Weir’s Gallipoli was the celebrated Australian director’s first international hit. It was, along with Warren Beatty’s Reds and Hugh Hudson’s Chariots of Fire, one of the three most talked about films of its year, one of three films seemingly destined for Oscar glory. While Chariots of Fire went on to win the Best Picture Oscar and Reds the Best Director Oscar for Beatty, Gallipoli received no Oscar nominations. Why not?

Distributed by Paramount in the U.S., Gallipoli did not have the awards backing of the studio that the studio-produced Reds, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Ragtime had, or the early awards recognition that the Paramount-distributed Atlantic City had, to get into a crowded Oscar race that also included Universal’s On Golden Pond and Warner Bros.’ U.S. release of Chariots of Fire. It did, however, make numerous top ten lists including that of the National Board of Review after which it received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Film, losing to the British-made Chariots of Fire.

Nominated for 12 AFI (Australian Film Institute) awards (Australian’s equivalent of the Oscars), Gallipoli won 8 including Best Picture, Director, Actor (Mel Gibson), and Supporting Actor (Bill Hunter). Among the ones it lost were those for the film’s true star, Best Actor nominee Mark Lee and Best Supporting Actor nominee Bill Kerr.

Theatre trained Gibson, already an international star thanks to Mad Max, had top billing but his role was secondary to that of model-turned-actor Lee in his first film. The film begins and ends on the image of Lee’s classic Australian golden boy face.

Both Lee and Gibson play runners, Lee professionally trained by his uncle (Kerr), Gibson a devil-may-care amateur one. Both are among the all-enlistee members of the West Australian unit of the all-volunteer Australian-New Zealand Army, led by Hunter, that sought to stop World War I from coming to their doorstep by meeting the German supporting Turks on the Turkish battlefield.

It all ends disastrously during the ill-planned Battle of Gallipoli in which their British commanders send the Aussies running to certain death at the hands of the better equipped Turks.

Weir patterned the film after Lewis Milestone’s 1930 Oscar winner All Quiet on the Western Front and Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 classic Paths of Glory. It is every bit as unforgettable in its dénouement as those two.

The Blu-ray includes Entrenched: The Making of Gallipoli, a six-part documentary made for the 2011 DVD release of the film.

Barry Levinson’s Young Sherlock Holmes, which was written by Chris Columbus and produced by Steven Spielberg, is an origins story about Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictitious characters, indominable sleuth Sherlock Holmes and his friend and biographer, Dr. Watson, who for purposes of the story meet in college.

Holmes and Watson are engagingly played by 18-year-old Nicholas Rowe and 14-year-old Alan Cox with Sophie Ward as Holmes’ first love. The supporting cast is led by Anthony Higgins, Freddie Jones, and Nigel Stock. The film’s special effects earned it its only Oscar nomination.

When you watch it, be sure to stay with it through the closing credits for a surprise ending which hints at a possible sequel that never emerged.

Both Rowe and Cox, who is the son of prize-winning actor Brian Cox, are still acting today, albeit neither became the major star they might have based on their performances in the film.

Co-directed by Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott, Big Night takes place in a struggling New Jersey restaurant in the 1950s in which the two brothers who run it plan a night of exceptional food. Its theme is that if life is a feast and love the main course, the key to happiness is finding your place at the table and what a table it is!

Tony Shalhoub and Tucci play the brothers. Both are excellent as are Minnie Driver, Isabella Rossellini, Ian Holm, and Allison Janney in support. Scott has a small role. The film didn’t receive any Oscar nominations, but it did receive awards for Tucci and Scott for Best First Film from various critics’ groups and Shalhoub received the Best Supporting Actor award of the National Society of Film Critics even though he was the film’s de facto star.

Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the biography of Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby who suffered a stroke leaving him with paralyzed body except for his left eye. He can see and hear but cannot speak, communicating only by blinking his good eye once for yes and twice for no.

Nominated for four Oscars including Best Director, the film is powerfully acted by Mathieu Almaric (Quantum of Solace) as Bauby. He is ably supported by Emmanuelle Seigner as his physical therapist and Marie-Josée Croze as his speech therapist who teaches him to communicate using a system where he spells out words by the blinking of his eye. The great Max Von Sydow received numerous awards recognitions, albeit none from Oscar, as Bauby’s aged father.

One of the five films nominated for that year’s Best Picture award at the PGA (Producers Guild of America), it was the only one of the five not to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. The other nominees were There Will Be Blood, Juno, Michael Clayton, and No Country for Old Men. which won. It was replaced in the Oscar nominations by Atonement, where No Country for Old Men was also the winner.