A Place In The Sun (1951)

A Place In The Sun (1951) is a rich and poor love and melodrama classic American tragedy American Tragedy adaptation corporate America family drifter lousy fiancée tortured young man marital fear and unwanted pregnancy fear murder or not quite murder film noir starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, in which a poor boy gets a job from his rich uncle and ends up falling in love twice, and not coping, and this is directed by George Stevens and is a great Oscar winner, a great, great Oscar winner.

The Strange Door (1951)

The Strange Door (1951) is a Joseph Pevney directed grand guignol gothic melodrama historical horror film noir women as chattels fantasy escapist historical nonsensical sensational portraits in film noir captive family member and psychopathic historical baron combination chiller-costume melodrama tale of madness, greed, insanity, revenge and loving heroism, starring Charles Laughton, Boris Karloff, Sally Forrest and Richard Stapley, based on the short story The Sire de Maletroit's Door by Robert Louis Stevenson, and sometimes rolling with the alternative title of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Door (1951).

Peking Express (1951)

Cotten remains our guide, the Joseph Cotten season drifting forward with an air of gentle fulfilment.

Peking Express (1951) is a William Dieterle anti-communist yellowface post-war returning veteran trains in noir remake thriller action adventure starring Jospeh Cotten, Corrine Calvet, Edmund Gwenn, Benson Fong, Marvin Miller and Soo Yong.

What follows is a deliberately confrontational act of reinterpretation, an academic recomposition that refuses both ideological timidity and critical fashion. I write not to soothe but to correct, and as I have already declared elsewhere, « la neutralité est la posture préférée de ceux qui n’ont rien à perdre », a statement I repeat here not as ornament but as methodological principle.

Assassin For Hire (1951)

Assassin For Hire (1951) is a contract killer stricken with remorse murder sleuth and plod procedural family hitman Limey British film noir with Sydney Tafler voicing an uncomfortably cliched and inappropriate Italian accent, a secret life or identity noir, in which, pretending to be a rare stamp dealer, a Tafler man supports his wife, and in an embarrasmenta of mama-style Italiante clichés, his musically talented younger brother, lives a secret nocturnal life as a hitman, nipping out of the same card game at the same café, to bump off unworthy Limey marks.

The Man With a Cloak (1951)

The Cotten season advances without strain, and presents a courteous offering that leaves few untouched.

The Man With a Cloak (1951) is a talky and confined gloomy New York gothic mansion genre-less melodrama Poe-posturing old New York style historical murder, deception and drunken curmudgeon paranoid girl poetic justice and wicked housekeeper style twist and turning film noir yarn which plays a special riff with classic literary gothic Americana, and which stars Barbara Stanwyck and Joseph Cotten, wow, and is Poe-infested raven wavin bed-ridden dying uncle of fortune and handsome literary low lifes at the bar and on the streets, with Leslie Caron, Louis Calhern, Jim Backus, and Margaret Wycherly.

Pool of London (1951)

The notion of a Basil Dearden season remains an unexpected and quietly subversive curatorial gesture.

Pool of London (1951) is a post war race relations smuggling offbeat classic British film noir customs officers and river police dockyard and barroom melodramatic crime story in a realistic setting procedural race against time thriller of the river underworld, so declared, and which is of note for portraying the first interracial relationship in a British film.

Night Without Stars (1951)

Night Without Stars (1951) is a romantic ex-collabo returning veteran hitting on a war widow blind man as sleuth somewhat suspenseless suspenser intrigue thriller set in the south of France and employing French cliche and post war ennui in a blindness as a metaphor for blindness adequate British Pinewood oldie noir without stars, featuring David Farrar as Giles Gordon, Nadia Gray, Alix Delaisse, Maurice Teynac, Louis Malinay, Gilles Quéant, Gérard Landry, Pierre Chaval and June Clyde.

Circle of Danger (1951)

The Ray Milland Season Unfolds Without Haste

Circle of Danger (1951) is an American in Britain post-WW2 investigative mystery Limey home nations road movie of mystery with locale-driven shooting in London, Wales and in the Highlands, making a virtue of Patricia Roc's infectious smile and Ray Milland's hatted and haunted pillar to post look as he uncovers a vaguely understandable plot that I am not sure now after two viewings — has ever been explained. 

The circle itself, the circle of danger, the rotunda of peril, is specifically not quite as convoluted as it might otherwise be in a film noir. 

Rawhide (1951)

Rawhide (1951) is a high stakes drama home invasion single mother out on the range heist and robbery ensemble gang on the run stagecoach robbery and overland mail company and relay station noir-inflected Western movie from the later stages of the golden era of the silver screen displaying tropes and sceneries that had been solidly familiar for decades 

It's a western but in any other form Rawhide (1951) would be a film noir. Deceit, revenge, a heist and a home invasion, with robbery, exploitation and a vulnerable hold up.

The western did not seem to update as quickly as did the classic film noir. 

The Secret of Convict Lake (1951)

The Secret of Convict Lake (1951) is a pressure cooker ensemble cast prison break snow-bound gang on the run innocent-man-accused Western movie with film noir tendencies aplenty and a few side comments too on the social roles of men and women, as such relate to heroism, homesteading and justice.

The 1951 Western The Secret of Convict Lake emerges as a unique entry in the genre, distinguished by its noir-inflected atmosphere and an unusually strong female presence. 

Directed by Michael Gordon, the film tells the story of a group of escaped convicts who, after enduring a harrowing journey through the snow-covered Sierra Nevadas, stumble upon a remote settlement populated solely by women. 

The Steel Helmet (1951)

The Steel Helmet (1951) is a written, produced and made during the Korean war, Korean War military man versus man behind enemy lines race relations and American imperialism critiquing buddy movie war noir made by Samuel Fuller, who created it in Californian parks on the cheap while infuriating military authorities and Uncle Sam by using military footage gained from them in order to express that war is a scam and a tragedy and that not all death was glorious, while racism and Imperialism were both real.

Good old friend of Jean Luc Godard Samuel Fuller made this film in ten days with twenty-five extras who were UCLA students and he used a plywood tank, he shot in a studio using mist, and he shot exteriors in Griffith Park, a large municipal park at the eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains, in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.

The Girl on the Bridge (1951)

The Girl on the Bridge (1951) is a Hugo Haas single-mother blackmail and suicide kindly old lousy husband and younger showgirl domestic film noir drama, with Beverly Michaels, in the kindlier and more homely of the Haas Michaels collabs of the day.

It's not the only time Haas plays the gentle and elderly immigrant hooking up with a young American girl, show girl or sass girl, we certainly get soem single mom showgirl favours for old watchmaker dudes in this on the face of it and yet in the depths of it also, innocent hass-time fun.

Der Verlorene (1951)

Der Verlorene (1951) is a post-World War II Peter Lorre directed West German rubble vengeance and regret existential experimental-Nazi vivisection lab film noir, directed and starring the recovering morphine-addicted super-scion of film noir, Peter Lorre.

Peter Lorre does manage within the scope of this late period rubble film, to create a most memorable character, although he does so much Lorre drift, peer, stare and smoke, and like all Peter Lorre films, and like all of Peter Lorre's life, the mis en scene is heavy on the cigarette-based action.

Pickup (1951)

Pickup (1951) is a tragic Hugo Haas femme fatale on the make tale of weak and devious minor characters planning murder in a rural backwater, starring Beverly Michaels as a bored and ambitious scheming woman, who attempts in the style of The Postman Always Rings Twice, to kill an older man for his dough.

With its scuzzy setting, between the old railway shack where Hugo Haas' vulnerable old widower lives, the nearby fairground, and the rails themselves, it is a simple an exploitative tale, assuming the worst of the wicked female lead, and the worst of her husband, the sap, the mark in this matter, the man she marries for money.

Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison (1951)

Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison (1951) is a violent prison gang riot escape attempt Crane Wilbur brutal warden crime exploitation jailtime film noir favourite, with docu over tones, and a blazing Steve Cochrane facing down a sadistic screwlord Ted de Corsia while good boy jailor David Brian attempts to bring peaceful methods to the brutalised American penal colony, Folsom California State Prison.

Steve Cochrane grimaces dirty smirking handsome revenge as con Chuck Daniels, a name we should have left at the cell door. Chuck it is though. Chuck is angry. Chuck is gritty. Chuck wants to chuck it all. He is pure dirty fed up with stir.

Death of a Salesman (1951)

Death of a Salesman (1951) is the first based on a play film adaptation of the Arthur Miller 1949 stage drama of the same name, starring Frederc March as the iconic and iconological Willy Loman, the American neveryman, the existential nothing of the coming decades in one staring suicidal staring contest with death.

Just before the film was about to be released, Arthur Miller threatened to sue Columbia Studios over the short that was to appear before Death of a Salesman. This short film, Career of a Salesman, showed what the producers believed was a more typical American salesman, and was an attempt to defuse possible accusations that Death of a Salesman was an anti-American film. Eventually, Columbia agreed to remove the 10-minute short from the film's theatrical run.

His Kind of Woman (1951)

His Kind of Woman (1951) is a Howard Hughes produced adventure comedy face transplant gambler noir with both light and heavy touches and an array of almost spoofily delivered scenes and lines which might have been suggestive of noir satire were it not for Howard Hughes failing movie policies, which always created slightly aberrant Hollywoodish features.

The story of His Kind of Woman (1951) tells of how a deported gangster's plan to re-enter the USA involves skulduggery at a Mexican resort, and gambler Dan Milner is caught in the middle. The end goal is a rather unspecified face transplant operation a variety of post-Nazi science that blends into the Hollywood fantasies of the day, unspoken and feared.

Hollywood Story (1951)

Hollywood Story (1951) is a motion picture industry noir killer thriller historic Hollywood mystery drama starring Richard Conte and Julie Adams, Richard Egan, Henry Hull, Fred Clark and Jim Backus, a high host of noir talent.

The murder in Hollywood trope usually takes a film noir twist and usually with a bit of fun. If it ain't In a Lonely Place it will be elsewhere.

Directed by William Castle, Hollywood Story (1951) takes us on a captivating journey through the glitz and shadows of old Hollywood. In a kind of film noir style, with curiosity and nostalgic tableau. Starring Richard Conte and Julie Adams, this American mystery film weaves a tale of ambition, murder, and intrigue.

Iron Man (1951)

Iron Man (1951) is a violent rivalry blue collar remake boxing film noir sport action movie, making it to the film noir canon for its portrayal of a man's inability to control his fists.

Of all the miserable movie mugs, hats off to Jeff Chandler who pulls the stiffest and hangedest doggest looks, spitting noir at times and flat out desperate to have his cheeks raised in a smile that will never come.

Better still is the coal mining back ground form which these tough mugs emerged, solid mining milieu not so much Zola as Zoloft as a man goes mad with coal dusts and mania.

Not just coaly but a gritty, hard-hitting noir that'll knock you flat on your back albeit in a beautifully photographed ring, and for fans of boxing noir and boxing movies, this must simply be an underrated and overlooked gem, or lump of coal, whichever way you want to look at it. 

He Ran All The Way (1951)

He Ran All The Way (1951) is a John Garfield classic home invasion disillusioned post-war young man turns-to-crime parental nightmare indolent rebel film noir, from the high era of the indolent rebellious criminal youth turns to crime movie style. 

In the murky depths of 1950s Tinseltown, where secrets slither in the shadows and peril prowls at every turn, He Ran All the Way emerges as a gritty yarn of deceit and treachery. 

Directed by the mysterious John Berry and starring the dynamic duo of John Garfield and Shelley Winters, this noir gem plunges audiences into the seamy world of youth in trouble with the law in the doom male post-war era of male doom and desire as doomed males turned to home invading robbery and anarchy, only to satisfy that world-ending craving they have for they know what, only in the movies, and only ever in film noir.