The Gunfighter (1950)

The Gunfighter (1950) is a lone gun-fighter facing early celebrity in the nascent wild west western revenge chase and showdown saloon and range estranged child and wife thriller starring Gregory Peck, Karl Malden, Helen Westcott and directed by Henry King. 

In the noirlands of the wild west and in the imaginations of the film makers and narrative makers of the high era of American creativity, a film such as The Gunfighter (1950) carries many a surprise.

House of Wax (1953)

House of Wax (1953) is a 3D remake historic horror chiller thriller non film noir blockbuster movie from the gold age of 3D cinema.

House of Wax, filmed under the working title The Wax Works, was Warner Bros.' response to the unexpected success of the 3D film Bwana Devil, which premiered in November 1952. 

Recognizing the potential of 3D technology, Warner Bros. adopted Julian and Milton Gunzburg's Natural Vision 3D system, the same system used in Bwana Devil.

 They chose to remake their 1933 Technicolor thriller, Mystery of the Wax Museum, originally based on Charles S. Belden's play The Wax Works. 

While Mystery included a newspaper subplot and was set in its release year, House of Wax, set around 1902, retained much of the original's plot and dialogue.

Ramrod (1947)

Ramrod (1947) is a darkness on the range film noir western tale of bullying double crossing and rivalry from one of the style's favourite directors, André De Toth, one of the pioneers in the film noir western genre jam of the 1940s.

The permutations of film noir began to play across nightmare scenarios in the urban, criminal, historical and now western styles of story telling,.

In the shadow-draped alleys of 1947, it was not all shadow-draped alleys and the Western too felt the noir influence from time to time. This picture called Ramrod hit the silver screen, helmed by the Hungarian maestro Andre de Toth, and is now considered to be an example of cross-over style, that most amazing of constructs, the film noir western.

Crime Wave (1954)

Crime Wave (1954) is a punchy procedural film noir with classic Los Angeles location photography, and Sterling Hayden creating the tooth-pick trope.

Further, the tooth-pick may have been a stylised way of suggesting a drug habit, although Sterling Hayden's Detective Lieutenant Sims is an early and incongruous promoter of quitting smoking for one's health.

As well as crime on the streets, there is a crime in the home theme as Crime Wave hits the home invasion theme hard, too. Home invasion in film noir signals in its stylised way the demolition of the full-on dream of Americana, that so infected the States in the 1950s.

Hidden Fear (1957)

Hidden Fear (1957) is something of a curiosity at the tail end of the film noir cycle, and that curiosity largely arises from the fact that it is set in Denmark.

The logic behind this is not clear, and some of the film in general suffers from this lack of clarity too.

Some of the more obvious film noir strings are not pulled, and were it not for John Payne in the lead role, bullying and slapping his way around the Danish capital, there may not be much noir left at all to enjoy.

Hidden Fear is a linear thriller, which does its best to make a virtue of its location shooting, but does not manage to raise any particular tension, or find any depth in its stroll through the Danish underworld.

Dark Waters (1944)

Dark Waters (directed by André De Toth, 1944) doesn't follow the obvious conventions we associate with the film noir style, such as the long shadows, the urban setting, the tough guy talk, the femme fatale and the cruelty of fate.  

But these weren't the only aspects of the movement, and although it's not overt in the more traditional noir crime stories of the 1940s and 1950s, Freudian psychology looms large in the cycle, and is pressed to the fore in such hits as The Woman in the Window.

Dark Waters also tips it hat to Freudian therapy, but that should be obvious from the title.  It follows patterns largely established in the hit film Rebecca, and is typical of the paranoid woman film of the time.