Kitty Foyle (1940)

Kitty Foyle (1940) is an almost or proto feminist classic woman's picture white collar girl class and women's rights flashback romance and melodrama Oscar-winning smoochie love and marriage triangle tale of high sadness and existential mid-century womanly angst in both Philly and Manhattan, facing death of hope and an illegitmate baby, and really not the only film of 1940 to make a massive deal out of a snow globe, starring Ginger Rogers, Katharine Stevens, Dennis Morgan, and James Craig, based on Christopher Morley's 1939 bestselling novel of the same name. 

Three Silent Men (1940)

Three Silent Men (1940) is a Thomas Bentley directed pacifist surgeon and deadly weapon of war early nuclear threat war-themed innocent man accused of murder mystery courtroom largely farcical semi-serious pre-War style but intra-War produced drama noir low budget thriller intriguer, directed by Thomas Bentley and starring Sebastian Shaw, Derrick De Marney, Patricia Roc and Arthur Hambling, written by Jack Byrd and Dudley Leslie.

The Mummy's Hand (1940)

The Mummy's Hand (1940) is a fun flick follow up but not sequel Universal Classic Monsters US horror chiller mummy film directed by Christy Cabanne and produced by Ben Pivar, about the ancient Egyptian mummy of Kharis (played by Tom Tyler), who is kept alive with a brew of tana leaves by The High Priest (played by Eduardo Ciannelli) and his successor Andoheb (played by George Zucco), which used stock shots taken from The Mummy (1932), leftover sets from James Whale's film Green Hell (1940), and musical scores almost entirely lifted from Son of Frankenstein (1939). Wallace Ford and Cecil Kellaway play incredible acting roles keeping the show going, indeed this may even be a Kellaway classic. 

Night Train to Munich (1940)

Night Train to Munich (1940) is a Carol Reed wartime sticky wicket concentration camp train and mountain and foreign territory based super anti-Nazi Alfred Hitchcock-influenced spy thriller by the mighty Carol Reed and starring Rex Harrison, Margaret Lockwood and Paul Henreid, and written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, and itself derived from Gordon Wellesley’s 1939 tale “Report on a Fugitive,” which charts the perilous tribulations of a brilliant inventor and his devoted daughter, both spirited away by the Gestapo in the ominous shadow of the Nazi incursion into Prague on the very brink of global conflagration, while into this treacherous milieu steps a resourceful operative of His Majesty’s Secret Service, who insinuates himself into the upper echelons of the German military machine, assuming the guise of a senior officer and feigning amorous interest in the young woman, all in the delicate hope of luring her and her invaluable father from the tightening coils of the Nazi embrace.

Island of Doomed Men (1940)

Island of Doomed Men (1940) is an undercover cop prison exploitation lousy husband film noir adventure shocker about sadistic capitalistic island owner in conspiratorial league with the US prison system, who runs a mean slave labour based penal island where he keeps his wife a captive, and where he is bothered to his downfall by a domestic monkey.

Peter Lorre is that island owner in Island of Doomed Men (1940), the prosaically named Stephen Darnel who runs a mean slave colony, with a sophisticated home enclave of dreams, flowers, a kitchen, grand piano, electric fence and a domestic monkey.

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.

Contraband (1940)

Contraband (1940) is a Powell and Pressburger British espionage wartime maritime female super hero nautical erotic romance thriller with shades of the early noir style, and shades too of what may be called 'camp expressionism' or 'expressionist camp', along with very early noir-style markers apparent in the blackout-Britain style approach which presents a wartime underworld London, in a time of real peril, when national identity becomes a matter of life and death, and where pluck and humour bob to the surface to provide the Limey noir feel that only the besieged Britain could provide, offering in fact what became the cementing of several clichés for all time including the female spy hero.

Without any shadow of a doubt it is time once more to turn to Dan Hodges and his studies on spy noir and its place in the origins of film noir in the UK and the US.

The Invisible Woman (1940)

The Invisible Woman (1940) is an US science fiction comedy film with little to commend it to the regular noir nor horror marketeer noireau, and yet comedy included it still grabs the headlines with its genre mixup and inevitable 1940s-style gender statements. It features Virginia Bruce, John Barrymore, John Howard, Charles Ruggles, and Oskar Homolka.

The Invisible Woman is an US science fiction comedy film. In this fil, well, to say the least an attractive model with an ulterior motive volunteers as guinea pig for an invisibility machine. Danger and hilarity and gender immorality ensues.

Black Friday (1940)

Black Friday (1940) is a brain transplant crime movie from the nascent moments of horror cinema as an as of yet undefined genre, and it is a film that shared some thematic and technical elements with the emerging film noir style.

With no monster as such to boast of and little in the way of a full mad scientist trope Black Friday does imply the crime genre full on in its fantastic progress to a sane conclusion.

Excuses for maddened acting and raw death row fun combine realities which could only in essence be explored in 1940, with no fully developed tropes fully recovered and broadcast in the cinemas, trope combination produced no end of experimental forays into what could have been.

The brain transplant movie genre emerged during a period no doubt of fascination with medical advancements and the exploration of the human psyche in cinema. 

Johnny Apollo (1940)

Johnny Apollo (1940) is an inter-generational double identity crime and prison break film noir from early in the cycle.

Directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Tyrone Power and Dorothy Lamour, Johnny Apollo tells the story of the son of a jailed financial and corporate embezzling broker who turns to crime to pay for his father's release.

Tyrone Power fits the title role of Johnny Apollo well. 

The name Johnny Apollo is a crazy, spontaneous, to-heck-with-it whassin-a-name spur of the moment decision for his character Robert Cain, Jr. whose father (played by Edward Arnold) has been jailed for some white collar securities violations, an event which brings his son's soft and privileged life to an end.

Brother Orchid (1940)

Brother Orchid (1940) is a Warner Bros. comedy gangster caper which while not a part of the classic film noir cycle, is an interesting stop on the route.

One of five films to star both Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson, Brother Orchid is a  shenanigan-based production which manages to eke out comedy from gangsterism — never truly easy in the era — while combing a spiritual and moral aspect, which doesn't quite pull the criminality from crime, but refashions it for social purpose.

The story kicks off with crime boss Little John Sarto (played by Edward G. Robinson) retiring suddenly, giving leadership of his gang to Jack Buck (played by Humphrey Bogart) while he leaves for a tour of Europe to acquire 'class'. However, Sarto is repeatedly swindled and finally loses all his money in a series of daft newspaper headlines.

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.

Castle on The Hudson (1940)

Castle on the Hudson (1940) is an early classic film noir high drama morality-guided prison movie with several differences. 

Hubris-powered hood John Garfield has ambitions to be The King of New York. 

He's young and good-looking, and filled with the kind of confidence that was popularised by the full-on gangsters of the 1930s.

He owns the night clubs and he owns the streets and he's just the sort of hero we have seen emerging over the last decade, out of the pre-Code era and into the fully coded sort of productions as Castle on the Hudson represents.

Working his way up from the streets, the hoods and mobsters of the 1940s were a special kind of gift to the world. American cinema offered more than a taste of evil, but a full on immersion into the lifestyles of the rich and criminally infamous.

They Drive By Night (1940)

A box office hit in its day, They Drive By Night (1940), with George Raft, Ida Lupino, Ann Sheridan and Humphrey Bogart is a film noir trucker movie, which opens on the embattled lives of some West Coast fruit hauliers, and closes on murder, madness and corporate corruption ― as obsession and madness destroy femme fatale Ida Lupino’s life.

The rub is that director Raoul Walsh had a flair for subverting genres, and really only made what you might call “Raoul Walsh pictures” whatever the basic  genre ― and this one is about as Raoul Walsh as you can get.

It’s a trucker movie, it’s a comedy, it’s a romance and it’s a thriller. It’s a picture about class relationships and the cutthroat nature of business; and it’s a picture about madness and the little guy rising to the top.

Raoul Walsh ― who also made the following film noir favourites ― High Sierra (1941); Pursued (1947); and White Heat (1949) ― had a feeling feeling for regular people, informal surroundings, and he portrays the hustle and bustle of working life very well.

Rebecca (1940)

Rebecca (1940) is the Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece that won Best Picture and Best Cinematography Oscars in 1940, and was nominated for seven more, and may both be and not be held by those who have a say in these matters to be a film noir.

But if Rebecca is not an example of film noir, what then is Rebecca, with its suspense, mystery, paranoia and brooding atmosphere?

Rebecca in fact while not held as being film noir, does feature many of the aspects of the genre which may be called the paranoid woman film: a young woman, captive in body and mind, lost in a spooky house masquerading as a family home; and a husband who may or may not be homicidal, possibly also even suicidal.

Thing is, in this production, the husband is captive too, which may be a more accurate psychological assessment of marriage. At the very least, Rebecca is a firm and fine example of the paranoid woman genre, and is certainly also to be considered in many aspects as -  an example of film noir.

Angels Over Broadway (1940)

Angels Over Broadway (1940) is a pretty little film noir B-picture, with elements of comedy and farce tagged on to some more usual elements, which include a suicidal male lead and some hoods playing a crooked game of poker.

The 'angels' of the title ultimately gather around an insecure and insignificant little man who is about to kill himself, due to  mis-appropriated $3,000.

These three unlikely characters are grifter and street-dwelling shark-about town Douglas Fairbanks Jnr; confident and innocent girl-on-the-up Rita Hayworth, and playwright and bombastic drunk, Thomas Mitchell.

What starts as a scam against the suicidal man is transformed by this unusual crew into more of a long con, when the four conspire to cheat some very bad gang-members out of money in a seedy high stakes game.

The mark, in effect turns the tables and becomes the conman, although this high risk strategy of course doesn't play out as expected.

Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)

Eddie Robson, who is one of the world’s most thorough-going experts on film noir, is determined that Stranger on the Third Floor is the world’s first film noir. 

Not that one should spend a lot of time on this debate, but still it’s discussed. And he might even be right!

Despite being heavy on the expressionist shadows and the hapless hero, Stranger on the Third Floor lacks a few key noir elements, notably the femme fatale or bad girl — of which there is none.

But Stranger more than makes up for that in shadows and the psychological blurring of dream and reality.