The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)

The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) is a Hollywood-based flashback-told drama of hubris and mania in film production, of betrayal and ambition and which shines a harsh critical light on the lives and careers of the producers of the era, and earlier, notably looking at David O. Selznick, or maybe not since he did not sue Metro about it, and maybe it was Daryl F. Zanuck, or Val Lewton or Orson Wells, and a five Academy Award winning ironic homage to Hollywood showing fragmentary multiple POV the ruthless eighteen-year rise and fall of a tyrannical, manipulative Hollywood movie tycoon, directed by Vincente Minelli and Starring Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Barry Sullivan, Walter Pidgeon, Dick Powell, Gloria Grahame, Paul Stewart and Leo G. Carroll.

Station West (1948)

Station West (1948) is a private eye cynical male lead morally ambiguous rugged frontier Western tale of deceit, violence and heists, and is likely a star case of the strangely elusive and debatable category that the cineastes and afficionados refer to as film noir Western, or Western film noir.

Snappy, moody and splashing a wagon load of Sedona scenery, Station West is an earnest and honest item of op class Americana from the days when film noir and westerns were the absolute staples of 

Sidney Lanfield, director, is not best known for film noir although he did direct the 1939 The Hound of the Baskervilles, a classic of more than just one canon, and comedy and romance with a little bit of musical might describe his work. The closest effort to a spy film within his range might well have been The Lady Has Plans (1942), a comedy spy thriller with Ray Milland and Paulette Goddard.

Johnny O'Clock (1947)

Johnny O'Clock (1947) is a sinister snappy-dialogue murder and finally it has to be said classic film noir which is a lot of fun and is surely one of the hidden gems of the who noir effort of the 1940s.

Complex in approach and yet diverting in its charm and snazz, Johnny O'Clock is a waltz through the film noir style, able to copy with mystery, murder, deception and some vile violence, before it wraps up and paces stylishly through its conclusion.

New York gambling house operator Johnny O'Clock played by Dick Powell, is junior partner in a smart  casino with Guido Marchettis (Thomas Gomez) and Chuck Blayden (Jim Bannon), the latter being a crooked cop. 

Split Second (1953)

Split Second (1953) is a nuclear threat hostage film noir — a nuclear noir if you will — that pits some habitual noir lowlife against the atom bomb.

The story follows two convicts, Sam Hurley (Stephen McNally) and Bart (Paul Kelly), who escape from prison with Bart having been shot. They're picked up by their getaway driver Dummy (Frank De Kova) and then hit a gas station, where the foul-tempered Sam kills the attendant (John Cliff). 

The men then hijack a car driven by Kay (Alexis Smith) and her boyfriend (Robert Paige) and set off into a nuclear testing ground where they pick up another two cast members, an attractive drifter called  Dottie (Jan Sterling), who is travelling with a journalist called Larry (Keith Andes).

The Tall Target (1951)

The Tall Target (1951) is a historical film noir crime film starring Dick Powell as a latter-day detective working to foil an assassination plot against then President-Elect Abraham Lincoln.

The action is based on an alleged real life plot to kill the President in 1861, and this historical fact of a possible assassination attempt on Lincoln gives the movie most of its power and interest.

Dick Powell is the star with the period hat and haircut who uses deduction and logic to find who on the train could be conspirators. 

He is straight-up foiled at different times but manages to win the day even when the conspirators have caught him. For effect, the movie's action takes place mostly on the train with the old rocking-camera technique and some fun fights in the steam and in the various parts of the vehicle.

Cornered (1945)

Cornered (1945) brings Dick Powell back to the film noir screen, and opens with him being refused a passport between London and France.

Undeterred, Powell slams his hands in his pockets, storms out of the passport office, and promptly swims the English Channel.

It’s that spirit that dominates Cornered (1945, Edward Dmytryk starring Dick Powell, Walter Slezak, Micheline Cheirel and Nina Vale.) 

The war had only been over for a matter of minutes before the film noir canon kicked off a whole new epoch in cinema — a time of uncertainty, deceit and men whose identities were always up for grabs.

Generally these guys were suckered by deceitful women, but often they didn’t know which way to wear their pants to begin with.

Either way, the post-war male was wholly bruised and confused.

Who exactly was he fighting?

Murder My Sweet (1944)

Humphrey Bogart played Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon in 1941 —  then played Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep in 1946.

But in between these two, we find Dick Powell playing Marlowe in Murder My Sweet (1944, director Edward Dmytryk) — an adaptation of Farewell My Lovely.

History has been kinder to Humphrey Bogart than it has to Dick Powell.

So while most would argue that  Bogart may have been a definitive Sam Spade, Dick Powell does well to capture the charm and cynicism of Marlowe.

In fact, he’s probably proved better at it than anybody else.

Pitfall (1948)

If Fatal Attraction represents the male pitfall-movie of the 1980s, with Glenn Close presumably playing a role akin to the AIDS virus, then Pitfall (1948 André de Toth) is the 1940s equivalent, with Dick Powell sliding into the equally heinous sin of finding life too boring. 

This is exactly the opening scenario of The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, and as in The Woman in the Window, the point is laboured in Pitfall.

With the war done and dusted, in fact, it seemed like a whole bunch of the film noir guys wanted a bit more action.

And there were a bevy of the deadliest women in the world on hand to supply it, steeped in the forbidden social excess and treachery that can only lead to trouble — and of course death.

Murder, My Sweet (1944)

Director Edward Dmytryk is something of a film noir hero.  Born in Canada in 1908, the son of Ukranian immigrants, he was raised in California and began working in the Hollywood studios as a teenager.  From 1935 to 1942 he directed a few B-pictures, but his breakthrough came in 1943 with the anti-Nazi propaganda piece, Hitler's Children.

The two noirs he made after this, Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Cornered (1945) secured his home in the noir canon, and this was followed by the excellent Crossfire (1947), possibly the first Hollywood picture to deal with the subject of racism.

As a left wing liberal however, Edward Dmytryk was one of the first to fall foul of film's furious foes at HUAC, and he became one of the Hollywood Ten for refusing to testify about his so-called un-American activities.