This week’s top Blu-ray upgrades are a diverse group of films stretching from the early 1990s all the way back to the mid-1940s, but they have one thing in common: change.

1991’s Dogfight gives us the premier sensitive boy actor of his generation, River Phoenix, as a cruel, foulmouthed marine whose sensitive side is a long time in coming. 1979’s Starting Over does the reverse in giving us the usually loudmouthed, insensitive Burt Reynolds as a low-key magazine writer unable to choose between two women. Western director extraordinaire Anthony Mann breaks with longtime star James Stewart to cast Henry Fonda as the lead in 1957’s The Tin Star. John Carradine shines in a rare leading role, in his own personal favorite performance, as the serial killer in 1944’s Bluebeard.

Long a cult classic, Dogfight was not successful in its initial release. It only played in two theatres, one in New York, opening on Friday, September 13, 1991, and the other in Los Angeles two weeks later. It went straight to video in the U.K.

River Phoneix at the time was a major star, a recent Oscar nominee for Running on Empty and an early favorite for 1991’s year-end awards for Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho opposite Keanu Reeves. He had casting approval for Dogfight for which he chose Lili Taylor to play the female lead in the film directed by Nancy Savoca whose only previous film was the 1989 indie hit True Love. Taylor’s only previous role of note was as one of the three stars of 1988’s Mystic Pizza, the others being Annabeth Gish and Julia Roberts.

Phoenix plays one of four loudmouthed marines on liberty in San Francisco the night before shipping out to Vietnam in November 1963. They have a contest between them to see which one can pick the ugliest girl to have a date with. Phoenix chooses Taylor, the plain, folk music-loving daughter of the owner of a coffee shop. He comes in second in the contest. When Taylor finds out, she tells him off and goes home to listen to Joan Baez’s recording of “Silver Daggar.” Remorseful, he follows her home, and they slowly begin a real relationship culminating in his promising to write to her, which he never does. The film ends with his being wounded in a battle in 1966 that kills his buddies and his return to San Francisco to see if she’s still there waiting for him.

The performances of Phoenix and Taylor, and the soundtrack filled with the music of Baez, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and other legends of the late 1950s and early 1960s, have grown in popularity over the years.

The Warner Bros. film is released on Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection with several documentaries featuring Savoca and Taylor among others.

Based on a novel by Dan Wakefield (TV’s James at 16), with a screenplay by James L. Brooks (TV’s The Mary Tyler Moore Show), and directed by Alan J. Pakula (All the President’s Men), Starting Over was a high profile sophisticated comedy for which Burt Reynolds fought for the lead, even auditioning for the part of the nerdy writer at the height of his career. His co-stars were Jill Clayburgh (fresh from her Oscar-nominated performance in An Unmarried Woman) as a kookie nursery school teacher and Candice Bergen (riding high with TV’s Murphy Brown) as his singer-composer ex-wife he can’t seem to let go of. Charles Durning as his brother and Frances Sternhagen as Durning’s wife are also prominent in the cast.

Audiences came, the critics were impressed, but in the end, it was just the two women, Clayburgh and Bergen, who were nominated for Oscars. Durning would later receive back-to-back nominations for 1982’s The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and 1983’s To Be or Not to Be, but Reynolds had to wait until 1997’s Boogie Nights for his sole nomination. Meanwhile, writer Brooks became a triple-threat film writer, producer, and director winning three Oscars for 1983’s Terms of Endearment and an additional five nominations for 1987’s Broadcast News, 1996’s Jerry Maguire, and 1997’s As Good as It Gets.

Pakula, a previous Oscar nominee for producing 1962’s To Kill a Mockingbird and 1976’s All the President’s Men, would later receive his third and final Oscar nomination for his screenplay for 1982’s Sophie’s Choice.

The Paramount film is released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber.

Anthony Mann rose to prominence as a director of such 1940s films noir as He Walked by Night and T-Men, but in the 1950s became the preeminent director of westerns, most of them, such as Bend of the River, The Naked Spur, and The Man from Laramie, starring James Stewart who he also directed in the 1954 musical The Glenn Miller Story and the 1955 tribute to the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command. That relationship ended abruptly when Mann turned down Stewart’s 1957 film Night Passage to direct The Tin Star with Stewart’s friend Henry Fonda instead.

Fonda brings his soft-spoken best to the part of a former sheriff-turned-bounty hunter who rides into town with a dead man on his spare horse and rides out in a buggy with new wife Betsy Palmer and her son Michel Ray. In the meantime, he helps young sheriff Anthony Perkins get rid of the bad guys. The script by the legendary Dudley Nichols (The Informer) is the only one of Mann’s westerns to receive an Oscar nomination for Original Screenplay.

Released between Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man and Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men in which he also gave acclaimed performances, this was Fonda’s first western since 1948’s Fort Apache. It was one of Perkins’ first films since 1956’s Friendly Persuasion for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Michel Ray was the young star of 1956’s The Brave One, which won that year’s Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

The Paramount film is released on Blu-ray by Arrow. It contains several documentaries and an audio commentary by Toby Roan.

John Carradine deliciously chews the scenery in Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1944 horror film classic Bluebeard, a TV staple for decades that has been rescued from public domain hell and restored by Paramount, released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber.

Afforded two commentaries, one by Gregory W. Monk and Tom Weaver, the other by David del Valle, both are worth listening to. Del Valle was a friend of both Carradine and Ulmer and provides many juicy reminiscences of both. Jean Parker and Nils Asther have the principal supporting roles in a cast that includes one of Carradine’s ex-wives (Sonia Sorel, mother of Keith and Robert Carradine) as one of his victims.

Happy viewing.