The Sign of the Cross, newly released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber, is a historically important film from 1932 that resurrected the career of producer-director Cecil B. DeMille, made a star of Claudette Colbert, and saved Paramount from bankruptcy.

The prolific DeMille, one of the founders of Paramount, hadn’t had a hit since his independently-produced 1927 epic The King of Kings. His last two films, Madam Satan and The Squaw Man, a remake of his first film, both produced by MGM, were notorious flops. He returned to Paramount at a quarter of his previous salary, with a reduced budget to make The Sign of the Cross, the third film version of an 1895 play he had seen as child.

With a story similar to the better known Quo Vadis, published as a novel the same year, The Sign of the Cross was first produced on the stage. It’s the story of a high-placed Roman soldier who falls in love with an early-Christian woman in Nero’s Rome. Fredric March was the soldier and Elissa Landi the girl, but the film is stolen by Charles Laughton as the emperor who fiddled while Rome burned, and Claudette Colbert as his even more evil wife, Poppaea.

The film has two set pieces, Colbert’s bath in ass’s milk, and yes, you can see her pert nipples, albeit briefly, and the finale in which crocodiles and lions are sent in to eat the Christians in the Roman Coliseum. The pre-code film was heavily edited for rerelease in 1935 and even further in 1944. It was not fully restored until the late 1990s.

Extras include two incisive commentaries.

Also newly released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber are All I Desire, There’s Always Tomorrow, The Balcony, and Hollywoodland.

1953’s All I Desire was one of Douglas Sirk’s first female-centric melodramas for Universal, focusing on a down-on-her-luck actress circa 1910, played by the always watchable Barbara Stanwyck, who returns to her home town at the invitation of her teenage daughter, Lori Nelson, the middile of three children she abandoned ten years earlier. Her elder daughter, Marcia Henderson, despises her, and her younger son, Billy Gray, doesn’t remember her at all. Her discarded husband, Richard Carlson, a high school principal, still loves her, but he also has feelings for drama teacher Maureen O’Sullivan.

The plot of All I Desire is ridiculous, but it is played with such warmth and style that you love every minute of it, nonetheless. Film historian Imogen Sara Smith provides audio commentary.

Sirk reached his melodramatic heights with 1954’s Magnificent Obsession and 1955’s All That Heaven Allows, both starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, before teaming with Stanwyck again for 1956’s There’s Always Tomorrow.

Like Magnificent Obsession and the later Imitation of Life, There’s Always Tomorrow was a remake of a film from the 1930s. Stanwyck’s co-star this time was her Double Indemnity co-star Fred MacMurray.

Stanwyck plays an old flame of MacMurray’s who comes back into his life at the point in which he feels neglected by his wife, Joan Bennett, and children. The charm of the actors keeps you interested even though you know how it’s going to turn out. Audio commentary is provided by film historian Samm Deighan.

Joseph Strick’s 1963 film The Balcony is pretentious twaddle taken from Jean Genet’s play set in a seedy brothel in which something kinky is going on in every room. Shelley Winters stars as the madam, with Lee Grant as her bookkeeper who doubles as one of the prostitutes, Ruby Dee as another prostitute, and Peter Falk and Leonard Nimoy as two of the brothel’s clients. Audio commentary is provided by film historian Tim Lucas.

The best part of this release is an on-camera interview with 95-year-old Lee Grant who expounds on the legendary feud between herself and Shelley Winters which began on this film.

2006’s Hollywoodland, directed by Allen Coulter, is a hybrid mystery-biographical drama about an investigation into the death of TV’s The Adventures of Superman star George Reeves.

The film splits its time between the actor, played by Ben Affleck in his final years, and Adrien Brody as the private detective hired by his estranged mother (Lois Smith) to determine who really killed him. Was it his new girlfriend (Robin Tunney), his discarded older one (Diane Lane), her movie mogul husband (Bob Hoskins), or the actor himself as hastily concluded by the police? The film doesn’t answer the question, leaving the mystery as unresolved as it was in real life.

Extras, including several making-of documentaries are imported from the film’s original DVD released.

Also newly released on Blu-ray are the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn classics Pat and Mike and Without Love from Warner Archive.

1952’s Pat and Mike, with its witty Oscar-nominated screenplay by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin and assured direction by George Cukor, is the more famous of the two, featuring an excellent performance from Hepburn as a woman athlete who excels in everything from golf to tennis. Tracy is a bit more problematic as her crafty manager. His Damon Runyon-style delivery doesn’t quite come off. It’s enjoyable fluff, but not nearly as good as the 1949 Cukor-Gordon-Kanin, Hepburn-Tracy vehicle Adam’s Rib, which also garnered Gordon and Kanin an Oscar nomination for their screenplay.

Third-billed Aldo Ray, then in the afterglow of his performance opposite Judy Holliday in The Marrying Kind, introduces the film’s trailer, the only extra on the Blu-ray.

1945’s lesser known Without Love is based on a play by Philip Barry whose Holiday and The Philadelphia Story provided Hepburn with two of her best earlier performances. Tracy is the scientist who enters into a platonic marriage with society gal Hepburn here. Lucille Ball and Keenan Wynn are the comic relief. It was the last film of director Harold S. Bucquot (On Borrowed Time), who died shortly after its release. A couple of short subjects and the film’s trailer are imported from the original DVD release.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray releases of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun.