Avengers: Endgame takes place after the events of last year’s Avengers: Infinity War, but unlike that film, which left me totally cold, this one has a great deal of heart, which sustains it through the non-CGI battle scenes.

The first Avengers film, appropriately titled The Avengers, in which the Marvel superheroes were brought together as a team, was released in 2012. In that one, the principal characters were Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans) and Thor, all of whom had been the principal characters in previous Marvel films along with newcomers Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Black Widow (Scarlett Johannsen), and Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), a character who had his own incarnation in prior films in which he was played by other actors.

Three years after the initial films came Avengers: The Age of Ultron in which they were joined by War Machine (Don Cheadle), Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Vision (Paul Bettany), and Falcon (Anthony Mackie), whose characters first appeared in other Marvel films released in the interim.

Superheroes joining the group in Avengers: Infinity War included Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), Spider-Man (Tom Holland), Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), and Guardians of the Galaxy Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) and Gamora (Zoe Saldana). The film ends with half the world’s population, including some of the superheroes) killed. It was obvious that the dead, or most of them, would be brought back to life in the follow-up film. How that is done forms the crux of Avengers: Endgame.

The principal heroes in Avengers: Endgame are Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and new-to-the-game Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) with the also new-to-the-game Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) popping in and out as do others.

The film ends on a bittersweet note with the death of one superhero and the retirement of another. The first superhero of the Marvel universe to be seen since is Spider-Man (Tom Holland) in Spider-Man: Far from Home.

Avengers: Endgame is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Making their Blu-ray debuts are Blackmail, Port of Shadows, The Wild Heart, and The Ugly American.

Kino Lorber’s release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail offers both versions of the 1929 film, one silent, the other with sound. The sound version was Britain’s first talkie.

Anny Ondra, Hitchcock’s star, was a major star in Czech and German films and would later become even more famous as the wife of Max Schmeling, the Heavyweight Champion of the World until he was defeated by Joe Louis.

Ondra is outstanding as the shopkeeper’s daughter who kills a would-be rapist in self-defense, only to be blackmailed by an unseen witness. The only problem was that Ondra’s thick Czech accent would not work for the daughter of British shopkeepers Charles Paton and Sara Allgood in the sound version. With post-dubbing not yet invented, Hitchcock solved the problem by having Ondra mouth her lines while British actress Joan Barry spoke them off camera.

John Longden co-stars as Ondra’s fiancée, a Scotland Yard detective with Cyril Ritchard as the would-be rapist and Donald Calthrop as the blackmailer. Allgood (How Green Was My Valley) was second-billed, but Hitchcock made it up to the Abbey Theatre player by giving her the lead in his next film, 1930’s Juno and the Paycock.

Separate commentaries are provided for both versions of the film.

Jean Gabin (1904-1976) was known as the French Spencer Tracy (1900-1967) whom he greatly resembled, but he had more in common with his American contemporary than looks. Both actors were known for their quietly commanding performances. Tracy won back-to-back Oscars for 1937’s Captains Courageous and Boys Town while Gabin at the same time was the toast of French cinemas in such films as Grand Illusion, the first foreign language film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar; Pepe le Moko, remade in the U.S. as Algiers; and Marcel Carné’s Port of Shadows, the film that provided the link between the German expressionism of the 1920s to the films noir of 1940s Hollywood.

Gabin plays a sailor with a mysterious past who finds himself in the middle of a power play between gangsters in Port of Shadows who comes afoul of nasty shopkeeper Michel Simon (La Chienne, The Train) when he falls for his daughter played by the enigmatic Michele Morgan (The Fallen Idol, Everybody’s Fine). Although she looks older, the always stunning actress was, like her character, just seventeen during filming.

Extras include a newly provided introduction to the film and a 47-minute analysis of the film and its place in film history.

The Kino Lorber release of The Wild Heart, like their release of Blackmail, includes two versions, in this case Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s original 1950 cut called Gone to Earth as well as producer David O. Selzmick’s 1950 re-edit for its U.S. release which he renamed The Wild Heart.

Powell and Pressburger’s original version of the film has a running time of one hour and fifty minutes. Selznick’s re-edit has a running time of one hour and twenty-two minutes. Selznick not only cut a good chunk out of the film’s original narrative he added several scenes with close-ups of the film’s star, his wife, Jennifer Jones, directed by Rouben Mamoulian (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Queen Christina) of the film in which Jones plays a Scottish lass pursued by minister Cyril Cuasck and hedonist squire David Farrar with tragic results.

Commentary is provided for both versions.

A cold war drama made during John F, Kennedy’s presidency, The Ugly American stars Marlon Brando as a well-intentioned but naïve American ambassador to a fictitious South Asian country patterned after Vietnam. Beautifully filmed in Thailand, the film is stolen by Eiji Okada (Hiroshima Mon Amour, Woman in the Dunes) as his former friend, the leader of the country’s opposition to the ruling family. Sandra Church, Arthur Hill, and Pat Hingle head the supporting cast in this Mill Creek Blu-ray release.

This week’s new releases include Blu-ray upgrades of Magnificent Obsession and Sweet Charity.