As James Bond insisted, martinis should be shaken, not stirred. Shake it up with the new DVD series, Martini Movies.

This is branding. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, which owns the Columbia Pictures catalogue, is packaging older movies to give them a fresh look. Martini Movies just launched with five titles: Affair in Trinidad (1952); The Garment Jungle (1957); Dollars (1971); The Anderson Tapes (1971); and The New Centurions (1972).

Coming soon are: Nickelodeon, Five, Getting Straight, Gumshoe, Our Man in Havana, Nightwing, Vibes and I Never Sang For My Father.

The first five Martini Movies share one primal element: A crime story. Plus a dash of sex and violence. None is a classic but each is worth seeing, with one caveat. In my case, two of the five would not play in my DVD machine, although they worked perfectly in a computer, so test your copies immediately.

The five movies feature Columbia stars ranging from Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth, locked in an incendiary embrace during their Affair in Trinidad, to the seductive pairing of Sean Connery and Dyan Cannon as bedtime burglars in The Anderson Tapes. The three titles from 1971-72 also share Quincy Jones as composer and, coincidentally, are obsessed with "cutting-edge technology" of their era. That includes clandestine listening devices and high-tech security, all of which looks quaint today.

None of the DVDs has making-of extras. Instead, each offers a martini recipe. One classic concoction would please 007: 6 parts gin, 2 parts vodka, 1 part Lillet Blanc; shake and garnish with a lemon twist.

- Affair in Trinidad: Directed by Vincent Sherman in fullscreen B&W: Glenn Ford visits Trinidad, suddenly finding his brother dead and the widow implicated. But, because she happens to be the sultry, sexy showgirl Rita Hayworth, Ford finds himself both attracted and repelled while she carries out her own secret investigation. Great pulp with a film noir feel.

- The Garment Jungle: Directed by Vincent Sherman in widescreen B&W: Another noir, this one has a social conscience. Lee J. Cobb is a hardline owner of a Manhattan dress-making house. Thugs keep the union out of his shop but his son, Kerwin Matthews, comes home and befriends a firebrand union organizer, played with zeal by young Robert Loggia. Great dramatic moments, although Matthews is wooden and the climax overripe.

- Dollars: Directed by Richard Brooks in widescreen colour: Conman Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn, a proverbial hooker with a heart of gold, team up to rob crooks hiding their loots in safety deposit boxes at a Hamburg bank. With a murky morality and sharp dialogue, Brooks, movie rides the razor's edge between thriller and camp. There is also gratuitous nudity and violence, so the Euro-flavoured movie really seems of its time and place.

- The Anderson Tapes: Directed by Sidney Lumet in widescreen colour: Sean Connery, as a hardened criminal, and Dyan Cannon, as his sexy galpal, team on a plot to clean out a residential haven for rich snobs. Christopher Walken makes his electric debut in the eccentric gang. Lumet cleverly masks his ambition, but the movie is really a political satire on the Nixon tapes.

- The New Centurions: Directed by Richard Fleischer in widescreen colour: While it ends with awkward melodrama, the root of this otherwise gritty film is a Joseph Wambaugh novel about how men end up as career cops in the LAPD. While George C. Scott and Stacy Keach are brilliant headliners, the support cast is sterling, too, especially Scott Wilson as a self-tortured cop with deep reservations about life on the beat.