Kino Lorber has released 4K UHD upgrades of two iconic films, one from almost twenty years ago, and one from almost seventy years ago: Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain from 2005, and Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956.

Brokeback Mountain was so successful that it made back its cost in its first week of limited release. It was the first film to be released on DVD while still in theatres and the first to be made available for downloading the same day as its DVD release. It was also the film that won most of the year’s critics’ awards and was the favorite to win Best Picture at the Oscars.

There was an audible gasp at the Oscars when Jack Nicholson opened the envelope and announced Crash as the winner. Nicholson himself was shocked as he too had voted for the film and expected it to win. Many attributed its loss to the Academy not being willing to give the Oscar to a film about a gay couple, choosing a safer option instead.

The film was a love story about two shepherds, one introverted and one extroverted, played respectively by Heath Ledger and Jack Gyllenhaal. Ang Lee, who won his first Best Directing Oscar for the film was sad that the film itself and especially Ledger as Best Actor didn’t win. Daniel Day-Lewis, when he won the SAG award for 2007’s There Will Be Blood in early 2008, dedicated the award to Ledger who had just died. He said Ledger’s performance in the film’s last scene was one of the most moving things he had ever seen.

When Annie Proulx, who wrote the short story, gave Gyllenhaal an autographed copy of the story, she wrote “To Jake”, but when she gave Ledger his copy, she wrote “To Ennis” by mistake but decided to leave it because to her he was Ennis, the character he played.

The film’s Oscar-winning screenplay was written by Larry McMurtry and his writing partner, Diana Ossana who discovered the story in the New Yorker. McMurtry, the greatest writer of modern western stories in the latter part of the twentieth century was no stranger to Oscar. He was the author of the novel on which 1963’s Hud, 1971’s The Last Picture Show, and 1983’s Terms of Endearment were based, winning a previous Oscar for his screenplay for The Last Picture Show.

The film has often been compared to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet which was also about a forbidden love, but that one ended tragically for young lovers who were still in their teens. So, while the first part of the film, in which the young lovers first meet, might reasonably be compared to Shakespeare’s story, the rest of the film might be more accurately compared to Fannie Hurst’s Back Street. In that one, which was filmed three times, a woman waits for decades for the man she loves to leave his nagging wife but he never does.

In Brokeback Mountain, the two men, whose relationship is even more emotional than it is sexual, go their own way. Ledger marries his high school sweetheart (Michelle Williams) and Gyllenhaal, on the rebound, marries socially connected Anne Hathaway. The two meet off and on for years whenever Gyllenhaal comes up from Texas to visit Ledger. Ledger doesn’t ever go to Texas to meet Gyllenhaal.

Williams, who was in a relationship with Ledger, who she met on the film and would later marry and divorce, insisted that Ledger and Gyllenhaal film their reunion kiss in front of her so that she could get into the emotional space of her embittered character. She had them do it repeatedly until they got it right.

Rodrigo Prieto, who received the first of his four Oscars nominations to date for his cinematography, the others being for Silence, The Irishman, and Killers of the Flower Moon, also played the part of the Mexican prostitute that Gyllenhaal picks up in Mexico.

The Kino Lorber release features a brand-new commentary by Julie Kirgo. Six documentaries are imported from previous releases of the film on DVD and Blu-ray.

One of the greatest most influential science fiction-horror films of all time, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, won no awards in its day but has been regarded as a masterpiece almost from the beginning.

Kevin McCarthy is the small-town doctor who is the only one from his town who has not been replaced by a pod person by the end of the film. The actor had been running all night by the end of the film and as a joke was still running twenty-two years later when he opened the remake which takes place in San Francisco, still running.

Kino Lorber’s release is presented for the first time on home video in two versions, in the conventional 1:85:1 aspect ratio, and in the stretched 2.00:1 aspect ration of the film’s original superscope release. It imports five documentaries from previous releases and contains four audio commentaries including one by stars Kevin McCarthy (1914-2020) and Dana Wynter (1931-2011) moderated by Joe Dante.

Kino Lorber has also released three films new to Blu-ray in the U.S., all three of which were released on region-free Blu-rays by Australia’s Imprint label in 2022.

Come Back, Little Sheba, The Country Girl, and The Rose Tattoo were all 1950s Oscar winners for Best Actress, Shirley Booth, Grace Kelly, and Anna Magnani, respectively.

Come Back, Little Sheba and The Rose Tattoo are both based on 2021 HD masters by Paramount used by Imprint, but The Rose Tattoo has a brand-new commentary by Julie Kirgo. The Country Girl is based on a newer 2023 HD master by Paramount but has the same excellent commentary by Jason A. Ney that appeared on the Imprint release.

No matter how many times I’ve seen them, I’m still unable to warm to Booth’s slovenly housewife in Come Back, Little Sheba and Magnani’s salt-of-the-earth widow in The Rose Tattoo, but I’ve always loved Kelly’s misunderstood wife in The Country Girl even though on the whole Kelly was never as good an actress as either Booth or Magnani and none of the three should have won the Oscars they did.

My choices for the Best Actress Oscars in 1952, 1954, and 1955 were Susan Hayward in With a Song in My Heart, Judy Garland in A Star Is Born, and Katharine Hepburn in Summertime, respectively.

Happy viewing.