The Criterion Collection has released state-of-the-art restorations of Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa and Luchino Visconti’s The Damned on Blu-ray.

Released in 1986, Mona Lisa was the breakthrough film of writer-director Jordan who two years earlier had scored a cult hit with The Company of Wolves. His future successes would include The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire, and The End of the Affair.

The film gets it title from the Oscar-winning song from 1950’s Captain Carey, U.S.A., sung in the film in Italian but later immortalized by Nat King Cole who sings it over the opening and closing credits.

It is a character study about an ex-convict who gets a job driving a high class call girl from client to client. He’s played by Bob Hoskins who made a career of playing inarticulate men, none more so than the one he plays here. Cathy Tyson, in her film debut, is the enigmatic call girl he falls in love with without really knowing her. She will, of course break his heart. Michael Caine is the nasty gangster Hoskins works for.

Hoskins won numerous Best Actor awards for his performance beginning with an award from the Cannes Film Festival early in the year. At year’s end he would win the New York Film Critics, Los Angeles Film Critics, National Society of Film Critics, Golden Globe, and BAFTA awards among others. He would be nominated for an Oscar but lose to Paul Newman who finally won on his seventh nomination for Best Actor for The Color of Money.

Tyson won the Best Supporting Actress award of the Los Angeles Film Critics and was nominated for other awards including the Golden Globe and the BAFTA but missed out on an Oscar nomination.

Caine would be nominated and win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his other high-profile film that year, Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters.

Blu-ray extras include archival interviews from previous DVD and Blu-ray releases as well as a newly recorded zoom interview with Jordan and Tyson.

Released in 1969, The Damned marked a turn in the career of celebrated Italian writer-director Visconti. Whereas his previously films such as La Terra Trema, Senso, Rocco and His Brothers, and The Leopard were meticulously crafted stately works of art, The Damned threw caution to the wind in its tale of a wealthy, albeit perverse, German industrial family whose decline is in direct contrast to the Nazis’ rise to power.

Dirk Bogarde had star billing as the murderous new husband of the widow of one of the three sons of the patriarch of the von Essenbeck family, but he is overshadowed by both Ingrid Thulin as his power-hungry wife and Helmut Berger as her decadent son.

Berger makes an early impression appearing as Marlene Dietrich in drag at his grandfather’s birthday party where everyone present except his mother is appalled. Although the film is in English, not German, Berger, costumed as the scantily clad Dietrich, sings “Kinder, heut, abend, da such ich mir was aus” from The Blue Angel in German. Dietrich, who rose to fame singing the song in the earlier film, thought Berger performed it much better than she did and wrote him a letter saying so.

Berger’s character is soon revealed to be a child molester in an incestuous relationship with his mother, and ultimately a murderer.

The film’s most notorious sequence was the reenactment of “the night of long knives” which originally got the film an X-rating that was later changed to R when the sequence, fully restored on DVD and Blu-ray, was all but excised.

That sequence, which deals with the massacre of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing by the Schutzstaffel (SS), Security Service (SD), and the Gestapo (secret police), was filmed mostly with extras in German with subtitles. It portrayed the SA as primarily composed of gay men who indulged in homosexual orgies while on duty, a myth that has long since been debunked. Although the leaders of the SA were homosexuals, there was no proof that the entire membership was gay nor that they indulged in all-day and all-night orgies.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the film’s notoriety, it performed well at year-end awards, becoming a finalist in several categories with the New York Film Critics and the National Society of Film Critics. Its only Oscar nomination, however, was for Best Adapted Screenplay co-written by Visconti, giving him his one and only Oscar nod.

Visconti later directed Bogarde in Death in Venice and Berger in Ludwig and Conversation Piece.

Extras include previously released material as well as a new interview with scholar Stefano Albertini.

Warner Archive has released Sam Wood’s 1935 film A Night at the Opera on Blu-ray.

A Night at the Opera was a comeback film for the Marx Brothers, whose last for Paramount, 1933’s Duck Soup, now considered their masterpiece, flopped at the box-office.

The MGM film, Groucho Marx’s personal favorite, became the biggest hit of the brothers’ career. Successful in its initial release in late 1935, it became an even bigger hit when it was rereleased on a double-bill with 1936’s San Francisco.

The film originally began in Milan, Italy with a lengthy musical sequence mimicking the opening of Love Me Tonight. That sequence was cut when the film was shown to U.S. servicemen during World War II and was subsequently lost. The film now begins in a restaurant in which Groucho hurls insults at his perennial foil, Margaret Dumont, seated at a nearby table. Co-starring Kitty Carlise and Allan Jones as opera singing lovebirds, the film’s most famous sequence is justifiably the hilarious “stateroom scene” onboard a train in which fifteen people crowd Groucho’s room, only to all tumble out when Dumont opens the door.

Extras include commentary by Leonard Maltin and an archival interview with Groucho Marx.

This week’s new Blu-ray releases include Night Shift and Angel on My Shoulder.