Turner Classic Movies is airing Town Without Pity (1961) on Saturday – and I don’t think much of it. It’s a postwar drama in which Kirk Douglas defends four GIs from rape charges in an Allied-occupied German town. But the great Dimitri Tiomkin wrote the score, and, like he did with his Oscar-winning High Noon, he came up with a pretty good title song. The song became a Top 40 hit for Gene Pitney. Here’s Pitney performing the song on TV.
(For a total change of pace, the song was also featured in John Waters’ 1988 Hairspray.)
Herb Alpert’s up-tempo trumpet version of ‘Town Without Pity’ is another change of pace; one of my favorite tunes.