Carrefour (1938)

Carrefour (1938) is an amnesia noir proto-noir French thriller with a pedigree so crucial to film noir and the noir style, that pages must and will be written about this classic of the noir manner.

Crossroads, as anglophones might intone, being the translated term, much it might be said in the film noir mode, with its emphasis in naming, upon streets, roads, and other similar type of concept.

Actually titled Carrefour in French, this early expression of the film noir trend is a mystery drama film from 1938. Directed by Curtis Bernhardt, it features Charles Vanel, Jules Berry, and Suzy Prim in leading roles. This influential film led to two remakes in English: the British Dead Man’s Shoes in 1940 and the American Crossroads in 1942. Filming took place at the Billancourt Studios and around Paris, with Jean d’Eaubonne and Raymond Gabutti as the art directors responsible for the film’s visual design.

Curtis Bernhardt’s journey through the film industry mirrors that of his contemporaries, traversing Germany, France, and America. Unlike Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak, Bernhardt never returned to Germany to film. 

Conflict (1945)

Conflict (1945) is a wife-murder mystery paranoia and psychiatry film noir from the classic noir period, starring Humphrey Bogart, Alexis Smith and Sydney Greenstreet.

Conflict broadcasts its wicked and paranoiac storyline directly from one of the key centres of film noir existence — the middle class suburban marriage. 

These marriages are often writ unhappily across noir, and featured weakened males, bothered by lust for another woman, as in this example, or other forms of unhappy greed.

Conflict opens with such a marriage on display —  a couple who appear to be happily married but in fact are not. And on their fifth wedding anniversary, wife Kathryn (played by Rose Hobart) accuses husband Richard (played by Humphrey Bogart) of having fallen in love with her younger sister, Evelyn.

World weary and as super cynical as ever, Bogart as Richard does not deny it, even though he has resigned himself to leaving things as they are, since Kathryn certainly would not give him a divorce.

High Wall (1947)

High Wall (1947) is a wife-murder mystery amnesia psychiatric PTSD ex-serviceman prison noir starring Audrey Totter, Robert Taylor and Herbert Marshall.

From its exciting opening sequence in which ex-mercenary flyer Steven Kenet (Robert Taylor) crashes his car into a river, trying to cover the evident strangulation murder of his wife with a suicide, to its traversing of the prison system for the criminally insane, up until its drug-induced truth-finding denouement, High Wall is exciting, fantastic, serious, dopey and features a proper film noir evil villain, a cool-blooded bad-doer who commits the most callous killings  — in order to save his chances at career promotion within the business of religious book publishing.