Some gritty vintage movies arrive on DVD this week

During the early 1930s, after sound came in but before Hollywood began censoring itself, movies contained a lot of material that just a few years later would not be allowed for a variety of reasons. Eight examples have just been released on DVD for the first time.

“Forbidden Hollywood: Volume 4” (Warner Archive, 1932, b/w, four discs, $39.95, four movies, trailers, available at www.WarnerArchive.com).

“Forbidden Hollywood: Volume 5” (Warner Archive, 1932-33, b/w, four discs, $39.95, four movies, trailers, available at www.WarnerArchive.com). It’s been three years since “Volume 3,” so fans of pre-Production Code pictures will be happy to see these follow-ups finally arrive, thanks to the manufacture-on-demand website.

“Volume 4” has a pair of William Powell comedy-dramas, the best being “Lawyer Man,” with Powell as a low-level attorney who is seduced by power but doesn’t like the compromises he must make, with Joan Blondell as the secretary who loves him. The other, “Jewel Robbery,” is a stagey adaptation of a play, with Powell as a debonair jewel thief who romantically pursues a married woman (Kay Francis) he has robbed. The latter film also boasts a surprising comic subplot about smoking marijuana!

The other films in “Volume 4” are “Men Wanted,” a satire of “modern” marriage and a prescient feminist tract, with Kay Francis as a magazine editor mismatched with her philandering “idle rich” husband, who eventually hires a male secretary (David Manners), and “They Call it Sin,” with Manners seducing small-town girl Loretta Young, only to have her unexpectedly follow him to New York, where she finds he’s engaged. So she cynically pursues a show-biz career by any means necessary.

“Volume 5” has Barbara Stanwyck in prison in the very goofy “Ladies They Talk About,” James Cagney as a hustler in the fast-talking comedy “Hard to Handle,” Warren William as a grifter in surprisingly pleasant “The Mind Reader” and saucy Blondell is “Miss Pinkerton,” an honorary title (after the “Pinkerton” detective agency), as a nurse recruited to help find a murderer.

“Full Metal Jacket” (Warner/Blu-ray, 1987; R for violence, language, drugs; two discs, $34.99; 44-page book packaging, audio commentary, featurettes, trailer). Stanley Kubrick’s treatise on military training and the Vietnam War is a little more disjointed than most of his movies, but it’s also enormously compelling and moving, and more shocking and gut-wrenching than any of his other work.

The film is shaped into three parts: basic training, Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, then tracking a sniper in burned-out Hue. Former Utahn Matthew Modine has the lead role, but it is R. Lee Ermy, Vincent D’onofrio and Adam Baldwin who deliver knockout, show-stopping performances.

“Clue: The Movie” (Paramount/Blu-ray, 1985, PG, $22.99, alternate endings, trailer). This silly, low-aiming farce, based on the title board game, is for no apparent reason set in 1954 New England as strangers, each with a secret, gather in a spooky mansion, a la Agatha Christie.

Familiar comic actors take on stereotypical suspect roles — Tim Curry is the snooty butler, Colleen Camp is the sexy French maid, Martin Mull is bumbling Col. Mustard, Lesley Ann Warren is the harlot Miss Scarlet, Eileen Brennan is prim Mrs. Peacock, Christopher Lloyd is seedy psychiatrist Professor Plum, Michael McKean is fey Mr. Green and Madeline Kahn is frigid widow Mrs. White. And the film offers three different endings, each with a different star revealed as the killer(s).