Town Without Pity, a little-remembered 1961 courtroom drama with Kirk Douglas, inspired a much more familiar song of the same name. But what of the movie asks Kim Newman.

Many 1950s/1960s movies are remembered today mostly for spin-off hit records. Everyone can hum 'Theme from A Summer Place', even if you can't remember its title, but few bother with the once-popular 1959 Sandra Dee-Troy Donahue movie it comes from. You could be forgiven for thinking the Nat King Cole hits 'Smile' and 'Mona Lisa' originate with the 1975 and 1986 films which use them as title songs, rather than Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (1952) and the obscure Captain Carey USA (1950). Though The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) is merely decent by Alfred Hitchcock's standards, the song Doris Day introduced in it ('Que Sera Sera') was an instant classic.

Other standards which eclipsed movies they were written for include 'Three Coins in the Fountain', 'That's Amore' (from The Caddy), 'Love is a Many-Splendoured Thing', 'Never On a Sunday', 'Days of Wine and Roses', 'Born Free' and 'The Look of Love' (from the first Casino Royale). 'Unchained Melody' may be 'that Ghost song', but it was first heard in Unchained (1955). Even 'Alfie' and 'Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head' are probably better remembered as songs than Alfie and Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid are as films.


These standards have all been covered, sampled, remixed and recycled to this day, as has Gene Pitney's haunting, paranoid, melodramatic 'Town Without Pity', introduced in this seldom-revived, very interesting 1961 Kirk Douglas courtroom drama. Pitney, who also had a hit with 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' (a theme song not heard in the film which inspired it), croons about persecuted young love on the run with a masochistic, melodramatic abandon ('yes, it isn't very pretty what a town without pity can doooooo ...').

Like 'Smile', 'Mona Lisa' and 'Unchained Melody', 'Town Without Pity' joins the hit-list of ditties written for one movie but used in another: it's the end credits music for Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat). The music and lyrics are by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington, who also wrote the High Noon ballad -- another the-whole-community-is-against-us song, as it happens. As was often not the case, the song is used well in the film itself -- blaring from a jukebox in the opening scene, though eerily muted as the troublemakers leave the bar and drift through a quiet German town under the credits, then reprised orchestrally throughout, amping up sometimes talky drama, with apt bites of the tough talking lyrics ('until this plain granite planet falls apaaaart').


Based on a novel (Manfred Gregor's The Verdict) inspired by an actual incident, Town Without Pity is an insistent statement of a theme -- essentially, that a rape victim who takes the witness stand is raped all over again as the defence lawyer feels obliged to convince the court that 'she was asking for it' -- that has been so often dramatised in subsequent film, TV and stage dramas that many countries have changed their laws. A US-German co-production, directed by Gottfried Reinhardt, this also has to deal with a particular set of legal circumstances: four GIs stationed in Germany in the early 1960s are tried for the rape of a local girl in an American court martial held before spectators in a local gymnasium.

Army-appointed defence lawyer Major Steve Garrett (Kirk Douglas, in a situation surprisingly parallel to his military lawyer role in Paths of Glory) keeps suggesting to the girl's indignant, pompous, self-deluded, bloodthirsty father (Hans Nielsen) that she be spared the ordeal of giving her side of the story in court, but this would mean the prosecution (headed by reliable E.G. Marshall, whose legal experience runs from jury duty in Twelve Angry Men to 132 episodes of the pioneering TV 'lawyer show' The Defenders) can't ask for the death penalty -- though, if the men were tried under German law, they would not face capital punishment.