"The Big Heat" and "Walking Tall" Are Out on DVD Served hot or cold, revenge has long been one of the signature dishes of filmed entertainment. There are at least 50 productions with that single word title alone, ranging from a four-minute British film of 1904 to a current ABC television series. A few filmmakers have made the theme a personal specialty - most notably in our time Quentin Tarantino (with the Wagnerian sprawl of his two-part "Kill Bill"), and in the classical past, Fritz Lang, who pursued the theme both in his German films (the second part of his 1924 telling of the Siegfried saga was titled "Kriemhild's Revenge") and in Hollywood (his first American film, the 1936 "Fury," stars Spencer Tracy as a man who survives a lynching attempt and returns to settle the score with the small-town mob that tried to kill him). Lang's most resonant treatment of the theme was perhaps his 1953 film noir "The Big Heat," which has now been issued as a superb, limited-edition Blu-ray by the boutique label Twilight Time (available through Screen Archives Entertainment, at screenarchives.com). With a bulky overcoat for his armor and a felt hat for a helmet, Glenn Ford portrays Detective Sgt. Dave Bannion, a tenacious cop in a minimally detailed, generically named Everycity who defies his corrupt superiors and refuses to drop his investigation of a fellow officer's suspicious suicide. His resolve only intensifies when a car bomb intended for him instead kills his wife (Jocelyn Brando). Based on a screenplay by Sidney Boehm, "The Big Heat" has one foot in the "city confidential" subgenre inspired by the Senate's Kefauver committee hearings of 1950-51. Films like "The Captive City" (Robert Wise, 1952) and "New York Confidential" (Russell Rouse, 1955) imagined the nation in thrall to a vast criminal conspiracy made up of swarthy gangsters and machine politicians - a paranoid vision of big business that emerged as a complement to the Red Scare of that time. Bannion soon finds that the trail of corruption leads from his immediate superior in the police department to Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby), the Sicilian crime lord who really runs the city. Lang, the chronicler of Dr. Mabuse, was no stranger to master criminals and underground organizations, yet "The Big Heat" concentrates on more personal issues. Bannion is motivated at first by abstract idealism and professional pride, but the murder of his wife (which, like the child killings in Lang's "M," becomes more forceful by taking place off screen) makes this a personal matter, allowing Bannion to relinquish his badge and the procedural restrictions that go along with it (but not his gun - "that's mine, bought and paid for"). But even in his righteous anger, Bannion remains a curiously cold, withdrawn figure. His most audacious act is to rough up the middle-aged widow of the cop who killed himself, whom he believes to be on Lagana's payroll - hardly a Wagnerian moment. For that, Lang needs a true Valkyrie, and he finds one in the undulating figure of Debby March (Gloria Grahame), the spurned mistress of Lagana's chief enforcer, Vince Stone (Lee Marvin). Herself the victim of one of the most shocking acts of off-screen violence in film history - Vince hurls a pot of boiling coffee in her face - it's Debbie who answers transgression with transgression, and precipitates the climactic Götterdämmerung. Twilight Time, $29.95, not rated Walking Tall One of the best of the "50s "city confidential" films was Phil Karlson's 1955 "The Phenix City Story," a docudrama avant la lettre based on the approximately true story of a young lawyer (Richard Kiley) and his attempts to clean up a vice-ridden town near Fort Benning, Ga. Nearly 20 years later, Karlson virtually remade the film as "Walking Tall," an independent production that became a box-office phenomenon of the Nixon years. This time, the inspiration was nominally the tale of Buford Pusser (Joe Don Baker), a real-life sheriff who took on a similar Sin City in Tennessee, but the dynamics of the highly fictionalized story resemble both "Phenix City" and "The Big Heat": What begins as abstract moral outrage becomes personal when the hero's wife (Elizabeth Hartman) is killed. The story may have stayed the same, but the world had changed around it. What in 1955 was a progressive plea for civic reform (laced, again, by some searing violence), had become by 1973, in the context of the Miranda decision and Nixon's law-and-order politics, a wild-eyed fantasy about an incorruptible leader who finds it necessary to subvert the law in order to save it. Unconcerned with legal niceties like search warrants and evidence, Pusser, here portrayed as a former professional wrestler, conducts his campaign of civic reform by busting up the local clip joints (and quite a few patrons) with a giant stick carved from an oak tree. The hyperbolic phallic imagery is matched by the rhetorical extremes of the story. Pusser survives a series of beatings, stabbings and shootings that arrive with the rhythm and regularity of a Road Runner cartoon, and like Wile E. Coyote, he bounces back every time, slightly battered but ready for more. The cartoonish exaggeration may have been Karlson's way of distancing himself from the demagogy of the screenplay (he parlayed the success of "Walking Tall" into his final film, "Framed" - a far more troubled and troubling look at vigilantism, also starring Mr. Baker). At times, though, "Walking Tall" seems remarkably cleareyed about the racial tensions of the time. Buford's lovable father (Noah Beery Jr.) expresses some casual bigotry - a realistic touch that few directors would risk today with a "positive" character - and if Buford's black best friend (Felton Perry) seems a little too convenient, his presence does generate the film's one real moment of dramatic tension. When Buford leans on his buddy to reveal the location of a moonshine operation run by blacks, his reluctance to answer evokes generations of mutual distrust. "Walking Tall" arrives in a well-appointed edition from Shout! Factory, featuring new high-definition transfers of the original film as well as its two sequels, in which Bo Swenson replaced Joe Don Baker in the lead: "Walking Tall: Part 2" (directed by Earl Bellamy, 1975) and "Final Chapter: Walking Tall" (Jack Starrett, 1977). (Shout! Factory, Blu-ray $34.93, DVD $24.97, R) THE WOMAN IN BLACK Still in shock from his wife's recent death, a lawyer (Daniel Radcliffe) travels on business to an isolated village, where the local attractions include a haunted house. With Ciaran Hinds, Janet McTeer and Shaun Dooley; James Watkins directed. The movie is "a creaking, shrieking haunted-house amusement," Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times in February. THIS MEANS WAR Tom Hardy and Chris Pine are C.I.A. agents who bring all of their lethal skills to bear as they compete for the affections of the same woman (Reese Witherspoon). With Til Schweiger, Chelsea Handler and Angela Bassett; McG directed. "Industry sages keep putting Ms. Witherspoon in romances, which is like putting a shark in a tank with a bobbing basket of kittens," Ms. Dargis wrote in The Times in February. RED TAILS The story of the Tuskegee Airmen - the first African-American military pilots in the United States armed services - as they prepare to be sent overseas in World War II. With Cuba Gooding Jr., Terrence Howard and Bryan Cranston; Anthony Hemingway directed. "The mostly happy ending is as satisfying as a snack of milk and cookies after a ninth grade softball game," Stephen Holden wrote in The Times in January. Lucasfilm/Fox, Blu-ray/DVD combo $39.99, DVD $29.98, PG-13 THE SECRET WORLD OF ARRIETTY Produced by Studio Ghibli in Japan, Hiromasa Yonebayashi's film is an adaptation of Mary Norton's children's book "The Borrowers," about tiny people who try to live unnoticed by the larger variety of humans. The English-language version features the vocal talents of Bridgit Mendler, David Henrie, Amy Poehler, Will Arnett and Carol Burnett. "While she's 14 going on 15, and three or so inches going on four, Arrietty seems bigger because her courage, along with her fluid form and softly dappled world, come by way of the famed Japanese company Studio Ghibli, where little girls rule, if not necessarily as princesses," Ms. Dargis wrote in The Times in February. Disney, Blu-ray $39.99, DVD $29.99, G CERTIFIED COPY An art historian (William Shimmel) and the owner of an antiques store (Juliette Binoche) spend a day out in the countryside. Have they just met, or are they a married couple playing a game? The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami ("The Wind Will Carry Us") directed. The film "is an endless hall of mirrors whose reflections multiply as its story of a middle-aged couple driving through Tuscany carries them into a metaphysical labyrinth," Mr. Holden wrote in The Times last year. Criterion Collection, Blu-ray $39.95, DVD $29.95, not rated