.png)
.png)
.png)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) is indeed in many ways a unique prospect, which while note folks this is not a film noir, it is still a major work from Orson Welles, and the Orsonian contribution to everything we adore was so profound, that inclusion beyond a mention is needed.
.png)
This is not a film noir, and yet within it lurks the genes of the style not quite activated, but present as the underscored factual spiritual well from which draws a grabbing interest, between the snogs and high-class encounters. In the 1940s they did not have slacker movies, but they did have loafer movies, and this is one.
.png)
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.
.png)
Super fine composition work complements Gregory Peck's desire to do good and right which compromises his loyalty to his gang of evil-doers and is driven by his growing love for the tomboy in question, played by Anne Baxter, inexplicably living on the edge with her old grandpops on an abandoned movie set.
His love is more than forceful, and not just because this is the 1940s, but rape is more than suggested in their first sexual encounter in which Peck angrily forces himself upon Baxter. She resists but later relents.
.png)
Five Graves To Cairo (1943) remains of critical interest to the noireaux and other aficionados who hover among the tombstones which mark the old old films that are rarely but watched no more, because it forms the foundational evidence for the thesis of one of the most interesting noir writers and commenters on the globe, which is Dan Hodges of The Film Noir File.
.png)
More than that, Walk On The Wild Side (1962) does provide a f & m buddy movie vibe, kicking off with a wandering tale of two drifters, drifting together, the young and wild and immoral Twist played by Jane Fonda, and the cool calm cowpoke character played by Laurence Harvey.
.png)
A surprise treat from 1941, Renoir brings some poetic magic to the early years of the Golden Age, by taking time to develop characters and also developing the fact and fiction of the swamp itself, bringing on the sticky everglades as a peril as lousy as the urban jungles of more familiar film noir.
More complex and sad also, than the more common fare of the day, Swamp Water (1941) teases out feeling and emotional pain from the cast in the small town jealousies of its actors, and even a scene of torture in which Dana Andrews' character is drowned for information on the whereabouts of Walter Brennan's character.
.png)
Guest in the House — which was later re-released under the salacious, demeaning and slightly orgiastic title of Satan in Skirts — was directed by John Brahm and stars Anne Baxter and Ralph Bellamy, with support from Marie McDonald
In this sensual and somewhat slow-burning domestic film noir fable, the character of Evelyn Heath (Anne Baxter) arrives in the home of the extended family of her smitten fiancé, Dan Proctor (played by Scott McKay) somewhere on the New England coast, hoping for a recuperative summer.
The scenery is reminiscent of many a woman's picture of the era, with high cliffs and crashing waves, the first being suggestive of suicide, and the later suggestive of emotional turmoil.
.png)
The priest and his best friend, young married woman Ruth Grandfort played by Anne Baxter, have other secrets and cop Karl Malden makes it his business to get to the bottom of it all, Malden being the force that keeps this whodunnit engaging and driving, as it spirals into faster increasing paranoia and fear, for the man who knows he did not commit the crime he is accused of.
Starring Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter and Karl Malden this exciting thriller jumps from point to point and in such great surroundings it is hard to resist.