Going My Way is one of the last of the more than 90 Oscar-winning best pictures to receive a Blu-ray release. Russell Dyball, who provides the commentary on the Shout Select release, hopes that this fact will increase the film’s standing which has eroded considerably since the film’s phenomenal 1944 release. Despite Dyball’s hopes, I think the ship has sailed on this one.

Going My Way was hugely successful with critics, audiences, and the Academy in its day, but whenever a ranked listing of Academy Award winning films is published, it comes out near the bottom of the list. Not only hasn’t it held up very well, if you look at it closely you realize there really wasn’t much substance to it to begin with. It relied heavily on the charms of Bing Crosby as an easy-going young priest and Barry Fitzgerald as a set-in-his-ways older one. Classified as a comedy-drama, rather than a musical, the film’s best moments are centered around its songs, particularly “Too-ra-loo-loo-ral” (the Irish lullaby) and “Swinging on a Star” the Oscar-winning megahit second only to “White Christmas” in Crosby’s repertoire.

Although the film’s main characters were priests, it’s not a religious film like its contemporaries, The Song of Bernadette and The Keys of the Kingdom, or even its sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s, were. Crosby and Fitzgerald might have been playing doctors, or an insurance investigator and a cop as they were in their subsequent films together, 1947’s Welcome Stranger and 1949’s Top o’ the Morning.

Director Leo McCarey had a way with actors. It was he who introduced Laurel and Hardy to each other, directed the Marx Brothers in their greatest comedy, Duck Soup, and gave Cary Grant his persona in The Awful Truth. Without him at the helm, Going My Way wouldn’t have had the magic it did have. You’d have to be a real curmudgeon, though, not to be touched by the reunion between the old priest and his close-to-100-year-old mother at the film’s still glorious conclusion.

Ernst Lubitsch was the most sophisticated of Hollywood’s European émigré directors who traversed the silent era and the early talkies with equal aplomb. From Love Me Tonight and Broken Lullaby to The Shop Around the Corner and To Be or Not to Be, his films were treasured gems as was the last one he completed, 1946’s Cluny Brown which has been given a 4K restoration by Criterion.

Jennifer Jones stars in this delightful comedy as a plumber’s niece, displaying comedic gifts no one realized she had. Charles Boyer, in his first comedic role since McCarey’s Love Affair seven years earlier, is equally fine as a Czech émigré in London. The film has more hilarious reaction shots from its superb supporting cast than any other film in Hollywood history. Among those in its large cast are Peter Lawford, Helen Walker, Reginald Gardiner, Reginald Owen, C. Aubrey Smith, Florence Bates, and, most delightfully, Sara Allgood as a snobbish housekeeper and Una O’Connor as Hayden’s disapproving mother. It’s the film that ponders whether we should feed nuts to the squirrels or squirrels to the nuts. Extras include a 1950 radio adaptation with Dorothy McGuire and Boyer.

A huge hit in 1973, A Touch of Class has been given a Blu-ray upgrade by Warner Archive.

Hailed at the time as a throwback to the Hollywood screwball comedies of the 1930s, it’s really just a throwback to 1960’s The Facts of Life by the same writer-director, Melvin Frank, albeit since this was the post-sexual revolution era, gone was the coyness of the earlier work which starred Bob Hope and Lucille Ball as longtime friends married to others who are beginning to fall in love with each other but don’t quite get there. In the frequently shrill A Touch of Class, George Segal and Glenda Jackson more than get there, they bicker and fight until their clandestine affair comes apart at the seams. Jackson is left with more uneaten dinners than Irene Dunne, Margaret Sullavan, and Susan Hayward combined in the three film versions of Fannie Hurst’s Back Street. Somehow, she won her second Oscar in four years for a performance that was a lot more irritating than it was charming, but the same audiences that found Doris Day comedies of a decade earlier to be the height of sophistication thought highly of it. At least the London, England to Malaga, Spain and back again locales are pretty to look at.

Mike Nichols’ 1988 film version of Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues has been given a Blu-ray upgrade by Shout Factory. The World War II service comedy starring Matthew Broderick, Christopher Walken, Matt Mulhern, Corey Parker, Markus Flanagan, Casey Siemaszko, and Michael Dolan is a well-performed ensemble piece in which all the main actors are given their moment to shine. An on-screen interview with Parker is provided as an extra.

Having previously released two Blu-ray volumes of films noir from Columbia Pictures, Mill Creek has now released Noir Archive Volume 3: 1957-1960 (9-film Collection).

Included in the release are The Shadow on the Window, starring Jerry Mathers, Betty Garrett, and Phil Carey; The Long Haul, starring Victor Mature and Diana Dors; Pickup Alley, starring Mature, Anita Ekberg, and Trevor Howard; The Tijuana Story, starring Rodolfo Acosta and James Darren; She Played with Fire, starring Jack Hawkins, Arlene Dahl, and Dennis Price; The Case Against Brooklyn, starring Darren McGavin and Maggie Hayes; The Lineup, starring Eli Wallach and Robert Keith; The Crimson Kimono, starring Glenn Corbett, James Shigeta, and Victoria Shaw; and Man on a String, starring Ernest Borgnine and Kerwin Matthews.

Several of these films have been previously available on DVD, and one, The Crimson Kimono, had a previous limited-edition Blu-ray release from Twilight Time.

Personally, I found four of the films, Ken Hughes’ The Long Haul, John Gilling’s Pickup Alley, Laszlo Kardos’ The Tijuana Story, and Don Siegel’s The Lineup routine, but the other five are films that I could watch over and over.

William Asher’s The Shadow on the Window has one of the most unusual opening sequences ever filmed. A young boy observes a young punk kill his mother’s employer and another coming at his mother. Traumatized, he wanders down the highway and is picked up by long distance truckers who bring him to safety. Sidney Gilliat’s She Played with Fire is about insurance fraud and possible murder and contains numerous twists and turns. Paul Wendkos’ The Case Against Brooklyn is a based-on-fact film about crooked cops. Samuel Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono is a humdinger of a murder mystery. André De Toth’s Man on a String is a nifty cold war thriller.

This week’s new releases include Yesterday and The Major and the Minor.