House by the River (1950)

House by the River (1950) is a lousy husband historical 'accidental' murder body in the river sex pest film noir, directed by Fritz Lang and starring Louis Hayward, Lee Bowman and Jane Wyatt.

The lead character is a manipulative and power-crazed failing writer, who finds that the murder of his maid, and the publicity it gives him, has a huge effect on his writing career.

He of course next makes the mistake of writing out his murderous tale of inappropriate groping lust into a novel, but this is not his undoing.

His undoing is his guilt and his ineptitude at manipulating those around him, which he achieves through a mixture of anger, belligerence and snobbish posturing as he bullies his rather weak brother into greater complicity in the crime.

711 Ocean Drive (1950)

Vintage Columbia Pictures 1950 crime film noir 711 Ocean Drive, starring Edmond O'Brien, Joanne Dru and Otto Kruger, tells the story of how an ambitious and happy go lucky expert in telephony becomes a mean and vicious gang-land leader.

It's a wandering tale of crime, bookmaking and the perils of making a fast and succesful rise in the world of gangsterism.

It leads us from the small bookies of coastal California, through the high lives and low lives of its gangster antagonists, to wind up on and within the Boulder Dam in Arizona, where the gangster meets his inevitable end.

Edmond O'Brien is known from other contemporary film noirs such as The Killers, A Double Life and The Web (all 1947), to D.O.A.and Backfire in 1950.

And he does good guys just he does bad guys, and here we see him doing both.

Sure, he starts off as the wisecracking and fun telephone engineer, who likes nothing more than to bet in the horses.

But when he has the bookmaking system explained to him, and the importance of telephony, he is offered a job that he can't refuse.