Fear (1946)

Fear (1946) is a classic low budget Crime and Punishment derived film noir tale of murder, urban isolation, poverty, morality, and an object lesson in the nascent and embryonic video-visual techniques employed in the name of production in the 1940s, in a time even before television.

This Monogram Pictures production of  Crime and Punishment is an example of what cinema can do to a text and will do to a text, because it is barely Dostoyevsky, and yet leans into that tale not just for narrative and dramatic features, but to try and pull some of the existential magic over form the olden Russian experiences of the day to day realisations of pre-modern life in 1866. Everything stated was to come.

Black Friday (1940)

Black Friday (1940) is a brain transplant crime movie from the nascent moments of horror cinema as an as of yet undefined genre, and it is a film that shared some thematic and technical elements with the emerging film noir style.

With no monster as such to boast of and little in the way of a full mad scientist trope Black Friday does imply the crime genre full on in its fantastic progress to a sane conclusion.

Excuses for maddened acting and raw death row fun combine realities which could only in essence be explored in 1940, with no fully developed tropes fully recovered and broadcast in the cinemas, trope combination produced no end of experimental forays into what could have been.

The brain transplant movie genre emerged during a period no doubt of fascination with medical advancements and the exploration of the human psyche in cinema.