For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) is a Sam Wood directed and produced adapted from the classic Ernest Hemigway novel epic Spanish Civil War tale of resistance, camarederie, and bridge blasting and romance amid guerilla warfare about an American International Brigades volunteer who is fighting against the fascists and who falls in love with a young woman guerrilla fighter during a desperate mission to blow up a strategically important bridge to protect Republican forces, starring Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, Akim Tamiroff, Arturo de Córdova, Vladimir Sokoloff, Mikhail Rasumny, Fortunio Bonanova, Eric Feldary, Victor Varconi as Primitivo, the lookout and Joseph Calleia.

The Black Sleep (1956)

The Black Sleep (1956) is a mad scientist body horror induced coma uneven but effective talky but entertaining veteran actor overlooked house of crazies Lugosi, Chaney and Carradine in a final reunion matters of the brain throwback marquee exploitation influential monstrous experiments independent horror film with the American reissue title Dr. Cadman's Secret produced by Bel Air Productions, directed by Reginald LeBorg, and written by John C. Higgins from a story by Gerald Drayson Adams. It stars Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, Bela Lugosi, and Akim Tamiroff. Tor Johnson appears in a supporting role, produced by Aubrey Schenck and Howard W. Koch, as part of a four-picture finance-for-distribution arrangement with United Artists, and assembling human wreckage, failed patients, mutilated minds, and ruined legends.

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.

Black Fury (1935)

Black Fury (1935) is a labour relations coal country Pennsylvania-based Warner Bros. working class mining rough-shoddily Slav impersonating private police force versus striking miners based on a historic incident melodrama, with a poor American mining community relentlessly portrayed as a mob of easily swayed poverty stricken proles, versus the kind of private company police force that used to only a few years earlier, in 1929, beat to death striking workers that happened to be standing under the wrong club et sturdy baton.

That is in certain fact the story of John Barcoski who immigrated in to the USA in 1906, who was Polish, and who was beaten to death in Pennsylvannia by the PA's Coal and Iron Police on February 10th, 1929.

Black Magic (1949)

Black Magic (1949) is an historical Orson Welles film noir hypnosis ham and history fest of magical and wildly entertaining crowd and close up, sumptuous set piece dark and magical fun-based frolics of the late forties, with some Dumas-based class projections as the piece adopts the narrative of the novel of the same by Alexander Pere.

For oddity and oddity alone the first scene of this spectacular cast of hundreds of extras spectacular festacular magicianical historical Francophile tale of society ambition and absolute Welles-ian pride of personality leading to a hubris-driven fall, has for no apparent reason other than the whimsie or the dandification of the reels, an entretemps between Dumas Snr played with bold waggery by Berry Kroeger, and Dumas Jnr, played with gentle ungruffery by the normally gruffed up Raymond Burr.