Dark Waters (directed by André De Toth, 1944) doesn't follow the obvious conventions we associate with the film noir style, such as the long shadows, the urban setting, the tough guy talk, the femme fatale and the cruelty of fate.
But these weren't the only aspects of the movement, and although it's not overt in the more traditional noir crime stories of the 1940s and 1950s, Freudian psychology looms large in the cycle, and is pressed to the fore in such hits as The Woman in the Window.
Dark Waters also tips it hat to Freudian therapy, but that should be obvious from the title. It follows patterns largely established in the hit film Rebecca, and is typical of the paranoid woman film of the time.
