Tiger in the Smoke (1956)

Tiger in the Smoke (1956) is a fog-bound British returning veteran Limey street gang treasure and deception paranoid woman Post-War London underworld adventure thriller film noir, and a movie notable not just for its atmospheric River Thames silent credits, but the copious amounts of fog, mist and vapour within its sets and dramaturgy — for no other movie of the era or indeed of any era, including many a Victorian horror epic, has more wool-thick smog and smoke in it, than this modest mirk of gloaming pea-soupery.

You already like Donald Sinden, you may not know it, but here in this heroic foggy fugue, you've come to love him, before anyone else had met him.

Chase A Crooked Shadow (1958)

Chase A Crooked Shadow (1958) is a paranoid woman assumed identity deceit and fleecing meticulous murder chamber drama British film noir with subverting notions of expectation as well as dark and shadowy double-play and in this case situated on coastal Spain, starring Anne Baxter as a typically doubting covers-gripping shocked and terrified femme indoors, with a special twist, and a great cast of Alexander Knox, Herbert Lom, Richard Todd and Faith Brook.

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. 

Blind Date (1959)

Blind Date (1959) is a Losey Limey London-based violence-against-women flashback and sophisticated murder mystery puzzle artist anti-hero police procedural erotic class and privilege social corruption film noir, directed by Joseph Losey and starring Hardy Krüger, Stanley Baker and Michelene Presle, with extra Gordon Jackson for the hardy Brit fan that likes a bit of the Scotch roughage in uniform.

In 1959, amid the twilight of post-war certainties and the emergent undercurrents of cultural upheaval in Britain, Joseph Losey released Blind Date (retitled Chance Meeting for its American audience). 

No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948)

No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948) is a scandalous British psychopath crime thriller film noir in which Limey actors adopt fake American accents as the Brits attempt to create a mock film noir styled thriller based on the most widely read British novel of World War Two.

St John Clowe’s 1948 adaptation of No Orchids for Miss Blandish is and does remain and is the remains of what was once a pivotal yet polarising entry in British cinematic history of film noir, that Limey Noir history we all crave, from the 1940s and 1950s. Based on James Hadley Chase’s sensational novel, the film was a bold attempt to replicate American-style gangster noir within the constraints of British cinema. 

So Evil My Love (1948)

So Evil My Love (1948) is a gaslighting and bullying historical art-forgery and murder paranoid woman fog based faux-gothique period noir multi lousy-husband social and society mix of madness, poison, Caribbean cures, old time maritime malaria, and gaslight, was gaslight ever mentioned. Gaslight.

The women's movies of film noir, the overlapping themes of gaslighting men and paranoid women, and old houses and a stripped back gothic that retains none of the deep psychology but has everyone in the extremist of states all of the time, these women's movies are troped to the core with such material as is found in So Evil My Love (1948).

Stage Fright (1950)

Stage Fright (1950) is an Alfred Hitchcock British female seeker hero theatre-land murder mystery starring Jane Wyman, Richard Todd, Alistair Sim and wow yes fans, it is Marlene Dietrich.

After the triumphs of his American films, Alfred Hitchcock returned to his roots with Stage Fright (1950), set largely in the theatrical world of post-war London. Based on Selwyn Jepson’s novel Man Running, the project marked Hitchcock’s attempt to merge his fascination with the stage with his penchant for suspense. The screenplay, adapted by his wife Alma and playwright James Bridie, promised a compelling tale of murder, deception, and performance, but the resulting film revealed both creative successes and notable flaws.

The Blue Lamp (1950)

The Blue Lamp (1950) is a Limey crimey ensemble cast classic British police procedural and Ealing produced state of the nation values-led post-War copper drama, directed by Basil Dearden and starring Jack Warner, Dirk Bogarde, Bernard Lee, Peggy Evans, and is about as non-noir as it gets, while still being entirely relevant to the crime wave fevered press narratives of the day. 

its about the bonhomie and salt of the earth morality of the constables, all working men with values that we might like to interpret as British and are seen giving directions, and actually helping elderly women across the road. They even appear to have a separate division titled 'Women Police' (26:10).

Obsession (1949)

Obsession (1949) is a Limey lousy husband murder cat and mouse and dog revenge thriller in which Robert Newton plays a London psychiatrist who is so fed up with the repeated affairs of his wife Storm, that he plots and executes a seemingly perfect revenge against her latest lover, an American, by locking him for five months in a dingy post-war basement, while preparing a fiendish end for the sorry Yank.

The American nature of the victim seems to be a snidely perfect backdrop for the very British murder, and as the action commences, we are in the gentleman's club where the psychiatrist relaxes, listening to the snobbish upper classes dish the dirt on the British economy, and its new reliance on the US dollar, and the post-war glooms which are irritated further by the cultural evidence of the United States which pervades the drear with its omnipresent and clashing accent.

Appointment With Crime (1946)

Appointment With Crime (1946) is a British gangland revenge thriller Limey film noir with a sweet and vile sharp noir edge indicating that the forties filmers of the United Kingdom has been paying attention to the American noir reels, enough to encapsulate and imitate and transplant some of the best noir tropes from one side of the Atlantic to the other, and so with wrist torture, sore wrists, and all manner of wrist attack upon William Hartnell's villainous and hard done by wristless crook.

William Hartnell plays as cool calm and smokin twisted career criminal who like any true anti-hero villain has a peculiar facet or obsession, and in this case it is his wrists.

Temptation Harbour (1947)

Temptation Harbour (1947) is a sympathetic British morally complex period piece post-war Limey noir suitcase full of money gangster versus civilian poverty versus temptation melodrama romance film noir, with Robert Newton and Simon Simon struggling on the south coast of England. 

The title of Temptation Harbour (1947) is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, lifting of wet suitcases full of money from the harbour, the harbour wherein the temptation lies, floating, and so nobody gave much thought to letting the old tale roll with such an oddly unflattering production designation for this now triple-remaker Simenon bobbing by the shore watery crab hunting classic of noir.

Is decency real? is the question of the day and the coal burning in this hard working and effective tale of temptation, and morality, and doing the right thing, which of course has been presented before, and is still presented yet, and as has been said, miraculously presented three times in the case of the suitcase belonging to the man from London.

Night and the City (1950)

Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950) is a cinematic excoriation, a nocturnal fugue of failed aspiration, doomed enterprise, and lurid spectacle. This British-American hybrid noir, directed by an expatriated American director fleeing the sordid tribunal of the House Un-American Activities Committee, coalesces around the jittery figure of Harry Fabian—a human perversion of motion itself. Played with convulsive energy by Richard Widmark, Fabian is a miscreant whose ambition corrodes every surface it touches. In his breathless pursuit of legitimacy through London’s professional wrestling underworld, he performs a danse macabre before the abyss.