Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XIII (Spy Hunt / The Night Runner / Step Down To Terror) (BLU-RAY)

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 Märta Torén (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 (Torén), 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 suspense-soaked noir stars Colleen Miller (Playgirl, The Night Runner, Hot Summer Night), Charles Drake (I Was a Shoplifter, Female on the Beach, No Name on the Bullet) and Rod Taylor (The Time Machine, The Birds, Darker Than Amber). Pursued by detectives, killer Johnny Walters (Drake) leaves the city to visit his family in a small California town. Among the household: his dead brother’s alluring widow Helen (Miller), who soon is attracted to him. But ominous events and conflicting evidence leave Helen suspicious of her beloved brother-in-law, as director Harry Keller (The Unguarded Moment, Quantez, The Female Animal) expertly ratchets the tension.