Dark Passage (1947)

Dark Passage (1947) is a face-lift ex-con innocent hunted man on the run POV prison break cabbie sexual chemistry classic Warner Bros. mystery picture starring the Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, who are all over this marvel of a chemistry set of a classic film noir.

The mythology of the face-lift is deeply rooted in cultural narratives and societal expectations, particularly regarding beauty and aging. In many stories, women undergo face-lifts to retain their partners, highlighting the societal pressure for women to remain beautiful. 

This contrasts with men, who are often depicted as seeking new partners rather than maintaining their current relationships. The perceived ugliness of aging women is seen as natural and biological, though it is heavily influenced by cultural standards that do not apply equally to men.

Sudden Fear (1952)

Sudden Fear (1952) is a paranoid woman psychological stalking thriller film noir from the golden age of sinister and romantic wife's suspicion of her husband pictures.

Ever since Suspicion indeed, on the one hand, and Rebecca on the other, volumes of reel of film have told the tales of the paranoid woman of the era, she is the very sight of the times and the very words sudden fear themselves may be used to describe noir itself, it's attack vogue, it's play in the dark nature, the insuring lustre of stars on the screen, reworking in this case the themes, of suspicion, and the key player in the play of death is a dictating machine, a media within the media.

Shakedown (1950)

Shakedown (1950) is a slick and high speed journalism and media film noir crime and blackmail film about one young photographer's ambition to be the richest, best and most romantically involved snapper in the entirety of the great noir city.

Directed by Joseph Pevney and starring Howard Duff, Brian Donlevy, Peggy Dow, Lawrence Tierney, Bruce Bennett and Anne Vernon, Shakedown manages to blur the lines between crime and reportage.

With its hero to heel ending Shakedown (1950) is a lot more than a thrilling item of media noir, with its twin villains and twin romance stories, and with a central character about whom we shouldn't but do sympathise with.

Undertow (1949)

Undertow (1949) is a frame-up crime and romance film starring Scott Brady, Dorothy Hart and Peggy Dow.

The idea of the innocent being caught in a conspiracy of guilt is huge in the movies, but oddly not so common in real life. 

The paranoia of the golden age era was expressed in its purest form in many films, not in the least those by Alfred Hitchcock, of a person — always a man — accused of a crime they did not commit.

These fantastical tales make up a large part of noir cinema, whether it be the innocent man dragged by coincidence into a plot of which he knows nothing — to the ex-con unable to go straight, either due to circumstance, a frame-up, or the general ill-will of society which seems to dictate that once a man's a con — he's always a con.

Mystery Street (1950)

Mystery Street (1950) is a classic murderous cat and mouse police procedural and sporadically violent film noir thriller.

It's known as one of the first films to be shot on and around location in the Boston and Cape Code area.

In the story by Leonard Spigelgass, a married, upper-class super-bounder James Joshua Harkley, played by Edmon Ryan, shoots dead his pregnant girlfriend Vivian Heldon (Jan Sterling), discards the naked body in the sea and sinks her stolen car in a muddy pond. 

When the car owner Henry Shanway (Marshall Thompson) is arrested, super-smiley police lieutenant Peter Moralas (Ricardo Montalban) and never-smiling Harvard doctor Dr McAdoo (Bruce Bennett) set out to investigate.

Nora Prentiss (1947)

Nora Prentiss (1947) and starring Ann Sheridan may not make it on to the major league lists of the great film noirs, but it could still teach us more about the style than many other flicks.

As an object lesson in the behaviours of the femme fatale, Nora Prentiss is an elevated example of that great noir trope - the family man falling foul of the femme fatale. 

What we learn is maybe unintentionally revealed. But the classic figure of the femme fatale represents much more than the dangers of sex, or living loose on the rough side of the city. She represents female emancipation and this being Hollywood and the manners of middle America, that can only be a bad thing. 

Kent Smith plays the mild mannered and successful family man who has it all, and is about to find out the hard way, what it means to lose it, by falling for the wrong woman. That in essence is the straightforward moral and the quick plot summary here, but this is film noir, and the waters run deep.

First is the exciting opening of the movie, featuring a strange shrouded character who is being led to trial, and who will neither speak nor reveal their true identity.

The Man I Love (1947)

The Man I love (1947) is not the most classifiable of film noir productions from the 1940s but it does say plenty about the style and the era.

It's also potentially a rare film noir in that it attempts to close in on the female experience of family life, dating, night life and petty criminality. Gender roles are clear in The Man I Love, as they are in all cinema of the 1940s. But they are still overturned in places.

And if you have found the overturning of social norms in the cinema of the 1940s, you have almost always certainly found film noir, even if your movie doesn't feature paranoia, corruption and the dark criminality and murder more normally associated with the style.

The Man I Love is not an immediately obvious placement in the film noir canon, and yet with its female seeker hero in the form of Ida Lupino, working her way through night clubs on the West Coast, this film has noir chops to spare.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) may be considered one of the few blessings the patriarchy has offered us.

We may add the disclaimer too, that The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is not really in its entirety a film noir, although there are significant noir style, chops, attitudes and participants to make it as essential a viewing experience as any noir fiend might ever seek.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre isn't here on the Classic Film Noir website by sufferance however, and as a Humphrey Bogart film it can be enjoyed on these merits alone, and although it's an adventure tale, there is plenty paranoia and deceit on offer.

One observation from the off, and something that seems to jar somehow, is that it’s hard to read about this film without the word ‘great’ being used and overused, and then used again, and overused some more, on account of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre being a great film.

You know.

Mildred Pierce (1945)

Mildred Pierce (1945) is  a Michael Curtiz James M. Cain flashback but barely any voiceover detourned woman's picture murder mystery femme fatale female success story lousy husband children-in-film-noir family tragedy tragic love triangle rags to riches to darkened beach house classic film noir starring Joan Crawford, Ann Blyth, Eve Arden, Zachary Scott, Jack Carson, Bruce Bennett and Veda Ann Borg.

A classic film noir indeed, and also a great melodrama, a story which from the off when it bangs iunto beach house action followed by a suicidal moment at the docks, this melodrama is not a film noir in its immediate sea-sweeping seconds, and the theme music is that of a woman's picture, that so-called real entity of the era, the project that is detoruned ce noir la.