Thunder on the Hill, Douglas Sirk’s 1951 film, was the director’s first for Universal, the studio where he would make such classics as Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, and Imitation of Life over the next eight years. He was the perfect choice for this female-driven murder mystery based on a successful East End London play.

Claudette Colbert, in her last great screen role, plays a nun who is also a nurse in a Catholic hospital where convicted murderess Ann Blyth is sheltered for the night on the way to her execution for the murder of her brother. Convinced of Blyth’s innocence, Colbert and a loyal assistant (Michael Pate) make a dangerous trip in a small boat during a storm to find Blyth’s former fiancé (Philip Friend) in the hope that he can help prove her innocence. She is also aided by a fellow nun, the hospital’s chief cook (Connie Gilchrist), who finds a clue to Blyth’s innocence in newspaper accounts of her trial. Gladys Coper is the disapproving Mother Superior, Robert Douglas the hospital’s primary doctor, and Anne Crawford is his nervous wife. The film’s climax in the chapel’s bell tower predates the more famous one in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo by seven years and is just as memorable.

Thunder on the Hill is one of three films featured in Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray boxset Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema II, featuring beautifully restored prints of all three films in the set. The others are The Female Animal and The Price of Fear.

Directed by Harry Keller, 1958’s The Female Animal is classified as film noir but is really an unabashed melodrama about a move star (Hedy Lamarr) and her alcoholic daughter (Jane Powell) in love with the same man, a Hollywood gigolo played by George Nader, that ends in tragedy. Nader had starred opposite Esther Williams in the previous year’s The Unguarded Moment, also directed by Keller, in which the rising star appeared opposite an actress whose legendary screen career was approaching its end. Williams would make three more films through 1963, but for Lamarr, this was the end of the road at 44. The actress who was the model for Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, who turned down the leads in both Gaslight and Laura, deserved a better end. She got it posthumously with 2017’s Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, in which the actress who died in 2000, is given her due as underrated ingenious inventor. Her invention of frequency hopping paved the way for cell phones, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and military technology.

1956’s The Price of Fear, directed by Abner Biberman, was released as the bottom half of a double bill in which the headliner was The Creature Walks Among Us, the third film in The Creature from the Black Lagoon trilogy. It is hardly even mentioned in the trailer for The Creature Walks Among Us, which is provided as an extra.

The film is undeniably intense but suffers from lack of a relatable hero. Top-billed Merle Oberon is a coldhearted investment banker who accidentally kills a man with her car for which she is willing to allow nominal hero Lex Barker to take the blame. Barker, playing the co-owner of an L.A. dog track, is also being framed for the murder of his ex-partner. Charles Drake, Warren Stevens, and Gia Scala co-star.

The Barbara Stanwyck Collection, another Blu-ray boxset from Kino Lorber, includes Internes Can’t Take Money, The Great Man’s Lady, and The Bride Wore Boots, which are far from the great actress’s best works.

1937’s Internes Can’t Take Money, directed by Alfred Santell (Winterset), is the best of the lot. The first Dr. Kildare film, it has none of the folksiness of the beloved MGM series starring Lew Ayres and Lionel Barrymore, which began in 1939. It’s taken from writer Max Brand’s Saturday Evening Post story with the medical aspects diminished in favor of the hard luck story of the doctor’s patient played by Stanwyck who, along with Joel McCrea as Kildare, is superior to the material. Lloyd Nolan, Stanley Ridges, and Lee Bowman co-star.

1942’s The Great Man’s Lady, directed by William A. Wellman (The Ox-Bow Incident), is one of those films about an old lady looking back on her life, which audiences of the day were more apt to find Irene Dunne or Greer Garson in instead of Stanwyck, but Stanwyck acquits herself well as both the 107-year-old pioneer woman telling her story to reporter K.T. Stevens, as she is playing the same character at various ages. Joel McCrea is the great man and Brian Donlevy the other man in her life.

1946’s The Bride Wore Boots, directed by Irving Pichel (Tomorrow Is Forever) is a bit of fluff in which Stanwyck plays a woman who raises horses. She’s married to a bookish historian played by Robert Cummings who, tired of playing second fiddle to the horses, wants a divorce. The actors, including Diana Lynn, Patric Knowles, Peggy Wood and Robert Benchley, are superior to the material.

Also, from Kino Lorber are beautifully rendered Blu-ray releases of The Runner Stumbles and The Captive Heart.

1979’s The Runner Stumbles was director Stanley Kramer’s last film. Like his more famous works, Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Ship of Fools, this one is based on a true story, albeit a much less known one.

Based on a Broadway play of the same name, the action takes place in a remote village in Michigan in 1911. Dick Van Dyke, in his first dramatic film role, is a Catholic priest on trial for the murder of a nun played by Kathleen Quinlan (I Never Promised You a Rose Garden) who the town’s largely Protestant population thinks the priest was having an affair with. Beau Bridges is his defense attorney, Maureen Stapleton his housekeeper, Ray Bolger (in his last film) a stick-in-the-mud monsignor, Tammy Grimes a lonely old maid who married the first man who came along after the death of her father, and Billy Jacoby an intelligent-beyond-his-years altar boy. If you plan on seeing the film, do not research the story behind it. It will spoil the ending.

1946’s The Captive Heart, directed by Basil Dearden (Dead of Night), is also based on a true story. This magnificently filmed prisoner of war drama is set in a German POW camp from 1940 to the end of the war with a focus on five characters, played by Michael Redgrave, Derek Bond, Gordon Jackson, Mervyn Johns, and Jack Warner and the women they love. Redgrave plays a Czech soldier who escapes from a Nazi concentration camp and assumes the identity of a British soldier who died on the way to the POW camp. Rachel Kempson is the dead man’s wife with whom he corresponds. The story ends happily for Redgrave’s character, but not the character on whom his story is based. In 1948, the Czech communists sentenced him to 30 years imprisonment and work in the uranium nines where he died from torture and other inhumane conditions in 1957.

This week’s new releases include Criterion Special Editions of Dance, Girl, Dance and The Great Escape.