Sergeant York, given a long overdue Blu-ray upgrade by Warner Archive, was the highest grossing film of 1941. Adjusted for inflation, it is still one of the biggest moneymakers of all time.

When the film was being made, public opinion in the U.S. was strongly isolationist and the producers went to great lengths to avoid marketing the film as a war movie. By the film’s release in September of 1941, however, Hitler had conquered much of Europe and public attitude toward the war had changed dramatically. There were widespread reports of young men, having seen the film, who went from the theatre directly to a recruitment center to enlist in the Army. This was even more widespread after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 while the film was still in theatres.

Alvin C. York was the most decorated hero of World War I. He was a pacifist Bible schoolteacher from Tennessee, a conscientious objector who once he was drafted put his heart and soul into his job. On October 8, 1918, he defended himself and seven subordinates against attack from six German soldiers, killing all six, and then capturing 132 men and earning the Medal of Honor.

Postwar, his fame earned him endorsement offers totaling a quarter of a million dollars. He turned them all down, refusing to exploit his newfound fame. He had been resisting Hollywood offers to tell his story from 1919 until he finally relented more than twenty years later, but only if Gary Cooper would play him. Cooper would and did, receiving the first of his eventual three Academy Awards for his performance. His second would be for 1952’s High Noon. His third would be an honorary award for his overall career at the 1960 awards held in 1961 shortly before his death.

Sergeant York was nominated for 11 Oscars, the most of any 1941 film, winning for Film Editing as well as for Cooper’s performance, losing Best Picture to How Green Was My Valley after both films had lost the New York Film Critics’ award to Citizen Kane.

The film builds slowly. It is well into its second hour when Cooper as York is drafted. Early scenes concentrate on his family life with Oscar-nominated Margaret Wycherly (White Heat) as his mother, Dickie Moore (Out of the Past) as his brother, and June Lockhart (Meet Me in St. Louis) as his sister, as well as his relationship with future wife Gracie, played by Joan Leslie (Yankee Doodle Dandy), and his pastor, played by Walter Brennan, who earned his fourth Oscar nomination for his performance. Brennan had won all three of his previous nominations including one for the prior year’s The Westerner in support of Cooper.

It was directed by Howard Hawks, who received his only Oscar nomination for his efforts, although he would eventually be given an honorary award for career achievement at the 1974 Academy Awards. Decades removed from the urgency that Sergeant York presented, the film is not the highest regarded of Hawks’ lengthy career, or even of 1941. That would be Ball of Fire also starring Cooper opposite Barbara Stanwyck in the hilarious comedy that is a spoof of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Hawks’ other more highly regarded films include 1930’s The Dawn Patrol, 1932’s Scarface, 1938’s Bringing Up Baby, 1939’s Only Angels Have Wings, 1940’s His Girl Friday, 1943’s Air Force, 1946’s The Big Sleep, 1948’s Red River, 1952’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and 1959’s Rio Bravo. That he was only nominated for an Oscar once in such a distinguished career remains one of the great injustices of Hollywood history for many.

Mill Creek has released a Blu-ray upgrade of Sean Penn’s 2001 film The Pledge starring Jack Nicolson.

This was the third of four films directed by Penn thus far, following 1991’s The Indian Runner and 1995’s The Crossing Guard, and preceding 2007’s Into the Wild. Like those films, it is very dark, but like those films, it also provides memorable performances from its players – David Morse and Viggo Mortensen in The Indian Runner, Nicholson and Anjelica Huston in The Crossing Guard, Emile Hirsch and Hal Holbrook in Into the Wild, and Nicholson and Robin Wright here.

Nicholson plays a recently retired cop who makes a commitment to the mother of a murdered child (Patricia Clarkson) in his last case that he will find the killer the police have given up on. The trail eventually leads to Wright whose young daughter he thinks will be the killer’s next target. The film ends in a very twisted irony that not everyone appreciates, but that does nothing to diminish the impact of Nicholson’s performance, which is one of his finest.

Wright, Aaron Eckhart, Benicio Del Toro, and the always welcome Lois Smith are the standouts in the supporting cast.

Previously released in a dreadful washed out DVD and Blu-ray, Lewis John Carlino’s 1976 film, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, has been given a beautifully restored Blu-ray release from Scorpion Releasing.

Carlino’s film, his first as a director, was adapted from a Japanese novel by Yukio Mishima, which does not adapt well to the English countryside to which Carlino has changed it. Nevertheless, the film does offer beautiful cinematography, which can now be properly appreciated, and strong performances by Kris Kristofferson as the sailor who falls under the spell of a lonely widow, played by Sarah Miles.

Extras include on-camera interviews with many of the film’s artisans as well as Miles and Carlino. Scorpion’s Blu-ray was released on June 16, 2020. Carlino (The Great Santini, Resurrection) passed away the following day of myelodysplastic syndrome at the age of 88.

Some other films that have had vastly improved Blu-ray releases over the last year or so include three from Cohen Media Group, 1951’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, directed by Albert Lewin with James Mason and Ava Gardner; 1979’s The Europeans, directed by James Ivory with Lee Remick and Robin Ellis; and 1981’s Quartet, directed by Ivory with Isabelle Adjani and Maggie Smith.

I find all three of these films to be somewhat lacking dramatically, but you would have to look far and wide to find films more beautifully rendered pictorially than these. They are a tonic for the senses.

This week’s new releases include the Criterion Blu-ray releases of The Gunfighter and The Hit.