White Palace Blu-ray

Susan Sarandon kicked off the 1980s with her first Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her role in Louis Malle’s 1981 Best Picture nominee Atlantic City. She was 35 and a little over a decade into her career in movies, not the typical takeoff time for a successful Hollywood actress. The work kept coming for Sarandon but not much in the way of prestige or acclaim. She did score a couple of box office hits in 1987’s The Witches of Eastwick and 1988’s Bull Durham, the latter of which yielded her first Golden Globe nomination.

Buy White Palace Retro VHS Blu-ray
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By then, Sarandon was 42, already past the age when Hollywood is supposed to dispose of actresses or subject them to embarrassing scraps. And yet, Sarandon was just getting started. In the first half of the ’90s, she would land Best Actress nominations from the Oscars in four out of five consecutive years, ultimately winning the award for 1995’s Dead Man Walking. These were not throwaway nominations in minor movies: Sarandon was a leading lady in some of the finest dramas of the ’90s: Thelma & Louise, Lorenzo’s Oil, and The Client. It was a tremendous run that cemented Sarandon by acclaim and accolades as one of the premier talents of American cinema.

Look at the film that immediately preceded Sarandon’s historic 4-in-5 run and you find White Palace, a 1990 romance with the tagline “The story of a younger man and a bolder woman.” The younger man is played by James Spader, who turned thirty at the beginning of 1990 but was just a few years removed from playing high school students in the John Hughes-written/produced Pretty in Pink. For a Hughes alumnus, Spader had already shown unusual promise as an adult lead, taking top billing in Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar-nominated indie landmark Sex, Lies, and Videotape the year before.

In White Palace, he plays Max Baron, a 27-year-old Saint Louis advertising man who leaves the bachelor party of his best friend (“Seinfeld”‘s Jason Alexander) to dispute having received six empty boxes in his 50-slider order from a fast food burger joint. Getting shortchanged by $3 means little to Max monetarily, but it’s the principle of the matter, and that principle leads Max to cross paths with Nora Baker (Sarandon), the sassy, sexy cashier working there.

Later that night, Max and Nora cross paths again at a bar, where the inebriated Max reluctantly agrees to give Nora a ride home. He runs over her mailbox pulling up to the house and, unexpectedly out of coffee, she convinces him to spend the night on the couch there.

Thus begins an unexpected romance. Nora is sixteen years older than Max. Her house is messy. She has an interest in Marilyn Monroe that borders upon obsession. But the attraction is mutual and the sexual chemistry is profound. Given the poster image, you might expect White Palace to focus on the sex and veer off into erotica, but that is not where 35-year-old Mexican director Luis Mandoki takes us. Adapted from Glenn Savan’s 1987 debut novel, the screenplay by newcomer Ted Tally (soon to win the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs) and old pro Alvin Sargent (Ordinary People, Straight Time, and, later, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy) instead takes a level-headed and realistic look at what life as a couple poses for Max and Nora.

Both of them are in pain, Max having been widowed recently and Nora having lost her son, though not to leukemia as she has told him. And Nora can’t shake the feeling that Max is embarrassed to introduce her to his friends, suspicions that seem well justified. When Max and Nora finally take their relationship public, it is at a friend couple’s big Thanksgiving and the results are fairly disastrous.

It is easy to imagine everything in White Palace playing too broadly and missing its mark, but with Sarandon driving this ship, that never happens. For a steamy age-gap romance flick, this is surprisingly thoughtful and intelligent. Sure, it requires you to buy into the notion that someone like Sarandon is working at what is clearly a stand-in for White Castle, a pretty big ask for suspension of disbelief. But if you accept that, you’ll find yourself investing in Max and Nora’s relationship and wanting to see how it plays out.

Although it drew mixed reviews from critics, Sarandon still ended up getting nominated for the Golden Globes’ Best Actress in a Drama award, her first of three consecutive nominations there and five that decade. Thelma & Louise would open in theaters just seven months later on Memorial Day weekend to big business and acclaim.

While Sarandon has not drawn an Oscar nomination since her Dead Man Walking win thirty years ago, she has been a profile-boosting presence in many a film, some of them quite good (Enchanted, In the Valley of Elah, The Meddler, Robot & Frank). She turned 80 this month and even after getting dropped by her agency in 2023 over controversial remarks she made regarding Palestine at a 2023 New York rally and essentially being blacklisted, she is still continuing to work.

Spader too has had a long, productive career. Modern TV viewers will know him from “The Blacklist”, the crime drama series that ran on NBC for ten seasons through 2023. He also had runs on “The Practice”, its spin-off “Boston Legal”, and, for a season past its prime, “The Office.”

White Palace recently made its way to Blu-ray from Alliance Home Entertainment with one of the company’s signature retro VHS packaging slipcovers.

BLU-RAY DISC SPECIFICATIONS:
1.85:1 Widescreen
DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (English)
Subtitles: English for Hearing Impaired
Release Date: June 23, 2026
Single-sided, single-layered disc (BD-25)
Blue Keepcase in Cardboard Slipcover
Suggested Retail Price: $27.99

VIDEO and AUDIO

Although Alliance pops a lot of these catalog Blu-rays out, most manage to meet or exceed expectations for a high quality HD feature presentation. White Palace met mine. It boasts a nice, filmic look with a fitting amount of light grain and no other video concerns. The 2.0 DTS-HD soundtrack also has more of a kick than you expect, as you can notice from the sounds of pool games punctuating Nora and Max’s proper meeting at the bar. English SDH subtitles are thankfully supplied as well.

BONUS FEATURES, MENUS and PACKAGING

White Palace is joined by no bonus features here. In 2026, it is sad but true that to get an old movie remastered in high definition is enough of a novelty that no one expects the inclusion of original theatrical trailers, let alone anything newly-created.

Alliance does come through with another one of their retro slipcovers that looks a cassette peeking out of an old rental case, complete with video store “stickers.” The keepcase artwork below offers a different variation on imagery.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

A lot of movies making their way to Blu-ray late and without fanfare have obscurity justified by shortcomings, so I was pleased to discover that the age gap romance White Palace has not aged badly at all. Alliance’s Blu-ray is basic but the presentation is solid and if you dig their retro VHS packaging line, this might be one worth adding to your shelf.

Buy White Palace Retro VHS Blu-ray
at Amazon.com

Susan Sarandon Movies, Ranked ♦️ The Movies of 1990, Ranked