Olive Films has increased the speed with which it is releasing its library of films licensed by Paramount. New Blu-ray and standard DVD releases include five psychological mysteries, some better than others.

The cream of the crop is the long missing 1946 film noir thriller, The Dark Mirror with its sensational performance by Olivia de Havilland as twin sisters, one of whom is a murderess.

Directed by Robert Siodmak, the film keeps you guessing for a while as to which one is which, but even after the evil one is revealed, it still keeps you on the edge of your seat as the evil one tries to drive the other one mad. There are fine contributions from Lew Ayres as a psychologist who falls in love with the “good” sister and Thomas Mitchell as a canny police detective, but it’s de Havilland’s still amazing performance that lifts it out of the ordinary. Had she not won an Oscar for the same year’s splendid To Each His Own, she might have just as easily won for her tour-de-force performance here. It would make a great double-bill with Otto Preminger’s Laura from two years earlier.

Less outstanding is Fritz Lang’s 1948 film-noir mystery,Secret Beyond the Door with Joan Bennett and Michael Redgrave. Although the film has some memorable moments, it is too derivative of Hitchcock’s 1940 Oscar winner, Rebecca to make a serious impression.

Bennett is the rich American heiress who marries British widower Redgrave and spends the rest of the film wondering if he murdered his previous wife. Anne Revere as Redgrave’s domineering sister, Barbara O’Neill as his strange secretary and Mark Dennis as his weird son round out the household.

A hybrid of the noir and western genres, Raoul Walsh’s 1947 film, Pursued, features Robert Mitchum in his first starring role as a man being pursued by a group led by one-armed Dean Jagger. Through flashbacks we learn that he was rescued as a child from a massacre that took the lives of his parents, brothers and sister. His rescuer was the sister-in-law of the one-armed man, played by Judith Anderson. She raises him along with her own two children, one of whom grows up to be Teresa Wright who loves him, then hates him, then loves him all over again.

Michum’s performance is so strong that it’s difficult to believe that this was his first lead, albeit one that came two years after his starlingly only Oscar nomination and that in the supporting actor category for The Story of G.I. Joe. Wright and especially Anderson also turn in strong performances and the film is further aided by James Wong Howe’s evocative black-and-white cinematography and Max Steiner’s thrilling score.

A film I had fond memories of for forty years, Sidney Lumet’s 1972 mystery horror film, Child’s Play from a popular Broadway play, sadly does not hold up.

James Mason came in second that year in the New York Film Critics’ polling for Best Actor as a tormented lay teacher at a Catholic Boys School, and the performance is good, but the film it’s attached to is not.

Robert Preston co-stars as Mason’s nemesis, a respected fellow teacher who may or may be Mason’s secret tormentor. Beau Bridges plays the school’s new gym teacher, a former student at the school which is plagued by mysterious attacks by some of the boys on others. The film’s denouement is pretty lame, and the fate of two of the film’s three main characters is left in question. Oh well, so much for fond memories.

A film I didn’t care for the first time I saw it is even less interesting thirty-eight years later.

Frank Perry’s 1974 mystery thriller, Man on a Swing is slowly paced with more annoying characters than you can shake a stick at. Principal among them is the clairvoyant played by Joel Grey, who offers his services to the local police department headed by Cliff Robertson in the solving of a young girl’s murder.

Creepy from the get-go, Grey seems complicit in the murder, but is he? It’s allegedly based on a true story, but one so bereft of anything substantial that it takes its title from a labored scene in which Grey, under a trance, runs away from Robertson and begins swinging wildly on a playground swing like a six year-old child.

William Faulknor was one of the great American novelists of the 20th Century and an exemplary screenwriter to boot. One of his greatest novels was The Sound and the Fury, but you would never know it from the bowdlerized 1959 film they made of it.

The story of the deterioration of a once proud Southern family, the film is Faulknor by way of Tennessee Williams with a little William Inge thrown in. Ignoring the bulk of the novel, the film, directed by Martin Ritt, concentrates on the characters in the last part of the novel, giving prominence to two no-good characters who are cleaned up considerably for the film.

Joanne Woodward, pushing thirty at the time, is too mature for the nineteen year-old nymphet she plays and Yul Brynner as her guardian is not fully fleshed out. Margaret Leighton, only eight years Woodward’s senior, plays her mother by way of Blanche Du Bois. Jack Warden is her mentally challenged uncle; John Beal her alcoholic uncle and Stuart Whitman her no-account boyfriend. Only Ethel Waters as the family’s resilient housekeeper comes fully alive.

The film has been given a limited Blu-ray release from Twilight Time.

One of TV’s best series to come along in some time, Boardwalk Empire, is about to begin its third season. Fans of the series can now find the first two seasons on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Boardwalk Empire – The Complete Second Season is just as exciting as the first, with just about as many surprises and bodies piling up. I have to say, though, that I liked the first season better. The second ends with the brutal killings of two of my three favorite characters while many of the nasty ones live on.

This week’s new DVD releases include the long awaited Blu-ray debut of James Cameron’s Titanic in both 3-D and original theatrical versions. Also new this week is Snow White and the Huntsman.