The Killers (1964)

The Killers (1964) is a television-style flashback color Hemingway remake sports motor racing and murder femme fatal and gangster heist fallout and violence against a blind woman Don Siegel almost un- or non-credible cool brutal crime action film noir that is barely a film noir insofar as the noir is far from the habitual armoire of typical style motifs, but is called a film noir nonetheless, with oddly no night time scenes at all, not that excludes it from the film noir category, it is in the style that this nonnoirness nor nihilist nemesis, nor nausea-inducing net of failed morality, but it's crass instead, normal narrative, neatly non-noir, and with the star Lee Marvin and the stars Angie Dickinson, John Cassavettes, and President Ronlad Reagan.

Cry Vengeance (1954)

Cry Vengeance (1954) is an ex-con framed and disfigured ex-cop on a mission violent rural slick vengeance and violence against women film noir with hardboiled cops and a blond psycho hitman on the loose in backwater Alaska.

The orchestras of the 1950s are bigger, bolder, brassier and this mid 50s noir indicates well the period when the hardboiled become so hard that the pan had dried and the metal of its surface had fused into a mighty grimace, here worked by the unsmiling Mark Stevens.

Naked Alibi (1954)

Naked Alibi (1954) is a cop on the edge psycho killer chase thriller that endeavours to spill the ills of suburban America into the criminal wilds of Mexico, as an unhinged killer baker bridges the merciless and pointless gap between the normative strains of the American Dream and the animal flavours of the real world of criminal human agony.

The two tend to meet flatly in the face of the stylistically drowning form of mid 50s noir, when the residues of dramatised psychologically criminality, portrayed with such fun in the 1940s, turn to sour and serious and usually quite odd and unexplained abnormality, as the noir ideals begin to fade mid-decade.

Naked Alibi  (1954) stands as a testament to the enduring allure of film-noir, even as the genre evolved through the 1950s. The film brings together a trio that guarantees a noir masterpiece: Sterling Hayden, Gloria Grahame, and the shadowy ambiance of noir cinematography.