One of last year’s most highly anticipated films, Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, opened to mixed reviews and ended up alienating as many people as it pleased. Relatively absent from major awards recognition, it did nab Oscar nominations for its production design, costume design, and score. While it may have deserved to win all three, it won none. What was the problem?

There were several. At three hours and nine minutes, the film was too long with scenes that went on longer than they needed to. On the positive side, all three lead actors, Diego Calva as an up-and-coming producer, Margot Robbie as an overnight sensation in the mode of Clara Bow, and Brad Pitt as an actor modeled after John Gilbert toward the end of his career, were excellent. Unfortunately, many of the minor characters, such as the Louella Parsons-like gossip columnist played by Jean Smart and the whatever he was supposed be character played by Tobey Maguire, were poorly drawn. Worst of all, there were numerous gross-outs starting with the defecating elephant in the overly long sequence at the start of the film.

Ironically, the film’s greatest awards recognition was given to it by the AARP Movies for Grownup Awards which included it among its nominees for Best Time Capsule. The group’s other nominees were Armageddon Time, The Fabelmans, Till, and Elvis, which won.

The Paramount film is now available on 4k Blu-ray, standard Blu-ray, and standard DVD.

Kino Lorber has coincidentally also just released four classic films from Paramount, some of which were originally released not long after the events of Babylon, which takes place at the dawn of movie sound. All five have full-length commentaries among their extras.

First up is 1934’s Little Miss Marker, the first of numerous versions of Damon Runyan’s tale of a little girl who is left as collateral with a bookie by her gambler father who disappears soon after.

Directed by Alexander Hall (Here Comes Mr. Jordan), the film is most notable for the performance of Shirley Temple at her equally heartbreaking and charming best as the little girl. Fourth-billed behind Adolphe Menjou, Dorothy Dell, and Charles Bickford, she steals every scene she’s in on her way to becoming the screen’s biggest box-office star of the decade.

The story itself is quite good. Albeit obvious, it never wears out its welcome and is eons better than its three remakes to date, 1949’s Sorrowful Jones with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball in the Menjou-Dell roles, 1960’s 40 Pounds of Trouble with Tony Curtis and Suzanne Pleshette, and 1980’s Little Miss Marker with Walter Matthau and Julie Andrews. None of the little girls in those versions had careers anywhere near the heights of Temple’s. In fact, you would be hard pressed to remember their names let alone anything else you may have seen them in.

1935’s The Crusades was Cecil B. DeMille’s return to the biblical film after a couple of flops. With Hollywood’s production code now firmly in place, the director was constrained from making the kind of sensational sexploitation film that 1932’s The Sign of the Cross was with Claudette Colbert baring her breasts as she bathed in asses’ milk. This time around, his leading lady was Loretta Young at her most chaste and demure. With stuffy Henry Wilcoxin as Richard the Lionheart, the film is at its best when Ian Keith takes charge as Muslim leader Saladin. No wonder it was such a disappointment at the box office, driving DeMille away from the genre until he returned to it with 1949’s Samson and Delilah.

The material was covered somewhat better in David Butler’s 1954 film, King Richard and the Crusaders, top casting Rex Harrison as Saladin, Virginia Mayo, George Sanders as Richard, and Laurence Harvey as the film’s young hero. Ridley Scott tackled it again with 2005’s Kingdom of Heaven told from the perspective of a young blacksmith played by Orlando Bloom, with Eva Green, Jeremy Irons, and Liam Neesom heading the supporting cast.

Alan Ladd had one of his earliest hits with 1942’s Lucky Jordan, directed by Frank Tuttle. The comedy-drama about a reformed gangster and the ladies who reform him co-stars Helen Walker (Nightmare Alley) in her film debut and Mabel Paige, a 62-year-old veteran of 30 shorts and only one previous full-length film. Paige is especially memorable as an old drunk Ladd’s lawyer hires to pretend to be his dependent mother as a ruse to keep him out of the Army. The ruse fails, but the relationship doesn’t.

Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotton are the stars of William Dieterle’s 1945 film Love Letters.

Nominated for 4 Oscars including Best Actress, Art Direction, its famous title Song, and Score, the film with a screenplay by Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead) from a Christopher Massie novel, is a play on Cyrano de Bergerac.

Cotton plays a writer who writes love letters to Jones for a fellow soldier. Jones later marries Cotton’s friend only to be disenchanted by him. After her husband is murdered, Jones develops amnesia and Cotton comes into her life.

Gladys Cooper, who played the doubting nun in The Song of Bernadette, for which Jones won her Oscar, plays Jones’ aunt here, a stroke victim who holds the key to the mystery surrounding the murder of Jones’ husband. As she often was, Cooper is the film’s standout player.

Kino Lorber has also released a Universal gem from 1962 with astute full-length commentary.

No Man Is an Island is the only commercial film that writer-producers Richard Goldstone (The Tall Target) and John Monks Jr. (The House on 92nd Street) ever directed as well as co-writing and co-producing.

This was the third time that Jeffrey Hunter played a real-life war hero following 1953’s Sailor of the King and 1960’s Hell to Eternity.

Unlike many of the bigger names playing action heroes at the time, the 35-year-old actor was the right age for the role, one of his best. He plays the sole survivor of the December 7, 1941 attack on Guam who is hidden and helped by islanders for three years before he is evacuated. Part war movie, part human drama, and all true, this is one of the better films in the genre.

Happy viewing.