Body and Soul (1947)

Body and Soul (1947) is a Robert Rossen directed classic film noir Citizen Kane of all boxing movies flashback and occasionally De Niro sounding voiceover violence and corruption portraits in noir family and friendship melodrama of doom and lucre classic boxing and anti-boxing civil rights James Wong Howe shot boxing clever solid punch clawing your way to the top boxing film noir starring John Garfield, Lilli Palmer, Hazel Brooks, Anne Revere, William Conrad, Joseph Pevney, Lloyd Gough, Canada Lee and Art Smith.

Golden Earrings (1947)

Golden Earrings (1947) is an immediatley post-war wartime Romany-gypsy adventure transformation prisoner of war with shades of screwball comedy in the shape of a misbehaving wild sexpot gypsy espionage kind of backdrop infused film noir flashback but no voiceover man on the run and behind enemy lines Eurowaldian soundtage based romancer flick about a man and a 'gypsy' who is at odds with English morality, obviously, and who drives a cliched caravan through Nazi Germany with the SS in cold pursuit, ultimately creating a fusion genre that could be described by the phrase serious comedy, and starring Ray Milland and Marlene Dietrich, with Murvyn Vye, Bruce Lester and Dennis Hoey.

Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)

Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) is a late noir cycle race-relations civil-rights and jazz-fuelled minor heist film noir movie produced and directed by Robert Wise, starring Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan, Ed Begley, Shelley Winters and Gloria Grahame. 

Odds Against Tomorrow is one of the last films to appear in the classic noir cycle, and is notable for a plot which features a serious commentary on racism.

If there were to be such a sub-genre as arthouse-noir from the late 1950s, Odds Against Tomorrow would qualify. The score is by The Modern Jazz Quartet, so it would be hard to groove harder than that in the late-noir groove-yard of arthouse heist noir.

As well as the most solid of noir tropes, such as the ex-soldier turned to crime, and the massive dose of 'one last job' which everybody seems to be on, there are also dramatic shots of birds in flight, city landscapes and children at play, all set to that arty jazz soundtrack by John Lewis —  and even some experimental infra-red photography.

Force of Evil (1948)

Force of Evil (1948) is a classic New York numbers racket conflicted brothers pre-HUAC and voiced-over film noir with many biblical allusions (Cain and Abel, Judas's betrayal, stigmata) which pits a rising Wall Street lawyer against the modernising principles of post-war capitalism and the fascinating blue-collar practise of playing the numbers game.

Film noir is darkness, film noir is crime and film noir is human folly . . . writ large and personal, as a force of evil.  Film noir renders a cinema of weakness, deceit, lust-inspired crime, greed and mid-century urban survival.  

In the film noir city disasters are acted out in bars, cars and street corners, or in cheerless apartments, suggestive of a kind of homelessness.