Vertigo (1958)

Vertigo (1958) one of the greatest and best known of Alfred Hitchcock's films is also at its heart in the classic film noir tradition.

This psychological fantasy in full colour is probably one of the greatest and more ravishing Technicolor films ever produced, and so it does not perhaps fit the full film noir bill with its vibrant shades of rose and green.

The paranoia is real as is the preposterous fantasy elements, which if anything work against Vertigo because full-on colour like this, and most especially in its many splendid exteriors, are suggestive of a more real milieu.

The story is one of murder and madness, of weakness and psychological manipulation, and as often with Hitchcock, the ongoing manipulation and cruelty to women, who are judged poorly by men - - and it is all wrapped up in suspenseful storytelling and mystery.

The full whack of the psychological thriller film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock has become immortal in this picture. 

Caught (1949)

Caught (1949) is a film noir melodrama from Max Ophüls starring Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Ryan and James Mason, laying bare the perils of middle class marriage and the bullying and controlling which waits any eager young bride, keen to live the fantasy life which the magazines of the time were selling.

Caught is a film which appears more vicious the closer we look at it. 

To kick off, we have some young women who are planning to live their lives through catalogues, an excellent introduction to the mating game as America enters the 1950s.

It is stressed over and over again, in fact. Young model Maude, who changes her name to a more charming 'Leonora', played by Barbara Bel Geddes is seen with her friend and flatmate Dorothy (played by Natalie Shafer) constructing the fantasy life she shall lead via the pages of the many magazines and lifestyle publications that occupy their evenings in their rather downbeat and crummy digs.

Blood on the Moon (1948)

Blood on the Moon (1948) is a wild Western with film noir credentials. Those credentials are sounder than may first appear, and are real.

Robert Wise, the director of Blood on the Moon brought the urban, psychological, shadowy, violent and complex aspects of film noir to this movie, making it very likely the greatest admixture of the Western genre with the film noir style.

It begs the question as to what film noir and Western have in common, and it's likely the fact that both of them ultimately deal with morality.

The lead elements of film noir are first and foremost visible. These are a difficult to follow and relatively layered plot of crosses, triple crosses and identities.

These typically complex stories are also played out in the shadows where possible. Blood on the Moon not only opens with an epic and miserable rain storm, and in that storm is the figure of the drifter, stoically on the wander, the forever hired hand, here played by Robert Mitchum.

The Long Night (1947)

In a dingy boarding house in 1947, a shot is fired in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

 

This is The Long Night, Anatole Litvak’s contribution to the film noir landscape of 1947.

A man tumbles out of the door and slides and slithers down two flights of stairs and is stone-cold dead when he hits the bottom. 

There now follows an hour and a half of flashback and flashbacks-within-flashbacks about a veteran returning from the war, tired and disillusioned, only to find that he girl he loves has lied to him about her relationship with another man, and that man she now cares about is sadistic and pretty much an all-round cad.

Although not one of the best known in the canon, the film noir credentials of The Long Night (1947) are supreme ― sublime to say the least. As well as featuring Vincent Price, warming up to become one of the great pantomime movie villains of the century, this was also Barbara Bel Geddes’ first film roles.

Then there is Henry Fonda ― superb to watch, even though he is not one of the crowned kings of film noir. Still ― he has plenty to offer here, in what we’d like to christen as the ‘sap-in-a-cap’ style of film noir acting.

Let the sap-in-a-cap flashback begin.