Warner Archive has released Blu-ray upgrades of The Naked Spur, The Window, and Santa Fe Trail.

The Naked Spur was the third of eight collaborations between James Stewart and director Anthony Mann, five of which were westerns. Winchester ‘73 and Bend of the River came before, The Far Country and The Man from Laramie came after, as did the non-westerns The Glenn Miller Story, Thunder Bay, and Strategic Air Command. All were Universal releases except for Paramount’s Strategic Air Command and MGM’s The Naked Spur, the latter long considered the apex of their collaboration.

Oscar-nominated for its deft screenplay, 1953’s The Naked Spur draws much of its strength from featuring just five actors playing well-defined characters.

Stewart stars as a bounty hunter tracking fugitive killer Robert Ryan. He is joined in turn by Millard Mitchell as an old prospector and Ralph Meeker as a disgraced former soldier who help him capture the elusive killer. Janet Leigh plays Ryan’s companion, the daughter of one of his outlaw friends. Except for Leigh in a throwaway role, the actors are all stellar with a fierce but tender Stewart, a deliciously devious Ryan, a constantly surprising Meeker, and a cagey Mitchell all providing Oscar-caliber performances. Ryan is particularly memorable in one of his great villainous roles.

This was Mitchell’s last released film before his death from lung cancer at the age of 50 in October 1953. The character actor also had memorable roles in A Foreign Affair, Twelve O’Clock High, and Singin’ in the Rain in the last years of his life.

Directed by Ted Tetzlaf, 1949’s The Window is a great film noir that was the sleeper hit of its year.

Tetzlaf directed 17 films but is best remembered for his cinematography on 115 films beginning in 1926 and ending twenty years later with Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. Though he is not a credited cinematographer on this film, his cinematic eye is in full charge of this urban version of the boy who cried wolf from the novel by Cornell Woolrich (Rear Window). The film received a richly deserved Oscar nomination for Film Editing.

12-year-old Bobby Driscoll stars as the 9-year-old boy who witnesses a murder that no one, including the police, believes happened. His unforgettable performance earned him an honorary Oscar as best child actor of 1949. Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale co-star as the boy’s parents with Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman as the cunning murderers.

Driscoll was a natural born actor who began his film career at the age of five in 1942’s Lost Angel. He was especially good in The Fighting Sullivans, Song of the South, and So Dear to My Heart before The Window, Treasure Island and Peter Pan afterward. His last film was 1963’s Lilies of the Field. He died homeless; his body found in an abandoned New York City tenement in 1968. He was buried in a mass grave in New York’s Potter’s Field. No one knows where, as records for burials from 1961-1977 were destroyed by fire.

1940’s Santa Fe Trail, directed by Michael Curtiz, is both compelling and frustratingly annoying due to its blatant historical inaccuracy.

Let’s start with the title. The film is not about either the trail established in 1822, neither is it about the Santa Fe Railroad which is briefly shown in the film to be extending from Nebraska to Colorado which didn’t occur until 1873-1879, fourteen to eighteen years after the ending of the film, which takes place in 1859. It is about the pursuit of abolitionist John Brown, which ends in his capture and hanging at the raid on Harper’s Valley, Virginia (now West Virginia).

The film gives us two real-life protagonists in West Point graduates Jeb Stuart and George Custer as friends who are supposed to have attended the military academy together when in real life Custer was seven years behind Stuart. The two only met on the battlefield at Gettysburg where they were on opposite sides, Stuart having organized the battle for the South. The woman they were both courting, “Kit Carson” Holiday, the daughter of the Santa Fe Railroad magnate, never met either, nor did she have a brother who went to West Point.

Taking place prior to the start of the Civil War, the film goes out of its way to make heroes of 1854 West Point Commandant Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis (U.S. Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce) before they became traitors.

Stuart is played by Errol Flynn, Custer by Ronald Reagan, Miss Holiday by Olivia de Havilland, her fictitious brother by William Lundigan, the film’s two-faced villain by Van Heflin, and John Brown by Raymond Massey whose powerful performance is the film’s most memorable.

Massey was Oscar-nominated for playing Abraham Lincoln in the same year’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois, but he is even more compelling as Brown. He would play both characters in other films and plays throughout his long career.

Having forgotten to renew its copyright, Warner Bros.’ Santa Fe Trail was for years consigned to public domain hell. Despite the film’s many flaws, it’s nice to have it finally restored to its original pristine look.

Columbia has released Edward Dmytryk’s 1962 film Walk on the Wild Side on Blu-ray.

A guilty pleasure at best, this film, taken from Nelson Algren’s novel, features performances from Laurence Harvey, Capucine, and Jane Fonda that are hard to take. Harvey at least evokes a southern accent as a Texas tramp while Capucine as his lost love-gone-prostitute speaks in a cultured voice as the girl he grew up with. Fonda overdoes her role as a teenage slut who winds up in the same den of iniquity. Anne Baxter as a roadside gas station and diner owner comes off sympathetic, but her Mexican accent comes and goes. Only Barbara Stanwyck as the lesbian madam with her claws into Capucine gives a creditable performance, but it’s far from one of her best. Juanita Moore and Joanna Moore (Tatum O’Neal’s mother) have featured roles. The film received an Oscar nomination for its catchy title song.

This week’s new Blu-ray releases include The Damned and A Night at the Opera.