Crime Jazz Month: Henry Mancini (Experiment In Terror)

Experiment In Terror is an underrated noir crime film directed by Blake Edwards with a fantastic score by Henry Mancini, whose music touches on both the West Coast cool jazz sound and his own brand of lush, romantic strings — all of this, of course, dashed across the face with a salt grit of pure pulp crime!

The film is a bit of a sore thumb in the filmography of Blake Edwards, whose more successful features were all comedies (including The Great Race, The Pink Panther, and Breakfast At Tiffany’s). What most people don’t know about Edwards is that he grew up a huge fan of the pulps and wrote a hard-boiled serial for NBC before finding success as a film director. Experiment In Terror is, sadly, the only crime film Edwards made.