I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang (1932)

I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang (1932) is a proto-noir pre-Code prison and prison break film noir classic of American penal servitude and injustice, laying the ground work for many noir movies which followed, thematically 

The 1932 film I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is a remarkable example of pre-Code Hollywood’s capacity to blend searing social critique with gripping drama. Adapted from Robert Elliott Burns' memoir, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!, the film portrays the systemic brutality of the Southern penal system during the 1920s. 

Dillinger (1945)

Dillinger (1945) is a cheapo-epic biopic crime heist, robbery, murder, prison and prison-break film noir which was the breakthrough role for tough guy villainous noir actor Lawrence Tierney, directed by Max Nosseck and co-starring Anne Jeffreys, Edmund Lowe, Marc Lawrence, Elisha Cooke Jnr and Eduardo Cianelli. 

Packed with fun, action and menace, and oddly replete with cinematic meta-mechanics, Dillinger (1945) cannot be flawed for anything other than historical accuracy. 

Historical accuracy might have gone against the grain, too. The minute makers of 1945, fresh off the tracks of the great crime film experiments of the 1930s, which incidentally probably amount to the greatest body of work of 1930s cinema, were imminently to collide with state forces and the Production Code was in fullest sway, and so accuracy might have been well sacrificed.

Mr Arkadin (1955)

Mr Arkadin (1955) is an Orson Welles mystery drama French-Swiss-Spanish co-produced espionage film noir, also known as Confidential Report and as is not unusual for a plagued Welles production, one which exists in several edits and versions.

In an 1991 essay The Seven Arkadins, writer  Jonathan Rosenbaum identified seven different versions of the story, and since its initial publication, two more versions have emerged, including a novel and a stage play. 

When Welles missed an editing deadline, producer Louis Dolivet took the film out of his hands and released several edits of the film, none of which were approved by Welles. 

Adding to the confusion is a novel of the same title that was credited to Orson Welles, though Welles claimed that he was unaware of the book's existence until he saw a copy in a bookshop.

City For Conquest (1940)

City for Conquest (1940) is an epic Warner Bros. stories-of-the-city style prestige picture with a few filings of film noir placed within its frames, which tend to sprawling grandeur rather than intimate psychological portrayal.

Manhattan melodrama is the pure-bred genre this humanistic tale of immigrant struggles in New York City, does not fare high in noir, but is still a part of the story of the style, above all in the efforts of Warner Bros. to depict James Cagney as something more than a criminal, a boxer on the rise and fall, a story paralleled by the story of his young love Peg Nash, played by Ann Sheridan.