Score and Release Date

When in 1961 was Lunch Hour released? IMDb doesn't say and my simple Google-searches haven't turned up any information. Maybe you can do better? have stronger Google-fu than me?

Note that, for reasons that will soon become apparent, even knowing just that Lunch Hour (1961) was, say, an Xmas release would be useful. Can anyone who was around at the time of LH's first release, fill us in even in an approximate or vague way?

I have one reason that inclines me to believe that LH probably *was* an Xmas or end-of-year release: LH's score.

The score, which was written by LH's director, James Hill often sounds like a pianist jazzily noodling around on the melody and chords from Mancini's Moon River (lyrics by Johnny Mercer) from Breakfast At Tiffany's (1961) which was released in October 1961 in both the US and UK. The pianist does *just* enough (avoiding obvious melodic peaks and the like in the ways familiar to advertizing sound-alike writers) to forestall a lawsuit (although music plagiarism lawsuits weren't common in the early 1960s).

Now, if it turns out that LH was released early in 1961 then since Mancini had his tune locked well before Breakfast At Tiffs started filming in October 1960 we'll know that Hill rather amazingly, completely independently hit on the same basic melodic ideas as Mancini at almost exactly the same time.

Or maybe that's not so amazing. Mancini's tune is melodically very simple. He wrote it specifically for Audrey Hepburn's smallish, one octave range, with no key changes, and deliberately only used the white keys on the keyboard to help keep the tune feeling innocent/naive. [Update: Whoops, checking now, Moon River is in F-major, so that's all the white-keys but with a B-flat in place of B.]

Hill probably had to write very quickly and simply (he had lots of other duties as director after all) and he was accompanying apparently naive young lovers in the city with a focus on the inner life of a beautiful young woman who turns out to have a bit of mettle.

Maybe these forces are enough to make it likely that Hill would converge to pllnky-plonks not a million miles away from Mancini's tune. Hell, maybe it suggests that without Mercer's words there's nothing to really single out Mancini's tune from anyone else's single-octave-F-major noodling?