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)

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 Square Ring (1953) is a 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.

A Life of Her Own (1950)

The Ray Milland season does not advance so much as unfold — temporally, tentatively, beautifully. Its path is all digression and delay, yet within that slow meander there trembles a strange coherence, the whisper of a destination it cannot name.

A Life of Her Own (1950) is a George Cukor woman's picture young model from Kansas trying to make it big in New York, doomed romance and suicide driven depression discussing psychological critique lousy husband melodrama starring Lana Turner and Ray Milland, Louis Calhern and Ann Dvorak, Jean Hagen and Phyllis Kirk.

Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943)

Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943) is a Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce locked room gothic mansion and family estate murder mystery and mild mayhem exceptionally loosely adapted Sherlock Holmes co-opted for the purposes of World War Two serial movie.

In contemplating Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943), one encounters not merely another instalment in the venerable Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce canon but, to borrow from my own reflection, « une sorte de liturgie du mystère » — a liturgy of mystery. I like to say things in French, sometimes. It doesn't just sound good., It adds extra meaning, I know it.

Touch of Evil (1958)

Touch of Evil (1958) is an Orson Welles late noir period border-hopping cinema-literate classic film noir marvel of visual architecture and one of the high cathedrals of twentieth-century film, an orgy of chiaroscuro light and shadow, carefully calculated mise-en-scène, and baroque camera movements so aggressive they seem on the verge of toppling the frame. 

If it lacks the gravitas of Welles' debut, it compensates by revealing a director entirely freed from the burden of prestige, indulging instead in excess, sleaze, formal genius, and creative destruction. It is a masterclass in cinematic rule-breaking that turns every aesthetic choice into a moral judgment.

Dial M For Murder (1954)

The Ray Milland Season Hitchcock Highlight unfolds without haste —  it drifts — not lost, but unanchored — tracing arabesques through the medium of noir

Dial M For Murder (1954) is an Alfred Hitchcock Technicolor dual-strip polarised 3D but always subsequently seen in 2D lousy husband telephone-noir based-on-a play home invasion murder and police and detective procedural intriguer starring Grace Kelly, Ray Milland, Robert Cummings, Anthony Dawson and John Williams.

La Chienne (1931)

La Chienne (1931) is a French poetic realist film de pur génie puppet show de la vie misery of faked identities, Jean Renoir-noir Paris night-time street scenes murder and fated descent into tramping bummery, all round classique de poetic realism, classic film noir, and ardent ancient treasury of la cinematique-du-crime, in which a dupe is duped by a couple of unsympathetic street denizens of poverty struck human villainy wherein all you own are your clothes and your cigarettes, while also satirising the middle and business merchant class, and the art class, with its mendicant conclusion and historic remaking by Fritz Lang in the equally immortal and immoral bum-quest to the bottom that is Scarlet Street (1945)

The Return of the Fly (1959)

The Return of the Fly (1959) is a monster mad scientist shocker feature guinea pig hands and feet sequel effort from hell that is mild in noir relevance, so mild in noir relevance that the owners apologise, and here we argue that in fact this film's flyness and expected shock moments scientifically double effect a tale of industrial espionage, if indeed there is any hovering narrative to this atomic age sequel, and give it little reason to be here.

A minor creature, buzzing at the margin of the sublime, a mote in the cathedral of science, this film describes like no other the moment when the man and the insect pass through the molecular eye together, the universe commits a grammatical error, and republishes cheap. What emerges is not human, not fly, but a grotesque synthesis: the moral algebra of hubris incarnate. A catalogue entry in worst sequels?

The Captive City (1952)

The Captive City (1952) is a small town suburban journalism and media gambling and local corruption organised crime exposé with flashback and voiceover film noir, with epic desk to camera and such a strong Kefauver theme that Estes Kefauver himself appears in the film.

Super strong in its categories, this noir is nearly a classic film noir, and maybe even is such, certainly it is a class film noir, if not a classique. Close up paranoid photography and murder, newspaper men against the odds, small town atmosphere to perfection and an intriguing thug hood and mookery-style delivery under professional organised crookery.

Circle of Danger (1951)

The Ray Milland Season Unfolds Without Haste

Circle of Danger (1951) is an American in Britain post-WW2 investigative mystery Limey home nations road movie of mystery with locale-driven shooting in London, Wales and in the Highlands, making a virtue of Patricia Roc's infectious smile and Ray Milland's hatted and haunted pillar to post look as he uncovers a vaguely understandable plot that I am not sure now after two viewings — has ever been explained. 

The circle itself, the circle of danger, the rotunda of peril, is specifically not quite as convoluted as it might otherwise be in a film noir. 

Suddenly (1954)

Suddenly (1954) is a presidential assassination Lewis Allen home invasion children in film noir classic film noir Frank Sinatra and Sterling Hayden small town crime suspense thriller, which is not only a good time, but a beautiful item of film nostalgia, noir history, cinematic escapism, and an all round document of mid fifties optimism, conservatism, paranoia, and social confidence.

Yeah this is a town in which the lil boys want to be police officers when they grow up. The truth was break America fairly soon, but for the time this suburban aspic is a gelatinous capturing of some of the best known American dream-style tropes, characters and idiomes en scene.

Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943)

Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943) is a Sherlock Holmes wartime propaganda espionage crime and mystery thriller and adventure film noir-style which sees the nineteenth century and indeed, very early twentieth century private detective co-opted into the advocacy work of the Allies in the Second World War, as antiques-led mystery and match-book intrigue see Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Henry Daniell and George Zucco hamming up a storm in an effort to embarrass the Nazis into a ham-strung ham-based and confusing defeat.

The Uninvited (1944)

The Ray Milland Season Advances at a Crawl

The Uninvited (1944) is a supernatural clifftop haunted house, Cornish clifftop haunted house paranoid woman writer as hero portraits in noir gothic horror ghost chiller love and romance drama with a dog shot by Lewis Allen and starring Ray Milland, Gail Russell, Ruth Hussey, Donald Crisp, Alan Napier, and Cornelia Otis Skinner.

Few films of the 1940s reach the uncanny stillness and dignified unease as well as the fantastic silliness and dignified quease of The Uninvited (1944). 

Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942)

Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942) is a Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes wartime propaganda appropriated Conan Doyle characters Holmes serial movie classic about a wartime plot from Nazis to bugger up the British effort amid Eurowaldian English and East End smog shenanigan and cliché, and with mis en scene which is semi-noir while owing more to the espionage pictures adorably coming to represent conspiratorial reality as America takes a various angled dim view of the efforts of their soon-to-be allies against Hitlerism, still framed as anti-British and not yet anti-American.

The Thief (1952)

The Ray Milland Season dilates in time, endures with fascination. 

The Thief (1952) is a non-verbal one of a kind atomic age location-shot nuclear secrets classic Ray Milland and Russell Rouse film noir, both innovative and inventive, curious and classic, telling the engrossingly spun paranoid tale of one man's turning Communist spy and his discovery and having to go on the run, with escape and capture fantasy played out across New York, in some most famously shot locals and corners.

Pépé le Moko (1937)

Pépé le Moko (1937) is a mouche-noir French proto film noir Casbah-bound crime glamour seduction violence and poetic realist romance and intrigue police procedural classic of crime cinema and of French cinema, starring Jean Gabin and directed by Julien Duvivier.

As for films that stand the test of time and remain classics of cinema, and also classics of film noir, enough in fact to be here heralded and touted as an example of nothing less than classic film noir, then one must watch them to make the mind up, and not take any old soul's advice on that.

Watching Pépé le Moko (1937) is no duty however and will be a true pleasure, for the acting and the intrigue, for the framing and the fun, for the well constructed mis en scene and the en scene itself, of the many corridored confusions of The Casbah are the perfect and perfectly realised backdrop of this movie wonder. 

In the context of this, Julien Duvivier’s 1937 film Pépé le Moko, “le Moko” is not a surname but a nickname. It derives from the French slang term moko, which was used to describe people from the region around Toulon and Marseille in southern France, particularly dockworkers and sailors. 

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) is a racing good time of frolicsome detective work in the new vein of Sherlock Holmes as presented on the big and silver screen, pre-war and pre-nuclear, and an honest film presentation of some post-vaudevillian ideas as they are newly filtered into the service of a good time, adapting and adopting notions of what this new canon might be and might look like, in a rather nonsensical but truly Hollywood gothic-comic matter.

The year 1939 is remembered as quite an apogeeic moment of classical Hollywood cinema. It was the season of Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, and many others that are routinely catalogued as monuments of an industrial art form at its height. Within that gallery, one also finds The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, released by 20th Century Fox as a continuation of the enormously successful The Hound of the Baskervilles. The two films form a diptych. 

Casablanca (1942)

Casablanca (1942) is the one of a kind classic cinema anti-Nazi tale of war time love and intrigue which regularly appears in greatest film of all time compositions and not that often in classic film noir selections nor even moderate noir canons, nor even in the non-canonical and noir at a stretch.

Funny that Casablanca was not an instant hit and funny that your first thoughts are that the special effects are not that good for the greatest film of all time. 

By which you mean that the basic investment made in this greatest film of all time seems moderate to say the least. The aeroplane and some of the attending dressing of scene, the special effects.