The Best Years of our Lives (1946)

The Best Years of our Lives (1946) is a returning veteran epic post-war romance and social adjustment classic and sweeping melodrama of PTSD, alcoholism, social manners and physical disability charting America's adjustment to the post war order with broken limbs, broken relationships, broken aircraft and civilian indifference, directed by William Wyler and starring Dana Andrews, Harold Russell, Myrna Loy, Cathy O'Donnell, Frederic March, Virginia Mayo, Teresa Wright, Steven Cochran and with best of all perhaps, Hoagy Carmichael on piano.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) is a psychological vigilante and posse film noir western starring Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn, Mary Beth Hughes, Dana Andrews, Harry Morgan and Marc Lawrence.

If film noir is about anything it's got to be moral failings and immoral decisions, and if the western genre is about anything it is about the rough construction of United States by means of law and order.

Many of the film noir westerns we watch deal with the construction of a legal process and the layering of the base myths of Americana, and it was fitting therefore to see this quite par hazard in its ideal double billing with My Darling Clementine (1946).

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) is a film noir for certain, largely because of the murderous mob and their moral dilemma, after we have witnessed the moral and murderous decision making of a new American community, an area of land and an area of being in which law and order are not as codified as they could be. 

Night of the Demon (1957)

Night of the Demon (1957) is a Jacques Tourneur British horror demon special effects creepy supernatural sceptical disappearance and mystery magic murder movie, that is not a film noir, but which like all of the fifties horrorouevre does confine itself to noir, insofar as noir themes, effects and personnel will dominate. 

For who could be more noir than noir's Jacques Tourneur, director of the quintessential expression of the style, that is of course Out Of The Past from 1947, one ten year decade hence, noir incarnate no less.

Yet still who more noir than Dana Andrews, too, quite the figure of the film style, a man of noir, and one of the solids of the medium?

Daisy Kenyon (1947)

Daisy Kenyon (1947) is a classic Otto Preminger lousy husband romantic triangle arrogant commercial artist melodrama noir-style moral wrongness feature film with Joan Crawford, Dana Andrews, and Henry Fonda.

Preminger’s sensibility clashed with the shadows. His modus operandum, like a smoke-filled room, ran counter to the polished veneer of society. Daisy Kenyon, a dame caught in the crossfire, danced on the edge of desire and danger.

The two leading men, a fedora and a military hat, did anybody write a book about the hat motif and codes and modes of symbology in noir. They had better had. Noir needs hat analysis. Hat analysis may be brought to bear in any and many a film noir, a good example we could enjoy might be Ramrod, starring Lana Turner.

The Iron Curtain (1948)

The Iron Curtain (1948) is an early Cold War espionage and infiltration thriller based on the breaking up of a real Canadian spy ring in the immediate aftermath of World War 2. 

It didn't take long, but shortly after World War 2 ended it became apparent that the liberators of Berlin and the nation which defeated the Nazis in Germany became the main enemy of the United States, and by association here, and everywhere, Canada.

It is in fact by all accounts the first feature film to dramatize and propagandise the new-fangled Cold War of the period, which could really be said to have run from 1947 until 1991, and seen the rise and development of film noir as one of its key cultural expressors.

Swamp Water (1941)

Swamp Water (1941) is a moody southern innocent-man-accused rural-backwater pelter manhunt film noir, which was Jean Renoir's first American movie.

A surprise treat from 1941, Renoir brings some poetic magic to the early years of the Golden Age, by taking time to develop characters and also developing the fact and fiction of the swamp itself, bringing on the sticky everglades as a peril as lousy as the urban jungles of more familiar film noir.

More complex and sad also, than the more common fare of the day, Swamp Water (1941) teases out feeling and emotional pain from the cast in the small town jealousies of its actors, and even a scene of torture in which Dana Andrews' character is drowned for information on the whereabouts of Walter Brennan's character.

Edge Of Doom (1950)

Edge Of Doom (1950) is a desperate priest killer noir starring Farley Granger as a man driven to edgy paranoiac and driven madness by poverty and in his view the Catholic church.

A paranoid city streets noir of the first drainage, Edge Of Doom is a slum story set in increasingly crummier settings, pitting priests against poverty and poverty against sanity, as one man turns to blame the church for the ills of his life, and now has issues with them around the deaths of both his parents.

A brilliant noir with all the fun of the style which includes Dana Andrews as the priestly narrative glue, offering a framed Farley fable, a story of desperation from the poor side. 

On the capitalist mean streets of 1950 there is a shinola-show of trouble for the poor, and all of this is focused on Farley Granger's increasingly desperate and tragic desire to see a large funeral for his penurious maw.

Boomerang (1947)

Boomerang! (1947) is a semi-documentary style innocent-man-in-the-frame returning veteran PTSD corrupt cop and local politics factually based classic film noir, adapted from details of a real life murder that took place in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1924.

Starring Dana Andrews, Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden, Arthur Kennedy and Jane Wyatt, with voiceovers by Reed Hadley, Boomerang also boasts the most comprehensive roster of film noir character actors in all of the styles many movie productions.

By making use of the stentorian voiceover which was becoming increasingly popular as the 1950s fast approached, there is a semi-documentary feel to Boomerang (1947), which seeks noir authenticity not only by broadcasting the action in the voice of authority as it takes place, but under the forward-thinking direction of Elia Kazan, makes good use of New England people and locations, to infuse the film with a special layer of authenticity — a technique becoming more popular as the procedural style evolved.

Laura (1944)

Laura (1944) is a classic murder mystery web of love film noir drama of meagre and unhealthy male obsession directed by Otto Preminger, starring Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb and Vincent Price.

The premise of the story is that three men are fixated on the one woman, Laura Hunt, and as the story starts we visit one of those men — Waldo Lydecker, played by Clifton Webb — in the company of another of them, the young cop Mark McPherson, played by Dana Andrews.

The classic film noir flashback structure allows for a multitude of mystery and nonstandard storytelling, much of this confused by the fact that Waldo Lydecker is a brittle and caustic storyteller in himself — he is a famous columnist and aside from the power that he wields — typing his sometimes vitriolic and career-ending columns for his bathtub — he is in fact a weaver of tales himself and as such should not be trusted.

While The City Sleeps (1956)

While The City Sleeps (1956) by Fritz Lang is late enough in the cycle to be classed as knowing-noir - an almost self-aware example of the medium, that has mastered the tropes, themes, acting style and drama of the film noir phenomenon - enough to package up the groove and bottle it. 

While still a classic of the film noir style, many of the more significant tropes which formed the medium in the 1940s are curiously absent. While The City Sleeps is not a film of shadows, and neither is it a production heavy with cigarette smoke, hoods in hats and of course femmes fatales.

Still however, While The City Sleeps is considered by many to be a fine example of classic film noir.

It certainly has an A-list of film noir graduate class of 1956 noir as they come actors in it, including Ida Lupino, Dana Andrews, Thomas Mitchell and Howard Duff.

What makes this journalistic story of a psychopathic killer being caught by the press in concert with the cops a classic of film noir then? Perhaps it is because the story it tells of this killer loose in New York, as told by Fritz Lang, simply in and of itself contains enough material to be a Grade A example of the style, as it stood, towards the end of the cycle.

The Fearmakers (1958)

The Fearmakers (1958) tells a wonderfully revealing story of war, of advertising and the obfuscation of the line between corporate and government life.

Despite quality issues and any stand out cast performances, The Fearmakers also sounds an early alert concerning the war on the public that has become a ubiquitous feature of modern living.

Because of course, if it was unseen in the 1950s or 1940s, and if it was criminal, psychological and at odds with the public vision, it was going to be a subject of film noir.

There seems something peculiarly prescient about The Fearmakers, even if it is a part of the obsessive hunting of Communists that took over American public and cultural life in the 1950s. 

The real threat to freedom and civil society were already at work in the 1950s however, and The Fearmakers is a great introduction to the science of public relations, which had already been perfected over several decades and through World War Two, before it began to be used out in the open, in the form of political theatre.

Fallen Angel (1945)

"Hey you — I’ve seen the sleeping act before. You know your ticket ran out the last stop!"

With these words a sassy ass bus driver drops off the world’s next noir victim on the outskirts of Walton, and in the middle of the night.

It’s Fallen Angel, a film noir starring Alice Faye, Dana Andrews and Linda Darnell, director Otto Preminger.

Stuck in Walton, 150 miles short of his destination, our anti-hero Dana Andrews wanders into the local diner, where the locals are up to a decent amount of skulduggery, worried about a missing girl called Stella.

It isn’t long before the said floozy breezes in, her legs at a dangerous angle.

She swipes the hero’s hamburger and he exits to wander the streets alone.

Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)

Where the sidewalk ends, morality falls away, darkness prevails and in the black folds of the night, nobody can see who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy.

Where the sidewalk ends, you’re on your own, making your own moral choices, with no guidance other than your past, and your own spur of the moment errors — your own dry, cold and helpless anger, your vendettas.

In this devilish and dangerous land, film noir lives and breathes — and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) is an epic film noir, one of the greats. It's a film that drives the cynicism home, before kicking it to death in the garage.

Directed by Otto Preminger and starring Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney and Gary Merrill.