“House of Cards” Arrives on US Home Video for the First Time via Kino Lorber

John Guillermin’s “House of Cards” (1968) has never been available on any home video format in the United States. That changes now with a new Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, marking the film’s Region 1 debut. Universal delayed the US release by nearly a year after it played in England, eventually dumping it as a double feature with the Elvis Presley vehicle “Change of Habit.” TV prints were panned and scanned to near illegibility, reducing a film that looked like a million francs in Techniscope and Technicolor to visual noise.

The new disc restores the wide, crisp image, letting the film’s paranoid physicality land. George Peppard stars as an American boxer in Paris who gets tangled in a murder plot, with the story opening on a corpse floating in the Seine. Guillermin, best known for later blockbusters like “The Towering Inferno,” reworks Hitchcockian tropes with restless visual energy. The Eiffel Tower is shown, but from an unexpected angle. A boxing match is captured in frantic handheld shots.

Francis Lai’s main theme, a syncopated earworm with a harpsichord-like elegance, gives the film its chic and sinister pulse. The score is foregrounded throughout, much like Lai’s work on “A Man and a Woman.” Lyrics for the credit-sequence song were written by Pierre Barouh. The music alone makes this release worth the wait.