Columbia has made available a new Blu-ray release of Blake Edwards’ 1962 film, Experiment in Terror which was previously released in the U.S. by boutique label Twilight Time. That out-of-print release is currently available on Amazon for $97.95. The new release is going for $27.55 on Amazon

The film is an extremely tense thriller filmed on location in San Franciso in many locations that had changed little when I lived there twenty years later.

Glenn Ford gets top billing as the FBI agent on the case of a threatened bank teller played by Lee Remick, but it’s the performances of Remick, Stephanie Powers as her teenage sister, and Ross Martin as the serial killer on their tail that stand out.

Edwards made this between Breakfast at Tiffany’s in which Audrey Hepburn gave one of her most iconic performances for which she received her fourth Oscar nomination and Days of Wine and Roses for which Remick received her first and only Oscar nomination. Five years later, Hepburn received her fifth Oscar nomination for Wait Until Dark in a role for which Remick received a Tony nomination for in the original Broadway production.

Henry Mancini, who composed the film’s iconic score won back-to-back Oscars for Best Song for “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the title song from Days of Wine and Roses.

The film begins with Remick driving her car over the Oakland Bay Bridge from an evening out to her home on San Francisco’s Twin Peaks. There she is attacked in her garage by an asthmatic stranger (Martin) who won’t allow her to look at his face. He tells her that she will rob the bank she works for in two days or she and her sister will be murdered.

Cool as a cucumber, Remick contacts the FBI and gets Ford who doesn’t seem to be much help at first as Martin kills a woman, an artist, in her apartment near the San Francisco wharf. He then stalks Powers and her high school sweetheart at a pool and later kidnaps her.

The climax of the film takes place at Candlestick Park at a game between the Giants and the Dodgers.

Ross Martin’s name was missing from the film’s opening credits and not revealed until the end of the film for some reason. He wasn’t yet a big enough name for the revelation to mean much for audiences of the day in a role for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor.

MGM has released a Blu-ray of the 1961 U.S.-German film, Town Without Pity directed by Gottfried Reinhardt, the son of legendary producer-director Max Rheinhardt (1935’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

The younger Reinhardt had made a string of well-received films in the early 1950s including Invitation with Van Johnson and Dorothy McGuire, Betrayed with Clark Gable and Lana Turner, and The Story of Three Loves with Kirk Douglas, James Mason, and Leslie Caron.

Douglas is the star of Town Without Pity, giving one of his best performances as an Army Major defending four soldiers in the gang rape of a sixteen-year-old girl played by Christine Kaufman in a Golden Globe award-winning performance.

Douglas must defend the soldiers played by Robert Blake, Richard Jaekel, Frank Sutton and Mal Sondock, knowing full well that they are guilty as charged but arguing that there are degrees of guilt and that they should not be given the mandatory death penalty demanded by both U.S. military justice and the furor of the town. To do so, he must attack the innocent Kaufman in ways all too familiar to viewers of similar situations both in real life and on big and small screens.

Kaufman, who was the age of her character during the making of the film, turned in an equally riveting performance in the following year’s Escape from East Berlin opposite Don Murray. She married Tony Curtis, her co-star is Taras Bulba shortly after turning 18 in early 1963.

The excellent supporting cast includes Gerhart Lippert as Kaufman’s boyfriend and Barbara Rutting as a reporter who narrates the film.

The film’s biggest sensation, however, was Gene Pitney’s Oscar nominated theme song, a huge hit at the time.

I had hoped to review the latest batch of releases from Warner Archive, but I don’t get review copies and Amazon, Deep Discount, and other retailers are at odds with the way the Archive distributes its new releases. At one point, a third-party retailer on Amazon was selling this month’s releases at $100 a pop.

I finally ordered seven of the releases from Movie Zyng which are on their way. I will probably go with them for Warner Bros. and other limited release old films aside from those that Kino Lorber puts out from now on.

Included in this month’s releases are Raoul Walsh’s They Died with Their Boots On (1941) with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland; Michael Curtiz’s Bright Leaf (1950) with Gary Cooper, Lauren Bacall and Patricia Neal; Roy Rowland’s Two Weeks with Love (1950) with Jane Powell Ricardo Montalban, Debbie Renolds and Jerome Courtland; Richard Thorpe’s Knights of the Round Table (1953) with Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner; Vincente Minnelli’s The Cobweb (1955) with Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, Charles Boyer and Gloria Grahame; and William Conrad’s Brainstorm (1965) with Jeffrey Hunter and Anne Francis.

The seventh one I ordered is Richard Thorpe’s 1952 version of The Prisoner of Zenda with Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr, James Mason, Jane Greer, Louis Calhern, Robert Douglas and Robert Coote in the roles played in the superior 1937 version by Ronald Colman, Madeleine Carroll, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Mary Astor, C. Aubrey Smith, Raymond Massey and David Niven.

The 1937 and 1952 versions were included on the same DVD, but the 1937 version is said to need major restoration so instead we get the 1922 silent version with Lewis Stone, Alice Terry and Ramon Novarro as an extra.

Happy viewing.