The Front Page (1931)

The Front Page (1931) is a journalism and media Lewis Milestone pre-code screwball death row telephony comedy classic United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" public domain brilliant early talkie perfectly transferring into screen terms a stage classic of the twenties ribald rat-a-tat dialogue movie creation which imagines into life a new American archetype, the fast-talking, hard-drinking newshound who'll do anything for a scoop, starring Adolphe Menjou as Walter Burns, Pat O'Brien as Hildebrand "Hildy" Johnson, Mary Brian as Peggy Grant, Edward Everett Horton as Roy V. Bensinger, Walter Catlett as Jimmy Murphy, George E. Stone as Earl Williams, Mae Clarke as Molly Malloy, Slim Summerville as Irving Pincus, Matt Moore as Ernie Kruger, Frank McHugh as "Mac" McCue, Clarence Wilson as Sheriff Peter B. "Pinky" Hartman. 

Yield to the Night (1956)

Yield to the Night (1956) which is also known by its US release title Blonde Sinner is a classic film noir Limey death row female criminality flashback and voiceover murder exploitation lousy husband prison movie with a mean prison warden trope and revenge thriller element and with a confused fixation on women's legs, and is most overall best enjoyed as a incredible and felt performance from Diana Dors, and showing as it does the descent to madness through lousy husbandry and mannishness in general, was directed by J. Lee Thompson, and includes many sympathetic character acting performances and otherwise strong supporting acting from all and among others Yvonne Mitchell, Geoffrey Keen, Michael Ripper and Marie Ney, and Michael Craig as the lousy Jim Lancaster.

Murder! (1930)

The nascent works of Alfred Hitchcock, those formative exercises in suspense and moral ambiguity produced in the liminal years between silent expressionism and the codified sound era, persist as spectral presences within the embryonic landscape of what would later crystallize as film noir.

Murder! (1930) is an Alfred Hitchcock death row amnesia proto film noir poetic realist murder melodrama locked room  mystery sleuthing and amateur detection story of touring theatre blackmail and early twentieth century racism and transvestite trapeze performance.

La Chienne (1931)

La Chienne (1931) is a French poetic realist film de pur génie puppet show de la vie misery of faked identities, Jean Renoir-noir Paris night-time street scenes murder and fated descent into tramping bummery, all round classique de poetic realism, classic film noir, and ardent ancient treasury of la cinematique-du-crime, in which a dupe is duped by a couple of unsympathetic street denizens of poverty struck human villainy wherein all you own are your clothes and your cigarettes, while also satirising the middle and business merchant class, and the art class, with its mendicant conclusion and historic remaking by Fritz Lang in the equally immortal and immoral bum-quest to the bottom that is Scarlet Street (1945)

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).

Bewitched (1945)

Bewitched (1945) is a paranoid woman psychological voice-in-her-head voiceover flashback assumed identity psychological terror supernatural schizophrenic medical insane woman fleeing marriage hypnotism flashback and voice over film noir from the dark height of the golden age of the silver screen's era.

The term classic film noir does doubtless evoke as it is intended to do, a series of high powered and famous high stakes noir dramas from the period, usually of eminent structure and production, and preserved by film registries and their buffs, citing such names as Double Indemnity and the rest of the well-trod shuffle of the mighty, while 1945 alone boasts the classics of Detour (1845), Scarlet Street (1945), Mildred Pierce (1945), and The Lost Weekend (1945), yes it's the year that film noir won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards.

Hold Back Tomorrow (1955)

Hold Back Tomorrow (1955) is a serious but strange outré death row doomed couple fantasy film noir about two lost romantic souls converging in the darkest of circumstances.

In a dramatic move so odd it could only materialise in the liberally weird machination fantasies of the Hollywood machine in the death-of-film-noir period, which ranges across the five years between 1955 and 1960, a condemned man is offered the chance to have whatever he so desires, under the law, offering a crazed film premise that only a bluff and wild film noir producer in the 1950s could never refuse.

Black Friday (1940)

Black Friday (1940) is a brain transplant crime movie from the nascent moments of horror cinema as an as of yet undefined genre, and it is a film that shared some thematic and technical elements with the emerging film noir style.

With no monster as such to boast of and little in the way of a full mad scientist trope Black Friday does imply the crime genre full on in its fantastic progress to a sane conclusion.

Excuses for maddened acting and raw death row fun combine realities which could only in essence be explored in 1940, with no fully developed tropes fully recovered and broadcast in the cinemas, trope combination produced no end of experimental forays into what could have been.

The brain transplant movie genre emerged during a period no doubt of fascination with medical advancements and the exploration of the human psyche in cinema. 

Black Tuesday (1954)

Black Tuesday (1954) is a violent death row prison break journalism and media gang on the run sociopathic killer film noir.

Shot on sparing sets and more intense and violent than your average 1954 thriller, Black Tuesday with Edward G. Robinson is one of those noir gems that you hear about.

More than the sum of its parts, Black Tuesday (1954) pulls an epic violent bad guy sociopath role from G. Robinson and does so across some of the most unique set scenery of the day.

The two sets largely used are a set of prison sets, including a shoot out exterior, and plenty high angles looking down staircases and across yards. The electric chair scenes are probably the best across the whole style.

The Monster and the Girl (1941)

The Monster and the Girl (1941) is an outré monster death row revenge movie from the golden age of monster death row revenge movies. 

Unorthodox and strange, this crime science fiction courtroom horror thriller revenge monkey noir is a message to film lovers for all time, and stands as an immortal portal to more than just entertainment.

Film noir is one the least issues with The Monster and the Girl (1941) as there is such a delightful heap of unpacking to be made of this short epic, which tells of a mad experiment with monkeydom, and a mad experiment in film making too, as Hollywood feels its way towards the horror genre out of the monster department, while still indulging in its deep passion for monkeys.

more mystery than monster for the main of its short running time, The Monster and the Girl is a courtroom framed thriller mystery told in flashback as the shocked participants of a murder trial piece together the most awful facts that had ever been imagined on screen.

You Only Live Once (1937)

You Only Live Once (1937) is a 1930s couple on the run prison crime drama noir by Fritz Lang, and a super-early film noir classic, the bleakness of which the United States was not quite ready to face.

The picture's true noir inclination arises from the fact that it is about destiny and fate, and is the subjectively told story of the interlocking forces that serve to ruin the lives of a positive and beautiful young couple.

Although everything may at times seem to be going well for this couple, the truth is that everything is going badly. 

An early entry into the sub-genre of fugitive lovers on the lam pictures, the story leans on the legend of Bonnie and Clyde and shows how three times jailbird Eddie Taylor (played by Henry Fonda) is released, after strings are pulled,  into the arms of his adoring gal, Jo Graham (Sylvia Sidney). 

Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)

Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) is the great post-code gangster film. 

The fun truth that is constant about film noir, is that at its heart it does talk about morality. 

Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) directed by Michael Curtiz for Warner Brothers, and starring James Cagney, Pat O'Brien, The Dead End Kids, Humphrey Bogart, Ann Sheridan, and George Bancroft, makes at a stab at futurity and morality, the twin pins that the production is based on.

This is flat out morality with as much gangsterism as could be squeezed on to the screen, while Catholicism beckons from the sidelines, filtered through the rough-housing rough antics of a real juvenile delinquent squad of tearaways, who wreck the movie, much as the real life juvenile actors behaved true to type and wrecked the studio. 

This is an irony because film noir was brought about itself by the imposition of a moral code on cinema production, and film noir became an artistic way to discuss this code and frame its requirements in the most interesting ways possible.

Castle on The Hudson (1940)

Castle on the Hudson (1940) is an early classic film noir high drama morality-guided prison movie with several differences. 

Hubris-powered hood John Garfield has ambitions to be The King of New York. 

He's young and good-looking, and filled with the kind of confidence that was popularised by the full-on gangsters of the 1930s.

He owns the night clubs and he owns the streets and he's just the sort of hero we have seen emerging over the last decade, out of the pre-Code era and into the fully coded sort of productions as Castle on the Hudson represents.

Working his way up from the streets, the hoods and mobsters of the 1940s were a special kind of gift to the world. American cinema offered more than a taste of evil, but a full on immersion into the lifestyles of the rich and criminally infamous.

Decoy (1946)

Decoy (1946) is a low budget, cheaply plotted film noir thriller and shocker, premised on an idea that has elements in common with horror, as it re-animates a dead con in a miraculous escape from death row.

The source of the drama is easily stressed -- it's a box with $400,000 in it, the proceeds of a robbery.

And the leading actor in the villainous and double crossing pursuit of this box, is an energetic and deadly femme fatale performance from Jean Gillie, a British actor in her first American film role.

Actor Jean Gillie had a short, short life and Decoy, for all its ills and budgetary constraints was her penultimate film role.

For a film that doesn't boast much in the way of star performances, or glorious set pieces, Jean Gillie gives a helluva lotta goods in this short and at times brutal film noir.