Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics II

While there are no masterpieces in Sony's second film noir classics collection (presented in collaboration with Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation), this five-disc set features some excellent lesser-known titles. The most familiar entry here is Fritz Lang's Human Desire (1954), a rather sanitized adaptation of Émile Zola's La Bête Humaine that reunites the director and his stars from The Big Heat—Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame—with Grahame playing a tawdry femme fatale who lures Ford into a plot to kill her husband (Broderick Crawford). But the real gem is Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall (1957), a crisply directed suspense nightmare starring Aldo Ray as an innocent man fleeing from both the police and the brutal bank robbers who framed him for murder in a tale stretching from L.A. to Wyoming. Phil Karlson's The Brothers Rico (1957) is set within the world of organized crime, where dual loyalties (to the organization and to family) collide, with Richard Conte superb as the brother who is blindsided. Richard Quine's Pushover (1954) plays like a low-rent Double Indemnity, with an older, more world-weary Fred MacMurray starring as a cop who falls for a gangster's girlfriend (Kim Novak in her screen debut). Filling out the anthology is 1959's City of Fear, an interesting but slight thriller from Irving Lerner, reteamed with his Murder by Contract star Vince Edwards, who plays an escaped convict headed to Los Angeles with a stolen canister of highly explosive radioactive material. Although not quite prime cuts, these minor classics debuting on DVD with superb transfers will please genre aficionados. Bonus features include brief interviews with Scorsese, director Christopher Nolan, and actress Emily Mortimer. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)