Citizen Kane (1941)

Citizen Kane (1941) is not considered to be an example of film noir and yet there would barely be one reel of classic film noir at all were it not for this American drama film directed by, produced by, and starring Orson Welles.

Also starring Joseph Cotten and the players of the Mercury Theatre Citizen Kane appears right at the start of the great film noir years, and was released in same year as The Maltese Falcon, High Sierra and I Wake Up Screaming — all of which are full fat noir, proving the style was already underway.

At the same time, there's a case to be made for the fact that Citizen Kane is the archetypal, primal, principal and inceptive American film noir production.

Citizen Kane is not a crime film and does not feature any murder, femmes fatales, post-war anxiety, paranoia or otherwise any saps, heels, mooks, cops, roscoes, police procedural brutality or wandering palookas astray in an alienating urban environment.

Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)

Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) is a fun Pre-Code horror pre-Noir classic from Michael Curtiz, starring Glenda Farrell and Fay Wray.

This is a horror picture from the filmic age of innocence when in theory anything went before the Film Production Code cracked down on everybody and made morality great again, probably and incidentally creating the film noir of the 1940s and 1950s as it did so.

When sculptor Ivan Igor's London wax museum is burned down by his treacherous partner, he is left devastated. 

Ten years later in the then-present day New York, Igor opens a new museum, with more lifelike statues than ever before. Something mysterious and evil is behind his genius for wax likeness, but what could it be!

Horror films of the 1930s are an interesting prospect. Horror films of this time don't really lay bare the cultural zeitgeist, but usually looked at how science, crime and the supernatural intersected.