Smooth as Silk (1946)

Smooth as Silk (1946) is a femme fatale drunk driver killer playboy in theatreland razor-edged B-noir backstage thriller where Virginia Grey weaponizes glamour, ambition, and male stupidity in a vicious spiral of seduction, betrayal, murder, and theatrical revenge.

The Best Years of our Lives (1946)

The Best Years of our Lives (1946) is a returning veteran epic post-war romance and social adjustment classic and sweeping melodrama of PTSD, alcoholism, social manners and physical disability charting America's adjustment to the post war order with broken limbs, broken relationships, broken aircraft and civilian indifference, directed by William Wyler and starring Dana Andrews, Harold Russell, Myrna Loy, Cathy O'Donnell, Frederic March, Virginia Mayo, Teresa Wright, Steven Cochran and with best of all perhaps, Hoagy Carmichael on piano.

Temptation (1946)

Temptation (1946) is a shady lady femme fatale scheming wife and marital infidelity historical flashback and voiceover lousy Egyptologically obsessed husband brooding jealous and lust based on a play film noir murder melodrama starring Merle Oberon, Paul Lukas, George Brent and Charles Korvin.

The Beast with Five Fingers (1946)

The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) is a creepy euromad historical whodunnit mad pianist and body horror gothic wandering hand vintage special effect horror suspenser with the most unique and unusual music, and directed by Robert Florey and written by Curt Siodmak, and starring Andrea KIng, Robert Alda, Peter Lorre, J. Carrol Naish and Victor Francen, and though we may say whodunnit, when we know that it's the the hand that dunnit, the structure of the whodunnit does override the horror, with the Poirot-like detective making a bumbling but brave and coherent stab at solving the crazed mystery. 

I See a Dark Stranger (1946)

I See a Dark Stranger (1946) is a neglected masterpiece espionage and Irish republican IRA hopeful British Sydney Gilliat and Frank Launder voiceover for comic intensity and commentary woman's film noir and adventure story post war reflection picture comedy starring Deborah Kerr and Trevor Howard, commencing in Ireland in 1937 and following young Bridie Quilty who has grown up listening to her father's heroic tales of the Irish Revolution, . . . . .  she develops a hatred for everything and everyone British, especially "the wicked murdering blackguard" Oliver Cromwell. By 1944, Mr. Quilty has died. Bridie, who is now 21, sets out for Dublin to carve a life of her own, hoping to join the IRA. 

Duel in the Sun (1946)

Our sojourn with Cotten continues softly, its rewards modest, humane, and widely felt. Yes, indeed, this may not be his film, but the Cotten retrospective continues in a tone of soft confidence, gratifying precisely because it does not overreach.

Duel in the Sun (1946) is a big budget, trashy, overblown, fuss and lust in the dust perfect and strange Technicolor violence against women and girls epic ethnically unengaged and super-classic Jennifer Jones ill-informed diegetically failing mainstream meta-normative-narrative and hegemonic conservatism-inducing psychological western family feud and patriarchal posturin' romance fantasy drama David O. Selznick dream cinematic vision directed by King Vidor, with several directors being left uncredited for their work in the film, such as Josef von Sternberg, William Dieterle, William Cameron Menzies, Otto Brower, Sidney Franklin and Selznick himself, while production unit managers Glenn Cook and William McGarry were also uncredited, and starring Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Herbert Marshall, Lillian Gish, Walter Huston, Butterfly McQueen and Lionel Barrymore.

The Killers (1946)

The Killers (1946) is a classic film noir potboiler western-style revenge movie re-styled in the gangster mold post war study in masculinity flashback within flashback but no voiceover prison boxing crazed love and fatal existential doom laden hitman themed compote de criminalitie and lustful love forlorn longing and rejection, directed by Robert Siodmak, and starring  Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien and Sam Levene, with extra noir plus ultra provided by William Conrad, Charles McGraw, Albert Dekker and Jack Lambert.

She-Wolf of London (1946)

She-Wolf of London (1946) is a historic romantic foggy London lupine lycanthropic murder mystery police procedural women alone in a gothic mansion average film of mystery which certainly qualifies for film noir in many aspects and without offering too many spoilers, is also much within the paranoid woman genre, although which is somewhat blended in the not too wolfy mix — though don't go be expectin no monsters cuz there bain't be none I'm afraid.

Strange Impersonation (1946)

Strange Impersonation (1946) is a female scientist romance and love rivalry and disfigurement and hallucinogenic psychological fantasy jealousy and blackmail film noir plastic surgery melodrama by Anthony Mann and starring Ruth Ford, Hillary Brooke and William Gargan, all of whom combine to produce a block rocking cheapo fantasy film noir narrative of the first water, making it a film more of classic noir than many a classic film noir, and although this remains thematically and even stylistically classic, the overcoat of fantastic doom and femme fatality and the all important subject of identity, make of Strange Impersonation (1946) a classic of its medium and style, and a classic of its meta-narrational type, exploring the popular idiom and thinking of its day, as it does.

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.

Whistle Stop (1946)

Whistle Stop (1946) is a film noir tale of crazed small town jealousy bursting at the seams with a lousy husband and lousy boyfriend competing over the most beautiful woman of all time in a booze-based gamblathon with train image-ery a-plenty and passing trains and honking trains obviously while whistle stop motifery abounds in a darkened noir manner at the end of hope, as George Raft employs his incredibly still face, and Tom Conway twitches his most incredibly smooth and moustachioed face, and both faces are punched in booze-based and non booze-based rage, and Ava Gardner deploys her incredibly beautiful face.

Deception (1946)

Deception (1946) is an operatic gothic jealousy classical music elite queer coded grandly-themed and doomatically scored outre and artistic Bette Davis, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains film noir from the paragon days of the most virtuoso anti-virtuos black-hearted form of silver-screened entertainment that ever did bedevil the airwaves of the cinematic mind. This was Marshall McCluhan's favourite film of all time.

Maybe it wasn't but then again maybe it was. Only the Large Language Models will ever know that now.

The Razor's Edge (1946)

The Razor's Edge (1946) is an intergenerational returning veteran historical drama episodic male point of view romance adventure two and a half hour Somerset Maugham worldliness versus spirituality adaptation which was a huge romantic hit in its time, and which owes little to film noir, but offers a stable and repetitive cascading style of romance story that is a soft-soap kind of storytelling, offering the purest kind of escape known to 1946.

This is not a film noir, and yet within it lurks the genes of the style not quite activated, but present as the underscored factual spiritual well from which draws a grabbing interest, between the snogs and high-class encounters. In the 1940s they did not have slacker movies, but they did have loafer movies, and this is one.

My Darling Clementine (1946)

My Darling Clementine (1946) is a poetic, mythic Western rather than a noir-inflected one. But yet it surfaces in film noir lists as crossover material, and the big critickers of the century do like to hat-tip it as a noiresque style of western adventure.

I’m curious about the film noir style in My Darling Clementine, noting moody cinematography, deep shadows, lawlessness, and moral ambiguity. Characters like Doc Holliday and Linda Darnell enrich this dark, personal narrative.

Although My Darling Clementine (1946) is most often celebrated as a classical John Ford Western rather than a noir-inflected film, a few stylistic and thematic elements overlap with the film noir sensibility. Below are some of the key noir-like components you can find in the film.

Two Smart People (1946)

Two Smart People (1946) is a goofy capersome madcap kinda screwball-styled film noir-ish buddy movie style road movie style (train would be more accurate) government bond smuggling romance adventure movie, although to call it either a thriller or a film noir might indeed be stretching the definitions of both, though it is an event-filled journey that Two Smart People follows.

Yet Two Smart People (1946) does find its way on to our radar screens, not in the least because it is directed by film noir scion Jules Dassin, making of it Grade-A material for our investigative teams of ardent noireaux.

Bedlam (1946)

Bedlam (1946) is a historical shocker exploitation psychological thriller horror noir based on the drawings of William Hogarth and telling of exhibitionism, cruelty and vintage style madness, sympathy and bedlamites of yore in fig, pose, phantasy and framed with filmic license aplenty, talking much of the madness, and mildly exhibiting the standards of the earliest and most genteel modes of exploitation as cinema.

No monstrous modes of action herein but something that seems to prefigure the British Hammer films of the later 1950s and the 1960s, with a village horror kind of vaudevillian villain most mild torture and cruelty, with visions of captivity dominating the viewers delivered palette of ideas.

Deadline At Dawn (1946)

Deadline At Dawn (1946) is a classic era classic female seeker hero hardboiled amnesia film noir, and a classic film noir which is also a great example of several other film noir sub-styles including cabbie noir, and outre noir.

Full of fun, mystery and menace and with an almost unique script, quipped with an unequaled touch by Clifford Odets, not known for his cinematic writing, and directed by 

The history and definition of film noir remain complex, filled with contradictions and shifting interpretations. Though often described as an American invention emerging from a synthesis of hard-boiled fiction and German expressionism, noir's roots and reach are far broader.

Appointment With Crime (1946)

Appointment With Crime (1946) is a British gangland revenge thriller Limey film noir with a sweet and vile sharp noir edge indicating that the forties filmers of the United Kingdom has been paying attention to the American noir reels, enough to encapsulate and imitate and transplant some of the best noir tropes from one side of the Atlantic to the other, and so with wrist torture, sore wrists, and all manner of wrist attack upon William Hartnell's villainous and hard done by wristless crook.

William Hartnell plays as cool calm and smokin twisted career criminal who like any true anti-hero villain has a peculiar facet or obsession, and in this case it is his wrists.

The Brute Man (1946)

The Brute Man (1946) is an exploitation noir-style civic horror B-feature in which social fears of deformity seem to come alive in the rather blunt capitalisation of the medical misfortunes of Rondo Hatton, some time proto-horror star and former journalist who found a career in film due to his unique facial features, which were the result of acromegaly. Hatton headlined horror films with Universal Studios near the end of his life, earning him a reputation as a cult icon.

In The Brute Man, Hatton plays Hal Moffet. He’s a handsome college athlete disfigured by a chemistry lab accident. Raging at the friend he blames for his misfortune, he sets off on a killing spree. 

This neatly parallels Hatton’s real biography. He was once an athletic youth, but war and disease changed his body. 

Shock (1946)

Shock (1946) is a paranoid woman gaslit-to-madness sanatorium-based evil doctor psychological murder thriller from the golden age of the paranoid woman movie, which is coincident with the golden age of Hollywood, if that is a fact that matters?

The ultimate expression of the paranoid woman trope, so common to the 1940s, has a completely sane female character committed to a sanatorium where she is driven mad, in testing circumstances, brought to the brink, and made mad in the face of truth.