From Here to Eternity (1953)

From Here to Eternity (1953) is a wartime romance and martial bullying melodrama ensemble cast boxing or perhaps anti-boxing Oscar winning lousy husband controversial extra-marital foamy beach body embracing classic tale of some soldiers and their lovers stationed in Hawaii in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring  Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, and Frank Sinatra, Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed, Ernest Borgnine, Philip Ober, Jack Warden, Mickey Shaughnessy, Claude Akins, and George Reeves, and nope it's no noir, nor noir styled film nor film noir, with little of the noir style, but it's here because we can't talk about 1953 without giving it a shout, and it has many of our beloved noir heroes in it, within the cast ye ken, plus we got to have a film classics sidebar and this is where that belongs, film classics sidebar.

A Star is Born (1954)

A Star is Born (1954) is a Judy Garland comeback star vehicle musical scratch the surface portrayal of Hollywood stardom and its machinery love story and doomed romance tale of alcohol, fame, and every day studio and star system misogyny, big production piece musical action and suicide and love and success and failure and the scheming folly of the industry that produced it, and while not only not a film noir but emphatically not a noir nor noir film, is still in its narrative and meta-narrative and reflective qualities, one of the darker musicals one might see, in its reflections made upon the place and time of Hollywood at the end of the golden era of the silver screen.

The Best Years of our Lives (1946)

The Best Years of our Lives (1946) is a returning veteran epic post-war romance and social adjustment classic and sweeping melodrama of PTSD, alcoholism, social manners and physical disability charting America's adjustment to the post war order with broken limbs, broken relationships, broken aircraft and civilian indifference, directed by William Wyler and starring Dana Andrews, Harold Russell, Myrna Loy, Cathy O'Donnell, Frederic March, Virginia Mayo, Teresa Wright, Steven Cochran and with best of all perhaps, Hoagy Carmichael on piano.

Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945)

Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945) is a British historical poisoning and lousy alcoholic husband murdering Victorian age pharmacist daft dreaming son and local intrigue and femme fatale drama with Googie Withers, Mervyn Johns and Gordon Jackson, in a pent up family story of murder, reserve, calculation and feral femme folie in a beautifully set studio recreation of an 1880s Brighton agay with m class tension, social climbing and gossip.

Under Capricorn (1949)

We return to that felicitous juncture at which the season consecrated to Joseph Cotten unites itself with the prospective current of Alfred Hitchcock.

 Under Capricorn (1949) is an Alfred Hitchcock brooding moral historical sinister housekeeper and class conflict romance outback ranch nine to ten minute tracking shot paranoid women and gaslighting and past catching up with you alcohol themed antipodean love triangle drama classic color film noir farewell to the forties tale of the masochistic extremes of marital fidelity and a gloomy amalgam of shared guilt abjured desire complete with a drugged drink starring Ingrid Bergman, Jospeh Cotten, Cecil Parker, Michael Wilding, Margaret Leighton (as Milly, Flusky's scheming housekeeper), Denis O'Dea as Mr Corrigan, Jack Watling and Harcourt Williams.

The Man in the Net (1959)

The Man in the Net (1959) is a disappearing suburban wife lousy husband and beautiful young alcoholic missus versus artist versus conformity versus suburbia versus a nasty cop and an angry mob and crazy Connecticut manhunt for a framed and accused husband with assistance form children mystery thriller late late classic era film noir which makes a virtue of an avuncular, painterly but less engaged every year Alan Ladd, starring Carolyn Jones and Charles McGraw in a noir which has so many classic psychological tones that one would argue that had this script been filmed in 1949 or 1939, the resultant noir would have been prototypically excellent, as opposed what it is, a fully toned late period weirdismal reflection of of realism.

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.

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.

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!

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

Døden er et kjærtegn (Death is a caress) (1949)

Døden er et kjærtegn (Death is a caress) (1949) is a heart-breaking cold-hearted Norwegian lousy husband and motor car infidelity and murder shocker romance film noir, often cited as Norway's first film noir, and celebrated also for the fact that one of Norway's leading female directors shot it.

A wordy, pensive and petulant slow burner of sadness and emotional decline in the frank face of sex, Døden er et kjærtegn (Death is a caress) (1949) runs many a risk of falling a foul of the lack of Americana and the singular lack of a national cinematic voice, in order to achieve its grim ends.

As a noir worthy of any nation, Døden er et kjærtegn (Death is a caress) (1949) is a story freed from World War 2 and shot in a recently occupied country, which might make cause for thought.

Thunder Road (1958)

Thunder Road (1958) is a free-wheeling and lurid hillbilly noir drama thriller about the moonshine business and a crazed item of uber-engine-block-rockin fun and double Mitchum-based racing madness and mannish boyhood aggression among the backwood backwaters of the moonshine states of Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee in the late 1950s, with added cult-movie drive-in status and plenty machine action and moody maleness, old and young.

It's a noirish crime story with more than just a few late period swiping stabs at the style.

Boy must ya hate 1958 and this movie which opens with the banjo pickin moan of authority that complains millions of dollars are lost to the treasury through taxation each year by means of the power of illicit whiskey, boo hoo. Who cares!

On The Beach (1959)

On The Beach (1959) is a metaphenomenal post apocalyptic novel adaptation dark and empty gaze at the emptiness of post-nuclear life and the actual point of any kind of human existence, phrased beautifully in a Hollywood void of expression, most appropriate to the winding close of the existential age brought about by the cold Cold War reality of a life that is either radioactively poisonous, or sub marine.

On the Beach, written by Nevil Shute and adapted into a film by Stanley Kramer, stands as one of the most controversial and widely read books of its time. Both the book and the film are credited with significantly influencing the anti-nuclear weapons movement of the 1960s and contributing to the end of the nuclear arms race.

The Scarface Mob (1959)

The Scarface Mob (1959) is an early TV movie historical Al Capone and The Untouchables Eliot Ness-based film edit of the television pilots into an end of the cycle movie noir type of affair which has virtually no film noir elements to speak of, as such stylistic gems and nuggets are smoothed out to make way for the televisual plainety of the new mass media era of the 1960s.

The late 1950s brought black-and-white television to new heights, with The Untouchables exemplifying the era’s gritty appeal and plunge into endless tropery, some of which started right here. Known for its violence, the show stirred controversy in its day, with its portrayal of mob brutality and intense confrontations between law enforcement and the Chicago crime syndicates. 

Die Mörder sind unter uns (1946)

Die Mörder sind unter uns (1946) is an immediately post-war German Trümmerfilm, a style or genre translated as rubble film and was possibly the first film to be produced in Germany after World War Two, and maybe even the first anti-fascist film should such a canon be similarly useful.

To compare the cinema of 1946 and sample that of the US and that of Germany is to stumble upon the most severe of contrasts, and yet within this the word noir might still function to explain what we are seeing.

Die Mörder sind unter uns, known in English as The Murderers Are Among Us, is the most naturally ironic film one could imagine. The irony of anything at all happening in the rubbled remains of Berlin is strong enough without adding romance, and Christmas.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941)

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) is an atmospheric horror science fiction mystery movie adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, that stars Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner.

While not a film noir in the conventional mode nor even much in the capacity of the subject matter and story, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) is classic film noir inasmuch as it introduces the style within its full dramatic flow.

Yet as far as the noir, ambivalence and duality are pushed to the extremes in this cracker of a science fiction thriller, with Spencer Tracy who had been symbolising rectitude for many a cinematic year preceding. 

Guilty Bystander (1950)

Guilty Bystander (1950) is an alcoholic ex-cop crime drama panic scheming business acquaintance and smuggler film noir starring Zachary Scott and Faye Emerson.

In the midst of an era inundated with ceaseless reports of misfortune, as well as poor HD movies that rehash every last bullet and trope of soft genius from the golden days of cinema there emerges a glimmer of hope, however slight. 

Guilty Bystander (1950) is a diminutive, economical gem of the noir genre, cherished only by eccentric enthusiasts and much worthy of being resurrected from the annals of obscurity. 

Forlorn and neglected for decades, relegated to the most abysmal state imaginable, the film has been granted a new lease on life through a resplendent restoration, unveiling its splendour anew.

Appointment with a Shadow (1957)

Appointment with a Shadow (1957) is an alcoholic journalist switcheroo murder pursuit battle with the booze film noir from the far end of the noir style.

As well as a searing enough tale of conflict between man and bottle, Appointment with a Shadow (1957) tells a strange criminal face-lift noir, back from when face changes as plot device were as firm a fantasy as film could enjoy, and so in this instance it seems credible that a criminal mastermind has only to put it about that he has had his face changed, and confusion reigns.

Framed (1947)

Framed (1947) is a sap drifter frame-up femme-fatale murder film noir which features many a trope from the classic canon, and provides evil atmosphere aplenty for noir-seekers seeking the less than canonical but still functional examples of the classical canon.

Within this atmospheric noir landscape Glenn Ford assumes the role of the intrepid trucker miner and engineer heel and sap for the rap drifter Mike Lambert, a man thrust into an alcoholic ordeal when he unwittingly becomes embroiled in a web of deceit and danger. 

Behind the wheel of a truck sans brakes, his journey careens into the shadowy confines of La Paloma, a nondescript bar and restaurant where fatal sleaze and hot love intertwines his path with that of the enigmatic waitress, Paula Craig, portrayed with mesmerising female fatalistic allure by Janis Carter.

Repeat Performance (1947)

Repeat Performance (1947) is a lousy husband murder fantasy amnesia film noir with Joan Leslie, Louis Hayward, Richard Basehart, Tom Conway and Virginia Field.

One of the strengths of 1940s film noir was the element of the fantastic, which was often created by closed studio sets and incredible coincidences in the storytelling, in which characters acted out dark fantasies for real, with as little realism as possible — another world often being created by the mis en scene and the strange happenings.

Repeat Performance (1947) is something of an outlier in that the fantasy within it is manifest. Like other film noir which quickly taps into a national unconscious and plays out a murderous what-if, Repeat Performance tells a wild story in which the wild elements are simply givens that are accepted from the off.