The Strange Door (1951)

The Strange Door (1951) is a Joseph Pevney directed grand guignol gothic melodrama historical horror film noir women as chattels fantasy escapist historical nonsensical sensational portraits in film noir captive family member and psychopathic historical baron combination chiller-costume melodrama tale of madness, greed, insanity, revenge and loving heroism, starring Charles Laughton, Boris Karloff, Sally Forrest and Richard Stapley, based on the short story The Sire de Maletroit's Door by Robert Louis Stevenson, and sometimes rolling with the alternative title of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Door (1951).

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). 

Miami Exposé (1956)

Miami Exposé (1956) is a crummy cop Miami based swamp wrangling political conniving over legalised gambling in Florida bribery and murder and faked death airboat and Cadillac bright white light cruiser film noir with first rate desk to camera footage and decent moments of driving and aerial scenery around the fastest growing city in America, decade after decade, the city that was never a town and the tropical miracle that is Miami.

Fred F. Sears, a director tethered to Columbia Pictures and the watchful eye of producer Sam Katzman, carved out a career from the frayed cloth of low-budget filmmaking. His oeuvre, stitched together from an array of genres including science fiction, juvenile delinquency, and war-time tales, finds a peculiar resonance within the crime genre. 

Isle of the Dead (1942)

Isle of the Dead (1942) is an RKO Radio Pictures Val Lewton and Mark Robson Arnold Böcklin-inspired Boris Karloff historical Balkans War supernatural creeper mystery horror with Ellen Drew, Alan Napier, written by frequent Lewton collaborator Ardel Wray, it was the second of three films Lewton made with Karloff, and the fourth of five pictures Robson directed for Lewton.

The dead do not rest on Mark Robson's island. In Isle of the Dead (1945), what begins as a contemplation on the duties of command and the sanctity of reason unravels into a vision of mental collapse, buried trauma, and spiritual unease. 

The film, produced by Val Lewton and directed by Robson, engages its viewers in a paradox: its imagery evokes stillness, isolation, stasis, and yet its emotional and thematic resonances never cease to convulse. 

Lured (1947)

Lured (1947) is a moody mystery female seeker hero investigatory London-set serial killer thriller outré film noir, made by Douglas Sirk and perhaps as far as the Sirk toes get into the fascinating dark and complicated world of noir drama.

In its way, Douglas Sirk’s lurid Lured (1947), an example of the lurid noir, reimagines hard enough upon Robert Siodmak’s 1939 film Pièges, that it must surely be classed as a remake, capturing the essence of a film noir thriller with an impressive cast and smoke machine moddiness and soundstage London-effect cinematography. 

The plot follows and does trail the female seeker hero type Sandra Carpenter (Lucille Ball), a sassy American dancer in London who is roped into a police investigation as a decoy for a serial killer targeting women through newspaper ads. 

Manhandled (1949)

Manhandled (1949) is a lousy husband psychiatric jewel thievery crooked private eye wife-murder film noir crime drama directed by Lewis R. Foster and starring Dorothy Lamour, Sterling Hayden and Dan Duryea. It is based on the 1945 novel The Man Who Stole a Dream by L. S. Goldsmith.

Dan Duryea plays a crooked private eye, which is the first twist in this serpentine and sinuous noir drama, which is a lot of fun as any classy high period film noir should be. The convoluted plot is at the best of times a feature of film noir, and not to be sneered at in such a circuitous story as Manhandled tells.

Marnie (1964)

Marnie (1964) is the classic late period seriously is it the last meaningful Alfred Hitchcock film or at least the last he fully cared about? psychological late late period classic analytic thriller cineamternity Freudian love melodrama suspenseful sex mystery paranoid woman lousy husband drunken sailor classic neo-film noir, with all the big tricks of the Hitchcock trade, and Tippi Hedren facing Sean Connery, who plays a publisher called Rutland.