Violent Playground (1958)

The Basil Dearden season continues, presenting many noir-adjacent films that are more the by product of the medium than its core element, dealing with teenage, social and criminal problems and the police effort to present social reason for the increasing use of machine guns by school students.

Violent Playground (1958) is a Basil Dearden teenage tearaway race relations British battle of wills between a Liverpool Juvenile Liaison officer and a young and dangerous pyromaniac rock n roll social problem picture movie response to the alarmist, hugely successful teen melodrama The Blackboard Jungle (US, 1955) James Kennaway scripted inspired by an actual experiment that was carried out in Liverpool in 1949 late period Limey noir crime and civic anxiety fusion and social confusion picture starring Stanley Baker, Anne Heywood, David McCallum, Peter Cushing, John Slater and Clifford Evans.

The Threat (1949)

The Threat (1949) is a prison break revenge and violence cons on the run hostage procedural Felix E. Feist classic era film noir psychopathic bully drama with Charles McGraw, Virginia Grey, Michael O'Shea, Anthony Caruso, Julie Bishop and Frank Conroy.

Felix E. Feist's The Threat (1949) is a violent, accelerated bullet of a film. Clocking in at barely over an hour, it encapsulates the claustrophobic essence of noir within its limited timeframe. There is no flab to be found; every scene is propelled by urgency, and every character stands in the shadow of mortal danger. The film traffics in archetypes: the brutal criminal, the loyal detective, the compromised woman, and the hapless bystander. 

Cape Fear (1962)

Cape Fear (1962) is a classic film noir revenge and violence against women southern suburban disturbin psychopathic ex con on the loose police, lawyer and detective censorship-barrier-breaking intimidation-genre child exploitation and &ape-heavy terrifying thriller violence against women and girls movie with one of Robert Mitchum's most heavyweight performances of all time, and one of Bernard Hermann's most heavyweight scores of all times — and directed as it is by J. Lee Thompson, Cape Fear is in deed and in the opinion of many noireaux — and this is a biggie — the very last and final ultimate late in the day, last blast of heroic pure and timeless formula-based all in actual full on 100% qualified film noir — the terminal articulation of the studio-era noir idiom — the concluding flourish of Hollywood’s original noir cycle — the last film noir.

Dead of Night (1945)

Your every Basil Dearden season must include this delighting wonder of British forties filmation, a classic of several kinds and dear to all  Deardenians.

Dead of Night (1945) is a super classic anthology supernatural horror film noir themed portmanteau mixture of ghoulish spooky weird and comic misadventure with a framed narrative and fever pitched all time classic ventriloquist dummy anthology film in which the narratives spiral from spectral visitations to prophetic terror to outright, feral possession, each tale recounted by those who survived its ordeal. These confessions are bound together by a single, unsettling guest who claims an impossible intimacy with the house, the host, and the assembled company, recognizing them not from life but from a recurring nightmare he has endured relentlessly, a nightmare that has rehearsed this very gathering long before it came grotesquely true.

From the Earth to the Moon (1958)

The Cotten Sequence, or Joseph Cotten Season, proceeds with understated poise, its pleasures evenly shared, although obliging us to view this non-noir folly of fifties fantasia and filmation, we are not always best delighted.

From the Earth to the Moon (1958) is a Byron Haskin Jules Verne Civil War space rocket science fiction revenge and rivalry sane scientist drama featuring a cold war mutually assured destruction power that can destroy the earth action special effects adventure movie with Joseph Cotten, Debra Paget, George Sanders, Byron Haskin, Henry Daniell, Carl Esmond and Morris Ankrum. Oh cielo, questo non è un film noir!

I Believe in You (1952)

To mount a Basil Dearden season is an unusual idea and of course, one that resists the orthodox rhythms of repertory programming, and yet, and yet, and yet here is that season all the same. The Basil Dearden Season continues next with:

I Believe in You (1952) is an earnest British flashback and voiceover ex-Colonial Office probation officer seeks leisure and seeks social service courtroom-based teenage tearaway and juvenile threat social conscience anti-fun-fair young love and petty crime social melodrama modest Ealing drama exposing post imperial exhaustion, moral fog, bureaucratic hopefulness, and social ache, where reform curdles, idealism bruises, and British decency quietly erodes under persistence film noir by Basil Dearden, and starring Joan Collins, Laurence Harvey, Cecil Parker, Harry Fowler and Sid James.

The Man With a Cloak (1951)

The Cotten season advances without strain, and presents a courteous offering that leaves few untouched.

The Man With a Cloak (1951) is a talky and confined gloomy New York gothic mansion genre-less melodrama Poe-posturing old New York style historical murder, deception and drunken curmudgeon paranoid girl poetic justice and wicked housekeeper style twist and turning film noir yarn which plays a special riff with classic literary gothic Americana, and which stars Barbara Stanwyck and Joseph Cotten, wow, and is Poe-infested raven wavin bed-ridden dying uncle of fortune and handsome literary low lifes at the bar and on the streets, with Leslie Caron, Louis Calhern, Jim Backus, and Margaret Wycherly.

Pool of London (1951)

The notion of a Basil Dearden season remains an unexpected and quietly subversive curatorial gesture.

Pool of London (1951) is a post war race relations smuggling offbeat classic British film noir customs officers and river police dockyard and barroom melodramatic crime story in a realistic setting procedural race against time thriller of the river underworld, so declared, and which is of note for portraying the first interracial relationship in a British film.

Witness To Murder (1954)

Witness To Murder (1954) is a citizen sleuth misogyny and violence against women inept cop and de-Nazified murderer and sympathetic sceptic cop procedural LA based thriller with a rooftop denouement and paranoid woman in a racist sanatorium film noir from the early hey days of the victimisation of females genre of film noir, starring Barbara Stanwyck as the silly victim of a murderous persecution and George Sanders as a creepy killer guy, and Gary Merrill as a cop who believes nothing any woman says, because all women are dreamers and fantasists and cannot be trusted to look out a window without making up a whole murder plot.

Apology for Murder (1945)

Apology for Murder (1945) is a cheapie-rip-off ten-cent-copycat journalism and media femme fatale film noir "single indemnity" lol female killer thriller rich husband and married for money fantasy mid century noir motion picture adapted from a true story by Fred Myton about a man who falls in love with a married woman, married to a much older man who she wants to kill for the insurance on him, directed by Sam Newfield and starring Ann Savage, Hugh Beaumont, Russell Hicks and Charles D. Brown.

A Blueprint for Murder (1953)

The Joseph Cotten season is a gentle joy, and it drifts on with another film touched by his grace.

A Blueprint for Murder (1953) is an amateur sleuth suburbin disturbin courtroom and hospital with occasional voiceover ocean-going whodunnit poisoning family plot styled did she or didn't she suspenser film noir directed by Andrew L. Stone and starring the sterling super noir suspenser superstar Jospeh Cotten, with Jean Peters, Gary Merrill and Catherine McLeod.

Duel in the Sun (1946)

Our sojourn with Cotten continues softly, its rewards modest, humane, and widely felt. Yes, indeed, this may not be his film, but the Cotten retrospective continues in a tone of soft confidence, gratifying precisely because it does not overreach.

Duel in the Sun (1946) is a big budget, trashy, overblown, fuss and lust in the dust perfect and strange Technicolor violence against women and girls epic ethnically unengaged and super-classic Jennifer Jones ill-informed diegetically failing mainstream meta-normative-narrative and hegemonic conservatism-inducing psychological western family feud and patriarchal posturin' romance fantasy drama David O. Selznick dream cinematic vision directed by King Vidor, with several directors being left uncredited for their work in the film, such as Josef von Sternberg, William Dieterle, William Cameron Menzies, Otto Brower, Sidney Franklin and Selznick himself, while production unit managers Glenn Cook and William McGarry were also uncredited, and starring Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Herbert Marshall, Lillian Gish, Walter Huston, Butterfly McQueen and Lionel Barrymore.

Rancho Notorious (1952)

Rancho Notorious (1952) is a Fritz Lang female boss violence against women, rape, hate, murder and revenge western pursuit and narrative themes detection and deduction and lustful romance, incidental 'Chuck-a-Luck' music outlaw atmospheric hideaway Technicolor sexy and smouldering one woman and about twenty men pulp adventure starring Marlene Dietrich, Arthur Kennedy, George Reeves and Jack Elam.

Well, the title song promises hate, murder and revenge so this is clearly a noir-inflected product of the cinematic studio.

Track of the Cat (1954)

Track of the Cat (1954) is a snow-bound William A. Wellman squabblin family revenge against an animal existential and yet pathos laden wild panther ravaging bold moral allegory psychological western with a slight tendency to be classed as part film noir, part adventure, part melodrama, a part western and part ethical fable, starring Robert Mitchum, Teresa Wright, Diana Lynn, Tab Hunter, Beulah Bondi, Philip Tonge, William Hopper and Carl Switzer as Joe Sam, a case of a non-Indigenous actor performing an Indigenous role, as such a racial impersonation of Native American, or more specifically speaking, the colonial representational practice commonly referred to as redface.

The Naked Spur (1953)

The Naked Spur (1953) is a bounty hunter chamber piece in the wilds classic Technicolor character-driven super-national park cinematic landscape featuring taut and rugged four men and a girl on the trail road-movie-style buzzard bait irascible western treatise on the moral consequences of greed directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart, Janet Leigh, Ralph Meeker and Millard Mitchell. It is a film that features more plaster foam rocks than any other that anyone can remember from the early 50s.

Silver Lode (1954)

Silver Lode (1954) is an anti-McCarthy communist movie industry witch-hunt scandal film noir western angry mob in a small town revenge cat and mouse Wile West thriller romance and adventure murder and public disorder noir inflected western Lin which wedding bells curdle into mob hysteria, authority masquerades as law, suspicion metastasizes, and a lone man is publicly lynched by paperwork, starring Dan Duryea, Lizabeth Scott, John Payne and a few other fifties film faithfuls, in a tidy rather false-looking western town set setting wrapped up in a Fourth of July barbecue, but did they have barbecues in the wild west?

Yield to the Night (1956)

Yield to the Night (1956) which is also known by its US release title Blonde Sinner is a classic film noir Limey death row female criminality flashback and voiceover murder exploitation lousy husband prison movie with a mean prison warden trope and revenge thriller element and with a confused fixation on women's legs, and is most overall best enjoyed as a incredible and felt performance from Diana Dors, and showing as it does the descent to madness through lousy husbandry and mannishness in general, was directed by J. Lee Thompson, and includes many sympathetic character acting performances and otherwise strong supporting acting from all and among others Yvonne Mitchell, Geoffrey Keen, Michael Ripper and Marie Ney, and Michael Craig as the lousy Jim Lancaster.

Blackmail (1929)

Blackmail (1929) is an Alfred Hitchcock 1920s police procedural attempted rape and murder in self defence classic British film noir hit sound movie production based on a play and brutally blackly comic cinematic late dip towards higher modernism in the form and its technical prowess as it entered the 1930s, and this film which is clear evidence of the Hitchcockian it is also at its height horrific.

Apologies if the film noir canon is to be legally formatted in the 1920s, the thought is not tuned into the key features of the style, so it is unusual to call it a classic, and yet unanimous support from the Film Noir Board in fact classify it, classicify it if you can, that is the verdict.

Cast A Dark Shadow (1955)

Cast A Dark Shadow (1955) is a psychopath targeting elderly widows black widower greed and murder English film noir suspenser tale of polished homicide with English cuppa tea undertones and dark shadows of psycho-style fifties persecution and cunning styled as a Limey film noir tale of manipulation and Freudian hang-ups drawing room crime thriller, directed by Lewis Gilbert and starring Dirk Bogarde, Margaret Lockwood, Kay Walsh and Robert Flemyng.

Sapphire (1959)

Nobody requested a Basil Dearden season but when it came it was as welcomed as that of any other noir  favourite. So let's continue the season with this Dearden diamond in the rough.

Sapphire (1959) is a Basil Dearden police procedural violence against women cops playing with ladies underwear British limey deep racial tensions and civil rights and exceptionally rare passing-as-white Black British experience racism and bigotry murder mystery film noir starring Nigel Patrick, Yvonne Mitchell, Michael Craig, and Paul Massie. Progressive to a degree that borders on provocation for its historical moment, the film squarely addresses the everyday racism inflicted upon West Indian immigrants in London while anatomizing the buried insecurities, unspoken fears, and quietly festering hostilities of ordinary people when confronted with those they have racialized as other.

The Square Ring (1953)

The actuated conception of a Basil Dearden season feels anomalous within conventional retrospectives. But here it is nonethesame.

The Square Ring (1953) is a Basil Dearden mugs' game boxing single evening at a cheap stadium clinches and clichés portmanteau style based on a play British film noir long lost era of Limey filmmaking melodrama in which a trembling neophyte is hurled into ritualized violence opposite a decaying former champion clawing desperately for one final gasp of relevance, while a hysteria-stricken wife issues ultimatums from the domestic front, the corrupt machinery of a backstage fix grinds unseen, and the camera assaults the viewer with feverish close-ups of ringsiders baying for blood and entire rows of spectators convulsing in grotesque pantomime, their fists punching the air as if possessed by the fight itself.

Blonde Ice (1948)

Blonde Ice (1948) is a femme fatale cheapie wicked woman newlywed criminal psychology top society columnist aspiring politician and ruthless ice maiden obscure film noir revolving around a femme fatale low-budget crime drama for the interesting Film Classics company directed by Jack Bernhard,  and starring Robert Paige as Les Burns, Leslie Brooks as Claire Cummings Hanneman, Russ Vincent as Blackie Talon, Michael Whalen as Stanley Mason, James Griffith as Al Herrick and of course, Emory Parnell as Police Capt. Bill Murdock.

Night Train to Munich (1940)

Night Train to Munich (1940) is a Carol Reed wartime sticky wicket concentration camp train and mountain and foreign territory based super anti-Nazi Alfred Hitchcock-influenced spy thriller by the mighty Carol Reed and starring Rex Harrison, Margaret Lockwood and Paul Henreid, and written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, and itself derived from Gordon Wellesley’s 1939 tale “Report on a Fugitive,” which charts the perilous tribulations of a brilliant inventor and his devoted daughter, both spirited away by the Gestapo in the ominous shadow of the Nazi incursion into Prague on the very brink of global conflagration, while into this treacherous milieu steps a resourceful operative of His Majesty’s Secret Service, who insinuates himself into the upper echelons of the German military machine, assuming the guise of a senior officer and feigning amorous interest in the young woman, all in the delicate hope of luring her and her invaluable father from the tightening coils of the Nazi embrace.

Waterloo Road (1945)

Waterloo Road (1945) is a wartime flashback and voiceover absent without leave soldier versus civvy philandering conscription-dodger tale of British pluck and courage and directed by Sidney Gilliat with Trümmerfilm overtones and starring John Mills, Alistair Sim, Joy Shelton and Stuart Granger.

Waterloo Road (1945) presents itself, at first glance, as an agreeably told anecdote of domestic turbulence during the Second World War, yet such phrasing obscures the severity of its intervention.

They Made Me a Fugitive (1947)

They Made Me a Fugitive (1947) is a post war British limey spivving and drug dealing film noir classic psychopath action adventure returning veteran misty London rooftop and scabby old boozer thriller prison break police procedural fist-fighting exploitation violence-against-women crime movie by Alberto Cavalcanti and with all the mystery of any Alberto Cavalcanti production, it races onwards with Trevor Howard at his handsome hero best, and Sally Gray, Maurice Dunham — and Griffith Jones as a class act noir psychopath, complete with hanky mannerisms and a funeral business to cover his narcotics dealing, which is pretty hep for '47.

The Killers (1946)

The Killers (1946) is a classic film noir potboiler western-style revenge movie re-styled in the gangster mold post war study in masculinity flashback within flashback but no voiceover prison boxing crazed love and fatal existential doom laden hitman themed compote de criminalitie and lustful love forlorn longing and rejection, directed by Robert Siodmak, and starring  Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien and Sam Levene, with extra noir plus ultra provided by William Conrad, Charles McGraw, Albert Dekker and Jack Lambert.

Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

Witness for the Prosecution (1957) is a Billy Wilder classic court room drama classic film noir murder suspenser did he or didn't he? Hitchcockian love-that-Laughton Agatha Christie mystery plot twister puzzle game millinery-provoking murder character and melodrama film noir production based on a play and starring Marlene Dietrich, Elsa Lanchester, Tyrone Power, Charles Laughton, Ian Wolfe and Henry Daniell.

Murder! (1930)

The nascent works of Alfred Hitchcock, those formative exercises in suspense and moral ambiguity produced in the liminal years between silent expressionism and the codified sound era, persist as spectral presences within the embryonic landscape of what would later crystallize as film noir.

Murder! (1930) is an Alfred Hitchcock death row amnesia proto film noir poetic realist murder melodrama locked room  mystery sleuthing and amateur detection story of touring theatre blackmail and early twentieth century racism and transvestite trapeze performance.

The Spider Woman (1943)

The Spider Woman (1943) is a Roy William Neill Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce 1940s era mid-war Sherlock Holmes serial movie series entry horror (?) film production and extremely rough adaptation serial killer and sleuthing light entertainment crime and detection film with various noirish aspects, and also starring as it does Gale Sondergaard and Dennis Hoey, may be one of the better items on the Holmes 1940s registry.

The Spider Woman (1943) occupies a curiously authoritative position within the Universal Studios Sherlock Holmes cycle, a position it did not reluctantly inherit but rather seized with a vigour that demands attention. So Holmes, so far. Curios and authoritative, we are fans and though this not be noir, it is still noir informed and noir informing, so give it credence.

Night Without Stars (1951)

Night Without Stars (1951) is a romantic ex-collabo returning veteran hitting on a war widow blind man as sleuth somewhat suspenseless suspenser intrigue thriller set in the south of France and employing French cliche and post war ennui in a blindness as a metaphor for blindness adequate British Pinewood oldie noir without stars, featuring David Farrar as Giles Gordon, Nadia Gray, Alix Delaisse, Maurice Teynac, Louis Malinay, Gilles Quéant, Gérard Landry, Pierre Chaval and June Clyde.

She-Wolf of London (1946)

She-Wolf of London (1946) is a historic romantic foggy London lupine lycanthropic murder mystery police procedural women alone in a gothic mansion average film of mystery which certainly qualifies for film noir in many aspects and without offering too many spoilers, is also much within the paranoid woman genre, although which is somewhat blended in the not too wolfy mix — though don't go be expectin no monsters cuz there bain't be none I'm afraid.

The Man Between (1953)

The Man Between (1953) is a post war Cold War Trümmerfilm-styled Carol Reed espionage and defection and rebuilding of German and Europe The Third Man style Cold War thriller film noir starring James Mason, Claire Bloom and the queen of Cold War Euro noir cinema, Hildegard Knef. 

Carol Reed's The Man Between (1953) is a sure fire melancholic echo of his earlier triumphs, a film of shadows, silences, and moral indecision, set amidst the frost-bitten rubble of postwar Berlin. A lot of snow went into the making of this cold Cold War thriller.

Hôtel du Nord (1938)

Hôtel du Nord (1938)  is a French classic classic French proto film noir doomed pimp and darkly comic bickering dialogued suicide and true romance couple almost on the run prostitute prison and imprisonment ensemble cast melodrama of working class Parisien life from Marcel Carné and starring Arletty and Louise Jouvet.

Marcel Carné's Hôtel du Nord (1938) emerges from the late interwar period in France, perched delicately on the brink of catastrophe. Its mood of dreamy disillusionment and marginal existence is a quiet whisper of the cultural malaise circulating through a Europe growing weary of its own shadows. 

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is a classic Universal Monsters monster classic James Whale camp horror mad scientist angry torch-wielding mob driven queer coded Breen-positive historic recreational fantasy monster horror feature film sequel from the earliest most nascent era of screen creations both bestial in demeanour and possessed of a quasi-mythic savagery, marked by both vaudeville and a brutal, subhuman force, a movie which like its creatures, groans under the weight of its own deformity and beauty, respectively, with pile-driving feminist angst clashing misogynist tropery galore. 

The Great Flamarion (1945)

The Great Flamarion (1945) is an Anthony Mann flashback and voiceover vaudeville love and murder cheap-shot theatreland lowlife uptight artiste double love triangle scheming woman and cross-continental double-crossing dame pan-American alcohol-related hunt and chase drifter narrative classic sucker falls for a conniving woman film noir, starring Erich von Stroheim, Mary Beth Hughes and Dan Duryea.

Pick Up Alley (1957)

Pick Up Alley (1957) is a black and white Cinemascope Euro Yankee and Limey narcotics violence against women police procedural film noir so paradoxically conspicuous and elusive as the Euro American production circulated under the blunt sobriquet Pick Up Alley (1957), though it materialised originally beneath the more institutional title Interpol (1957). 

Soho Incident (1956)

Spin a Dark Web (1956) is a Vernon Sewell Limey noir telephony, gambling and boxing femme-fatale and fatally suckered sap on the run London gangland film noir studio and street filmed pot-boiler thriller with elements of some of that famed fifties and later forties male post-war disillusionment and a small home invasion segment as suburbia is disturbed by gangland and its femmes and thugs.

Diplomatic Courier (1952)

Diplomatic Courier (1952) is a Henry Hathaway Cold War espionage in post-war Europe screwball-adjacent drama romance chase military police procedural thriller, with Tyrone Power, Patricia Neal, Hildegard Knef, Stephen McNally, Karl Malden and special spot appearances from Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin, and a further dynamic and fun extra cross dress appearance

As for screwball, there is a certain sure pedigree of connecting dramatic matter which links the screw of the ball and its previous decades of filmatics and is indicated in Diplomatic Courier (1952), highlighted and brought to our attention when Tyrone Power describes Patricia Neal across a Trieste café bar table as 'screwey'. 

Joe MacBeth (1955)

Joe Macbeth (1955) is a feverish, noir-soaked transposition of Shakespeare’s blood-stained tragedy into a mobster film noir in which ensemble parking garage acting where ambition clashes with brass-knuckled loyalty collapses under the weight of prophecy, and a henpecked trigger man is whipped into grandiose dreams of power by his razor-edged wife, featuring back-alley execution, and guilt-ridden hallucination seeping from the same anxious postwar mood of rising urban brutality and moral corrosion, and starring Sid James as an American, an oddity in itself, and Paul Douglas as Macbeth and Ruth Roman as the all alluring femme fatale star of the show.

Suspicion (1942)

Suspicion (1942) is an Alfred Hitchcock birth of psychological film noir era foaming seas beneath the cliffs and motor car as lethal weapon gothic romance drama abusive behaviour gaslighting and lousy husband bullying-and-belittling-style paranoid woman film noir classique, and probably a classic film noir, starring Cary Grant as the sarcastic, mysterious, lousy husband from somewhere between farce and vaudeville, Joan Fontaine as his target and constant, and Nigel Bruce as a buddy bumbler comic face pulling foil, and containing the full silver service of Hitchcock mental cruelty, as Joan Fontaine instantly transforms from bookish, educated and independent professional woman into sensual and servile lover and then into quivering gaslit wreck.

Strange Impersonation (1946)

Strange Impersonation (1946) is a female scientist romance and love rivalry and disfigurement and hallucinogenic psychological fantasy jealousy and blackmail film noir plastic surgery melodrama by Anthony Mann and starring Ruth Ford, Hillary Brooke and William Gargan, all of whom combine to produce a block rocking cheapo fantasy film noir narrative of the first water, making it a film more of classic noir than many a classic film noir, and although this remains thematically and even stylistically classic, the overcoat of fantastic doom and femme fatality and the all important subject of identity, make of Strange Impersonation (1946) a classic of its medium and style, and a classic of its meta-narrational type, exploring the popular idiom and thinking of its day, as it does.

All The Kings Men (1949)

All The Kings Men (1949) is a realpolitik rise and fall with alcohol courtroom and firebrand wielding mob Southern corruption and fidelity, local and state influence peddling kickback and malfeasance drama with more film noir chops than may be immediately evident, and starring Broderick Crawford, Mercedes McCambridge, John Ireland and Joanne Dru.

There’s a long tradition of films about ambitious nobodies clawing their way to fame and power, only to reveal themselves as fakes. Citizen Kane and All About Eve are often held up as the gold standard — stylish, intelligent dissections of ambition, ego, and betrayal. Hey No Kings LOL!

Seven Days To Noon (1950)

Seven Days To Noon (1950) is a Boulting Brothers British catastrophe-based ultimatum and race against time reactionary post-war civic nuclear threat mad as in mentally unwell and in emotional crisis scientist film noir melodrama with Trümmerfilm shades and overtones of existential crisis and a cast of many, and a movie which pioneers the empty streets of the apocalypse look with Olive Sloane, Barry Jones and and André Morell.

The detonation of horror and conscience finds a singular locus in SEVEN DAYS TO NOON (1950), a work of distinct cinematic and political resonance. Released in the cautious and threadbare atmosphere of post-war Britain, the film disrupts the boundaries of genre, tonally ambiguous and ideologically riven.

Cosh Boy (1953)

Cosh Boy (1953) is a exciting but also earnestly vile teen exploitation juvenile threat ditto post war youth trouble boom psychopatriarch urban noir also known as The Slasher (1953) movie which studies juvenile delinquency and the spectre of moral collapse in Post-War Britain using the crime thriller format and which charts the birth of cruelty as a form of social and parental guidance for the worrying young persons' culture which the cinema and its co-habiting rock n roll and jazz exponents were cashing in upon, coshing in you might say — — and be warned — — Cosh Boy (1953) has the most vile and violently cruel conclusion in all of Limey post war silver screen flickery. The most violent ending of any film of the decade — reckons .

Wide Boy (1952)

Wide Boy (1952) is a post war Limey spiv noir which is a blend of police procedural, classic fated weakened male lead noir, lousy husband noir, blackmail noir, and the typical descent into crime downward trajectory film noir which was popular as a medium backdrop in the dispositif-forming 1950s, when either teenagers, war-shirkers, and unwise family men move from one relatively innocuous crime — the vending of black market stockings and fags — for wor post-war British purposes 'cigarettes' — to theft, to blackmail  — inevitably to murder.

Seamy Trümmerfilm glamour and ethical collapse collide in this low grade limey film noir.

To Be Or Not To Be (1942)

To Be Or Not To Be (1942) is not a film noir but as it is a theatreland mistaken identity German occupation of Poland romantic satire black comedy caper about the Holocaust, Nazism and Adolf Hitler and as such it is destined to feature on the classic film noir website, and though with little pedigree, wenn es überhaupt etwas ist, dann ist es kein Film Noir!

A comedy and as comedy does not age well of all the products and causes of the works of Hollywood, and of the few directors of the era that have no feet nor fingertips in film noir, Ernst Lubistch has no feet nor fingertips, non in film noir non, none.

An endless matinée, a film that works to eternity, one of the Hitler films and hard to conceive of in light of how magnificent it must be to portray the fascist in film, and there is film noir style, because if the shooting and the price of black and white, relax there is very little.

Jeopardy (1953)

Jeopardy (1953) is a super fast road John Sturges adventure psycho on wheels thriller woman chasing mad murderer chaser through Mexico car smash and trapped old man family adventure film noir from the earnest era of the early fifties and starring noir empress and all round actor supremo of the style Barbara Stanwyck, as well as a got getter outdoor Barry Sullivan, with none other than Ralph Meeker, a noir lover's actor as the murderous escapee of swagger and menace.

Jeopardy (1953) is a lean, 69-minute exercise in cinematic claustrophobia and moral ambiguity.

Something to Live For (1952)

The Ray Milland season continues with a languid, almost metaphysical hesitation, like a thought groping its way through fog

Something to Live For (1952) is an alcoholic uncommunicative male melodrama romance and extramarital affair lousy husband Christmas-based suburban versus the ratted out city of advertising and Americana with its multiple booze options and constant idiotic nagging party scenarios, starring Ray Milland and Joan Fontaine, as the fated foetid couple at large battling the booze against a stable marital backstop of two young boys and the perfected wife=figure, as played by Teresa Wright

Tales of Manhattan (1942)

Tales of Manhattan (1942) is an  accursed coat anthology portmanteau many star cast 1942 film which has solid noir quantities in the murder and intrigue elements, and in the alcohol and fated collapse of manhood elements, and of the femme fatale element too, the film is composed of these, and while full-billed melodrama, does have a significant noir-style and edge to its intense psychosexed up and indigently dangerous disaster stores, which are all based on the Mexican writer Francisco Rojas González's novel, Historia de un frac (Story of a Tailcoat) which he was not credited for, which he was not credited for, not credited at all, was it becauyse he was Mexican, and that would have spoiled the Manhattan vibe, I doubt it, he just was not credited, that's how it goes in Holly-hollywood?

The Ship That Died of Shame (1955)

The Ship That Died of Shame (1955) is a wartime flashback Basil Dearden nautical noir smuggling returning veteran adventure bereavement melancholy crime and coastguard foggy channel rockin manly 50s British film noir, which does ultimately serve noir but manages to swerve noir, while being a good yarn and ripping adventure, with the tragic bombing of a wife and the original sound stage equipped with aides throwing buckets of water over the actors during the rougher sea segments of the shooting, a surefire Limey seafaring movie staple.

This film has an Alfie Bass bonus. It has a Bill Owens count that is among the highest in film noir.