In the Shadow of Hollywood: Highlights From Poverty Row - BLU-RAY

This collection features three film noir classics. A WOMAN'S VENGEANCE (1948) - Charles Boyer (When Tomorrow Comes), Ann Blyth (Thunder on the Hill) and Jessica Tandy (The Birds) star in A Woman's Vengeance, a gripping noir mystery from acclaimed director Zoltan Korda (The Four Feathers). When his invalid wife Emily (Rachel Kempson, The Captive Heart) dies of a heart attack, it frees Henry Maurier (Boyer) to marry his young mistress (Blyth). Confiding her suspicions that Henry murdered her patient, Emily's nurse (Mildred Natwick, Against All Flags) is encouraged by a neighbor (Tandy) to tell the police. Suddenly Henry finds himself wrongly convicted and awaiting his fate while the family doctor (Sir Cedric Hardwicke, The Lodger) races against time to find the real killer and save his life. Visionary author Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) adapted the screenplay from his own short story, The Gioconda Smile. I WAS A SHOPLIFTER (1950) - Mona Freeman (Flesh and Fury) stars as the titular kleptomaniac in the sensational crime story, I Was a Shoplifter. Cop Jeff Andrews (Scott Brady, Undertow) agrees to go undercover to shadow the sticky-fingered Faye Burton (Freeman), a judge's daughter who has been coerced into working for a professional shoplifting ring run by ruthless pawnbroker Ina Perdue (Andrea King, The World in His Arms). Jeff finds himself falling in love with Faye while working to crack the gang of thieves. Directed by Charles Lamont (Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man), shot by Irving Glassberg (Larceny) and featuring Tony Curtis (The Square Jungle), Charles Drake (Deported) and Rock Hudson (The Tarnished Angels), I Was a Shoplifter is a fast-paced film noir treat. BEHIND THE HIGH WALL (1956) - Tom Tully (The Turning Point) and Sylvia Sidney (Sabotage) star in the riveting prison-break noir, Behind the High Wall. A group of convicts escape from the big ho

Three-disc set includes Thunder On The Hill (1951)Based on the British play InchBonaventure,Inch this involving mystery from director Douglas Sirk stars Claudette Colbert as Sister Mary Bonaventure, a nun who befriends Valerie Carns (Ann Blyth), a convicted murderess whose trip to death row has been delayed by a raging flood. Beginning to doubt Valerie's guilt, the sister becomes determined to clear her name and find the real killer. Robert Douglas, Anne Crawford also star. 84 min. BW/Rtg NR The Price Of Fear (1956)When his mobbed-up new partner wants to take him out of the picture-with a frame-job for a homicide-a dog track owner (Lex Barker) decides to make himself scarce. The bad move becomes worse, when the mysterious lady (Merle Oberon) he thumbs a ride with proves to have a dangerous agenda of her own. Dark drama co-stars Charles Drake, Warren Stevens, Gia Scala. 79 min. BW/Rtg NR The Female Animal (1958)Aging film goddess Vanessa Windsor (Hedy Lamarr, in her screen farewell), grateful for being rescued from an on-set calamity by hunky extra Chris Farley (George Nader), offers him a caretaker job. The young man's discomfort with the arrangement gets ramped up when his too-attentive boss battles for his attentions with her grown, hard-drinking daughter (Jane Powell)! Campy soaper co-stars Jan Sterling, James Gleason. 84 min. BW/Rtg NR

This collection features three film noir classics. SPY HUNT (1950) - The manhunt that rocked the world! Noir great Howard Duff (Johnny Stool Pigeon, Woman in Hiding, Shakedown) stars with the beautiful Marta Toren (One Way Street, Deported, Sirocco) in this compelling Cold War thriller. Steve Quain (Duff), escorting two zoo-bound black panthers on a train from Milan to Paris, is unaware that a secret agent, Catherine Ullven (Toren), has concealed an incriminating microfilm in the collar of one of the animals. But when the train is derailed in the Swiss Alps and the panthers escape, she is forced to involve him in her mission, which now includes enemy spies hunting the microfilm, the animals, Catherine and Steve. Directed by George Sherman (Larceny, The Sleeping City, The Raging Tide) from the novel Panther's Moon by Victor Canning (Golden Salamander, Family Plot, Masquerade). THE NIGHT RUNNER (1957) - Are mental patients turned loose too soon? Ray Danton (Outside the Law, The Big Operator, The Longest Day) stars as Roy Turner, a man with a violent past who is prematurely released from an overcrowded institution. Realizing that he cannot handle the pressures of big-city life, he moves into a small-town beachside motel and falls in love with Susan Mayes, warmly played by Colleen Miller (Four Guns to the Border, Man in the Shadow, Step Down to Terror), the daughter of the motel's owner. When her father finds out about Roy, he threatens to have him recommitted unless he leaves his daughter alone. Roy snaps, and commits a crime from which there is no turning back. Abner Biberman (The Price of Fear, Behind the High Wall, Gun for a Coward) directs this black-as-night yet sympathetic look at mental illness. STEP DOWN TO TERROR (1958) - Step by step he made a career out of love, and murder! Based on the same source material as Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, this suspens