The disc: Bad Girls of Film Noir

The details: Sony has issued an arresting collection of B movies under the umbrella title of Bad Girls of Film Noir. There are two volumes, four films per volume. By all odds the best movie overall is on Volume 2: The Glass Wall, with Vittoria Gassman and the devastating Gloria Grahame — the original suicide blonde.

It’s the story of a displaced person who jumps ship in New York harbor and goes on a hunt through the Times Square area to find a musician he helped during the war and who can protect him from deportation.

The film is passionately written and performed, if clunkily directed, but the night photography of Times Square and New York by cameraman Joe Biroc gives the film a dynamic charge unusual for 1953. All this, and musical performances by guest stars Jack Teagarden and Shorty Rodgers as well! The Glass Wall — the title refers to the United Nations building, the site of the film’s climax — is a savage little comment on post-war American hostility toward immigrants and remains relevant.

Also on Part 2 is Bad for Each Other, a not-bad movie with Charlton Heston and Lizabeth Scott that, despite being written by Horace McCoy, of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? fame, has absolutely nothing to do with film noir. It is, rather, a rewrite of Arrowsmith, as Heston plays a young doctor from a coal town who becomes a society doctor catering to rich alcoholics, with a corresponding loss of self-respect. Filling out Volume 2 are The Killer That Stalked New York, a tight little thriller with Evelyn Keyes and Two of a Kind, an indifferent crime movie with Lizabeth Scott again, and Edmund O’Brien.

Volume 1 is much less interesting and features three films with Cleo Moore, a nearly-forgotten Marilyn Monroe imitator, and Night Editor, with William Gargan and Janis Carter.

Both volumes features trailers and a couple of TV episodes that follow in the general Bad Girls of Film Noir line. Your best bet is to stick with Volume 2.