The Sea Wolf (1941)

The Sea Wolf (1941) is a nautical noir ghost ship of shame and cruelty dramatic abduction and high seas wrecking crew medical and maritime madness Jack London adapted tale of intersecting American narratives combining the frontier of the sea with the oldest narrative tropes known to the continent, including the olden mania of the rogue seamaster and the anti-Nietzschean struggle for the victory of normalcy over ubermenshcary.

Michael Curtiz's 1941 adaptation of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf occupies a peculiar intersection of seafaring adventure, psychological realism, and the film noir sensibility emerging in Hollywood during the wartime period. 

Chase A Crooked Shadow (1958)

Chase A Crooked Shadow (1958) is a paranoid woman assumed identity deceit and fleecing meticulous murder chamber drama British film noir with subverting notions of expectation as well as dark and shadowy double-play and in this case situated on coastal Spain, starring Anne Baxter as a typically doubting covers-gripping shocked and terrified femme indoors, with a special twist, and a great cast of Alexander Knox, Herbert Lom, Richard Todd and Faith Brook.

Michael Anderson's 1958 suspense thriller Chase a Crooked Shadow is a taut chamber drama that simultaneously flaunts its artificiality and derives power from its formal claustrophobia. Conceived as a British answer to the Hitchcockian mystery, the film cloaks its familiar conceit in an elegant mise-en-scène and haunting moral ambiguity. 

Tokyo Joe (1949)

Tokyo Joe (1949) is a post-war returning veteran smuggler film noir crime film directed by Stuart Heisler and starring Humphrey Bogart. This was Heisler's first of two features starring Bogart, the other was Chain Lightning that also wrapped in 1949 but was held up in release until 1950.

The returning veteran noir never had a better twist as the return is made to the defeated country, which is Japan. After spending World War II in the Air Force, ex-Colonel Joe Barrett returns to Tokyo to see if there is anything left of his pre-war bar and gambling joint, Tokyo Joe's.

Amazingly, it is more or less intact and being run by his old friend Ito. Joe is shocked to learn from Ito that his wife Trina, whom he thought had died in the war, is still alive. She has divorced Joe and is married to Mark Landis, a lawyer working in the American occupation of Japan. She has a seven-year-old child named Anya.

The Sleeping Tiger (1954)

The Sleeping Tiger (1954) is a Brit-teen jazz-crime tearaway movie, with stiff upper lip, hot and sexy jazz in Soho, and failed psychanalysis taking place in the midst of an even harder failing marriage. 

The subject matter is the mood music of the British time; teenage criminality, the hopeless British stabbing at psychoanalysis; the tragedy of marriage and the family, and the failure of men to control the disastrous environments their misogyny created to begin with.

While Dirk Bogarde's character suffers from an inability to control his criminal teenage urges, his psychiatrist can't control his profession, and is a failure as a husband while obviously believing he is doing the right thing. When he is mansplaingly doing the wrong thing, again and again, while being the lamest husband ever.

And the teenage tearaway Dirk Bogarde is marvellous; his character longs to have actual issues but he is in fact a middle class boy, which makes his random bullying and cigarette puffing anger all the more wild; and how he has the hot-hots for his psychiatrist's moody wife!