Blues in the Night (1941)

Blues in the Night (1941) is a blues musical roadhouse road movie jazz band drinking and gambling brutal love and betrayal American Dream style rags to riches to institution for the insane violence against women national narrative love steals a man's creative powers hustle and dream montage rail-ridin left-leanin guy becomes a nobody rosy-posy monkey on a stick fast talkin comedy that is among the most fun of all film noir. 

Fun and noir are not the most common of screen-fellows, but this fast-moving wise-cracking funny and feeling love adventure into music, has more packed into its hour and a half than many of its slower contemporaries.

The Woman on the Beach (1947)

The Woman on the Beach (1947), by Jean Renoir, and starring Joan Bennett, Robert Ryan and Charles Bickford, is a fascinating character study, as well as an appropriately twisted dream-noir, telling of an abusive love triangle, acted out by the sea.

Robert Ryan plays Lieutenant Burnett of the Mounted Coast Guard, and as the film commences, we are launched straight into his nightmares. 

Although it is not made entirely clear what is going on, it is highly likely what is presented is another film noir rendering of what we now know as PTSD. 

Burnett, we witness, has recurring nightmares involving a maritime tragedy. He sees himself immersed in an eerie landscape surrounded by a shipwreck and walking over skeletons at the bottom of the sea while a ghostly blonde woman beckons him. 

C'est noir par la mer!

As Burnett walks towards this ghostly woman, the tension increases, and when they finally meet, then boom! He awakens into an explosion of emotion.

Strange as this is, the story becomes stranger still when he sets out for his day job, which involves patrolling the coast on his black horse.

There on the coast he encounters Joan Bennett, the eponymous woman on the beach, a melancholic and lonely character collecting wood for her meagre fire. And he immediately becomes attracted.