Crime Of Passion (1957)

Crime Of Passion (1957) is a cops in suburbia story of female subjugation by the American Dream, and the story of how one career woman in love regrets her decision to quit her job in the media and become a housewife.

Many of the favourite flavours of noir are evident in a curiously uncorrupted and happy cop shop whereas the subtle rot of suburban morality that is often unsubtly recorded in film noir is placed on a slow burn beneath the lot of this movie.

The men are the men and the women are the women in this vision of 1950s USA, and most especially of all this is a noir of suburbia, a tale of the middle classes and the stifling inability of the new American Dream to cope with any abnormality in the moral and gender relations of the day.

Hell on Frisco Bay (1955)

Hell on Frisco Bay (1955) is a satisfying colour flick set in and around the fishing wharf areas of San Francisco Bay. 

The picture opens as ex-cop Steve Rollins, played by Alan Ladd, is paroled and leaves San Quentin Prison in order to search San Francisco for the mobsters who framed him for manslaughter.

It's a pretty exciting opening few scenes, and it doesn't look like the gates of the prison have changed at all in the last seventy years. Of Steve Rollins prison years, we learn little, although they may likely have amounted to their own hell on Frisco Bay. Because of course, cops in stir are not usually that popular.

There at the gate of San Quentin, waiting for him, is his wife and former police partner. As his wife has been unfaithful to him while he was banged up, it appears, Steve Rollins rejects her and opts to take the bus to town. 

In this decision, his partner joins him, leaving the wife alone; the first of many casually handled scenes involving women on Frisco Bay.