Forbidden Planet (1956)

Forbidden Planet (1956) is a science fiction mad scientist classic 50s robot and monster outer space adventure movie based on a play and in its way an acme of the day as only in Henry Luce's America could it be quite normative and unquestioned to describe space exploration, as the voiceover does, as 'the process of conquest and colonisation', distasteful and camp male meathead dream opera magna landmark space thriller cinematographic classic and pioneering superior sound effect keystone one of a kind enduring id versus ego genre defying movie in which Dr. Morbius gives a description of the Krell race, particularly regarding how many shafts there were, their size, and the machines only for a red monster (alive only because of Morbius' thoughts) to come down the valley to the electro-field and kill one of the crew members, directed by Fred M. Wilcox from a script by Cyril Hume that was based on a film story by Allen Adler and Irving Block, and starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, and Leslie Nielsen, and shot in Eastmancolor and CinemaScope.

Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) is an autobiographical Tennesse Williams psychosurgery paranoid woman benevolent aunt madness or truth thinly veiled story about the unspeakable, homosexuality, Southern aristocracy and madness unsung surreal masterpiece of intriguing and twsited based on a play theatricals around a mad sister and a dead son, and a proposed lobotomy, and a pscyhoanalytico-religio-sacrificial erotomania suppression of women symbolic Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed film noir psycho-melodrama starring Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.

Temptation (1946)

Temptation (1946) is a shady lady femme fatale scheming wife and marital infidelity historical flashback and voiceover lousy Egyptologically obsessed husband brooding jealous and lust based on a play film noir murder melodrama starring Merle Oberon, Paul Lukas, George Brent and Charles Korvin.

The Front Page (1931)

The Front Page (1931) is a journalism and media Lewis Milestone pre-code screwball death row telephony comedy classic United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" public domain brilliant early talkie perfectly transferring into screen terms a stage classic of the twenties ribald rat-a-tat dialogue movie creation which imagines into life a new American archetype, the fast-talking, hard-drinking newshound who'll do anything for a scoop, starring Adolphe Menjou as Walter Burns, Pat O'Brien as Hildebrand "Hildy" Johnson, Mary Brian as Peggy Grant, Edward Everett Horton as Roy V. Bensinger, Walter Catlett as Jimmy Murphy, George E. Stone as Earl Williams, Mae Clarke as Molly Malloy, Slim Summerville as Irving Pincus, Matt Moore as Ernie Kruger, Frank McHugh as "Mac" McCue, Clarence Wilson as Sheriff Peter B. "Pinky" Hartman. 

Margin for Error (1943)

Margin For Error (1943) is a flashback Otto Preminger anti-Nazi screwball German American Bund, or the German American Federation (German: Amerikadeutscher Bund, Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, AV), German-American Nazi organization military and beat cop forced Nazi marriage with black comedy Jewishness versus Nazi gambling goose-stepper lousy husband and abused wife black comedy by Otto Preminger and starring Otto Preminger, and Joan Bennett, based on a play by Clare Boothe Luce and somewhat improved upon the play in its own way, starring Milton Berle in classic comic form, with Carl Esmond as Baron Max von Alvenstor, Howard Freeman as Otto Horst (the American Führer), Clyde Fillmore as Dr. Jennings, and Poldi Dur as Frieda (as Poldy Dur) personal maid to the villainous Karl Baumer (General Consul of Germany), whackily portrayed by Preminger, and delivered with good Jewish humour and a constant comic return to the name of the character played by Berle — Officer Moe Finkelstein.

Blackmail (1929)

Blackmail (1929) is an Alfred Hitchcock 1920s police procedural attempted rape and murder in self defence classic British film noir hit sound movie production based on a play and brutally blackly comic cinematic late dip towards higher modernism in the form and its technical prowess as it entered the 1930s, and this film which is clear evidence of the Hitchcockian it is also at its height horrific.

Apologies if the film noir canon is to be legally formatted in the 1920s, the thought is not tuned into the key features of the style, so it is unusual to call it a classic, and yet unanimous support from the Film Noir Board in fact classify it, classicify it if you can, that is the verdict.

The Square Ring (1953)

The actuated conception of a Basil Dearden season feels anomalous within conventional retrospectives. But here it is nonethesame.

The Square Ring (1953) is a Basil Dearden mugs' game boxing single evening at a cheap stadium clinches and clichés portmanteau style based on a play British film noir long lost era of Limey filmmaking melodrama in which a trembling neophyte is hurled into ritualized violence opposite a decaying former champion clawing desperately for one final gasp of relevance, while a hysteria-stricken wife issues ultimatums from the domestic front, the corrupt machinery of a backstage fix grinds unseen, and the camera assaults the viewer with feverish close-ups of ringsiders baying for blood and entire rows of spectators convulsing in grotesque pantomime, their fists punching the air as if possessed by the fight itself.

Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

Witness for the Prosecution (1957) is a Billy Wilder classic court room drama classic film noir murder suspenser did he or didn't he? Hitchcockian love-that-Laughton Agatha Christie mystery plot twister puzzle game millinery-provoking murder character and melodrama film noir production based on a play and starring Marlene Dietrich, Elsa Lanchester, Tyrone Power, Charles Laughton, Ian Wolfe and Henry Daniell.

Joe MacBeth (1955)

Joe Macbeth (1955) is a feverish, noir-soaked transposition of Shakespeare’s blood-stained tragedy into a mobster film noir in which ensemble parking garage acting where ambition clashes with brass-knuckled loyalty collapses under the weight of prophecy, and a henpecked trigger man is whipped into grandiose dreams of power by his razor-edged wife, featuring back-alley execution, and guilt-ridden hallucination seeping from the same anxious postwar mood of rising urban brutality and moral corrosion, and starring Sid James as an American, an oddity in itself, and Paul Douglas as Macbeth and Ruth Roman as the all alluring femme fatale star of the show.

Cosh Boy (1953)

Cosh Boy (1953) is a exciting but also earnestly vile teen exploitation juvenile threat ditto post war youth trouble boom psychopatriarch urban noir also known as The Slasher (1953) movie which studies juvenile delinquency and the spectre of moral collapse in Post-War Britain using the crime thriller format and which charts the birth of cruelty as a form of social and parental guidance for the worrying young persons' culture which the cinema and its co-habiting rock n roll and jazz exponents were cashing in upon, coshing in you might say — — and be warned — — Cosh Boy (1953) has the most vile and violently cruel conclusion in all of Limey post war silver screen flickery. The most violent ending of any film of the decade — reckons .

Dial M For Murder (1954)

The Ray Milland Season Hitchcock Highlight unfolds without haste —  it drifts — not lost, but unanchored — tracing arabesques through the medium of noir

Dial M For Murder (1954) is an Alfred Hitchcock Technicolor dual-strip polarised 3D but always subsequently seen in 2D lousy husband telephone-noir based-on-a play home invasion murder and police and detective procedural intriguer starring Grace Kelly, Ray Milland, Robert Cummings, Anthony Dawson and John Williams.

Casablanca (1942)

Casablanca (1942) is the one of a kind classic cinema anti-Nazi tale of war time love and intrigue which regularly appears in greatest film of all time compositions and not that often in classic film noir selections nor even moderate noir canons, nor even in the non-canonical and noir at a stretch.

Funny that Casablanca was not an instant hit and funny that your first thoughts are that the special effects are not that good for the greatest film of all time. 

By which you mean that the basic investment made in this greatest film of all time seems moderate to say the least. The aeroplane and some of the attending dressing of scene, the special effects.

Black Fury (1935)

Black Fury (1935) is a labour relations coal country Pennsylvania-based Warner Bros. working class mining rough-shoddily Slav impersonating private police force versus striking miners based on a historic incident melodrama, with a poor American mining community relentlessly portrayed as a mob of easily swayed poverty stricken proles, versus the kind of private company police force that used to only a few years earlier, in 1929, beat to death striking workers that happened to be standing under the wrong club et sturdy baton.

That is in certain fact the story of John Barcoski who immigrated in to the USA in 1906, who was Polish, and who was beaten to death in Pennsylvannia by the PA's Coal and Iron Police on February 10th, 1929.

We're No Angels (1955)

We're No Angels (1955) is a Michael Curtiz Humphrey Bogart and Peter Ustinov and Aldo Ray Christmas themed inappropriate island based prison break comedy in full studio colour as the trio fun and blunder through some uncanny voyeuristic crapulent more than semi-sexist kind of misery as comedy experience as they play three escapees from Devil's Island, the penal colony of Cayenne (French: Bagne de Cayenne), commonly known as Île du Diable, which was a French penal colony that operated for 100 years, from 1852 to 1952, and officially closed in 1953, in the Salvation Islands of French Guiana.

Ladies in Retirement (1941)

Ladies in Retirement (1941) is a historical woman's picture psychological social thriller Cockney talkin gothic Victoriana shadows in the marshes foggy soggy film noir thieven and murder drama of sisterly crazed dead bird collecting feminist examination of the pressures social, psychological and detrimental to the capable woman in the society of yore, as dramatists of 1939, a curious and exciting drama from the times when plays made films.

In the murky domain between madness and decorum, Charles Vidor's 1941 film Ladies in Retirement emerges as an exquisitely wrought chamber piece of deceit, loyalty, and murder. 

Deception (1946)

Deception (1946) is an operatic gothic jealousy classical music elite queer coded grandly-themed and doomatically scored outre and artistic Bette Davis, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains film noir from the paragon days of the most virtuoso anti-virtuos black-hearted form of silver-screened entertainment that ever did bedevil the airwaves of the cinematic mind. This was Marshall McCluhan's favourite film of all time.

Maybe it wasn't but then again maybe it was. Only the Large Language Models will ever know that now.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945)

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945) is a jealous invalid-sister paranoid woman small town family murder plot movie which takes the film noir style and its themes off of the city streets and into the middle class homes of a dull New Hampshire mill town.

Historical classical and purest high period Golden Age film noir does have a slight craze for mid century small town mill-centred drama. There are more than a few mill-town noirs. Among The Living (1941) is a classic mill-town noir, as is the amazing Bette Davis noir Beyond The Forest (1949). Purely classic mill town film noir

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945) and any article about it, or discussion of its noir propensities must always come with an extra spoiler warning, extra to the universal spoiler warning of this website, and your every day moment of film exploration will be shattered if you have not seen this film noir and continue reading this.

Dangerous Crossing (1953)

Dangerous Crossing (1953) is a maritime murder conspiracy mystery paranoid woman heiress in distress missing husband silly-newlywed-woman version of the well tested film noir trope of the vulnerable woman, lost in a world of romance that is fear-bitten, weird and underwritten by criminal conspiracy.

That most classic of mystery setups is no longer employed by the movies, the one in which all the world seems to be a conspiracy. No, madam, the purser has not seen your husband. No, madam, this is not your cabin and your bags were never here, your husband was never on this ship. This story is used again and again by da moviemakers, and here it is in a well-formed and perfect trope, creating rough ripples and mystery.

Five Graves To Cairo (1943)

Five Graves To Cairo (1943) is a World War Two espionage and desert assumed-identity Nazis on the march adventure and romance thriller, made by Billy Wilder, and while not often thought of as classic film noir in its story and outlook, is as essential to the canon as other key works from its super talented and Germanic Americanic, classic of all time wonderful uberfilm powerhouse of a director.

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.

Death of a Salesman (1951)

Death of a Salesman (1951) is the first based on a play film adaptation of the Arthur Miller 1949 stage drama of the same name, starring Frederc March as the iconic and iconological Willy Loman, the American neveryman, the existential nothing of the coming decades in one staring suicidal staring contest with death.

Just before the film was about to be released, Arthur Miller threatened to sue Columbia Studios over the short that was to appear before Death of a Salesman. This short film, Career of a Salesman, showed what the producers believed was a more typical American salesman, and was an attempt to defuse possible accusations that Death of a Salesman was an anti-American film. Eventually, Columbia agreed to remove the 10-minute short from the film's theatrical run.