Peking Express (1951)

Cotten remains our guide, the Joseph Cotten season drifting forward with an air of gentle fulfilment.

Peking Express (1951) is a William Dieterle anti-communist yellowface post-war returning veteran trains in noir remake thriller action adventure starring Jospeh Cotten, Corrine Calvet, Edmund Gwenn, Benson Fong, Marvin Miller and Soo Yong.

What follows is a deliberately confrontational act of reinterpretation, an academic recomposition that refuses both ideological timidity and critical fashion. I write not to soothe but to correct, and as I have already declared elsewhere, « la neutralité est la posture préférée de ceux qui n’ont rien à perdre », a statement I repeat here not as ornament but as methodological principle.

The Bigamist (1953)

The Bigamist (1953) is a downbeat lousy husband melodrama of loneliness and freezer salesmen about an almost accidental case of bigamy and the sad perils of being a man in the 1950s, told in flashback and voiceover, showing who a fifties bloke-man unwittingly partaking of two marriages for mundane and perfectly normal reasons, crafted in an eternally dramatically perfect style by the great master of film noir, Ida Lupino, and starring Ida Lupino herself, and Edmond O'Brien in the title role, and Edmund Gwenn as an avuncular adoption official, and Joan Fontaine, and Kenneth Tobey.

The Trouble With Harry (1955)

The Trouble With Harry (1955) is an Alfred Hitchcock shaggy dog black comedy iconic and laconic absurdist Beckettian farcical narcissistically inclined fantasy romance melodramatic lampoon burlesque send-up Technicolor travesty with John Forsythe, Mildred Natwick, Jerry Mathers, Edmund Gwenn, Shirley MacLaine in her film debut, and Royal Dano, and is one of Hitchcock’s few unequivocal forays into comedy, though it remains consistent with his habitual use of irony and dark, tongue-in-cheek humor while being also notable for its unusually frank dialogue, exemplified by John Forsythe’s unembarrassed declaration of his wish to paint Shirley MacLaine’s character wiff no clothes upon her!

Let me go on, The Trouble With Harry (1955) is not an film noir, nor has much noir adjacent styles themes nor tones, nor noir inflections as they are called, but as a Hitchcock film made in the era, noir abiding, and not a classic of anything much other than perhaps curiosity or absurdism, it is still be included in our global survey of the decade.

Dangerous Partners (1945)

Dangerous Partners (1945) is a mystery buddy cheapo Nazi Edward L. Cahn film noir of obscure narrative and displaying a certain laxitude of pacing and insecurity of continuity, acted as such, told as such an almost ideaful and adventuresome manner to make it a variety of multi-stranded and free form unboxed version of noir, created on the hoof out of inexpensive and still quite directionless cinematics.

The first frames of Edward L. Cahn’s Dangerous Partners are not introductions but disruptions. We enter not into a scene set up for comprehension but into a disarray of wreckage: a plane crash, bodies, survivors, and the peculiar urgency of strangers trying to force open a briefcase. 

Main Street After Dark (1945)

Main Street After Dark (1945) is a bunco-detail  criminal family crime drama pawn-brokered pistol packing mugging conspiracy Edward L. Cahn cheapso randomly told film noir thriller, etched into the back of the noir alley paper hoardings, seen only when you pull away from the possibility of sensible thriller cinematics, says The Noircades Project.

Undercurrent (1946)

Undercurrent (1946) is a paranoid women lousy husband drama woman's picture-style essential woman's picture film noir story of riches, jealousy, egregious abuses of domestic trust, and all out manic equine-based murder plot around a mystery Mitchum-alike sibling and significant and pressing hunky love interest in a rough leather jacket.

Undercurrent starts with normality, suburbia in the snow, the very surface that film noir was about to break, when 1946 spilled into the century and sped the future on with its weirdismal messaging about the martyrdom and murderdoom of wifely women.

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.

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

Foreign Correspondent (1940) is an early American period Alfred Hitchcock wartime journalism and media political adventure anti-Nazi propaganda espionage romance thriller chase and assumed identity movie, not in any sufficiency of the term as film noir, but most importantly a spy noir, and an espionage adventure, made noir almost with the advent of the twentieth century's best known bad types, the Nazis. 

Made in, for and about a morbid and bellicose hiatus period before the United States entered Word War II and when World War II had no name and is referred to as 'a general war', when Germany has invaded Poland but Russia is still in Alliance with Germany and Britain is at war of a sudden, while Holland is Nazified and occupied and makes up most of the set piece glory, most famously some windmill scene and scenery, amounting to some of the best and if not the best windmill film of the century.

Them! (1954)

Them! (1954) is a science-fiction nuclear monster red scare big bug monster film, which was a huge and surprise hit in its day.

The film is based on an original story treatment by George Worthing Yates, which was then developed into a screenplay by Ted Sherdeman and adaptation by Russell Hughes.

Directed by Gordon Douglas, and starring James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, and James Arness, Them! (1954) was one of the first of the 1950s nuclear monster films, and the first big bug feature film to use insects as the monster.

A small girl is found wandering alone in the New Mexican desert, the only survivor of an unknown calamity that befell her family. When roused from her catatonia, she can only scream: "Theeeem!"