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Recent releases, reviewed by Times critics.

**** “The Last Hurrah”

RCA/Columbia. $69.95. 1958.

Edwin O’Connor’s canny tale of the last campaign of a roguish Bostonian Irish-Catholic mayor receives a somewhat more sentimental and despairing transcription by Irish-Catholic New Englander John Ford. He treats the material broadly, using it as the base for a massive reunion of Hollywood’s ‘30s “Irish mafia” (Spencer Tracy, Pat O’Brien, Frank McHugh, Edward Brophy). Shot mostly in dark interiors, in waxlike tableaux, it’s still a stirring film--funny, trenchant and poignant.