The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)

The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) is a Hollywood-based flashback-told drama of hubris and mania in film production, of betrayal and ambition and which shines a harsh critical light on the lives and careers of the producers of the era, and earlier, notably looking at David O. Selznick, or maybe not since he did not sue Metro about it, and maybe it was Daryl F. Zanuck, or Val Lewton or Orson Wells, and a five Academy Award winning ironic homage to Hollywood showing fragmentary multiple POV the ruthless eighteen-year rise and fall of a tyrannical, manipulative Hollywood movie tycoon, directed by Vincente Minelli and Starring Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Barry Sullivan, Walter Pidgeon, Dick Powell, Gloria Grahame, Paul Stewart and Leo G. Carroll.

Ruby Gentry (1952)

Ruby Gentry (1952) is a King Vidor southern gothic jealousy and revenge social climbing voiceover and flashback and religious damnation triple lousy husband and abuse of women despite rags to riches story melodramatic unfortunate accident focusing sex, lust and love with a side story of American entrepreneurship scathing and furious trashy Duel In The Swamp style melodrama film noir with a famous harmonica theme tune and starring Jennifer Jones, Charlton Heston, Karl Malden and Barney Philips, with Tom Tully, Phyliss Avery, Frank Wilcox and Bill Walker. All true so far.

The Gentle Gunman (1952)

The season devoted to Basil Dearden should certainly include this curious and often overlooked film, which stands as a revealing example of his craftsmanship and of the thoughtful social concerns that quietly animate much of his work.

The Gentle Gunman (1952) is a rarely seen post-war English Limey gem wartime Blitz set Ealing take on Irish republican resistance paramilitary operation resistance and internecine war and peace moral Northern Ireland rural and Belfast-based discursive and at times genial and at times brutal adventure drama with Dirk Bogarde, John Mills, Elizabeth Sellars, Robert Beatty and also stars James Kenney who is better historically and famously known round these here parts as Cosh Boy, for he is such.

I Believe in You (1952)

To mount a Basil Dearden season is an unusual idea and of course, one that resists the orthodox rhythms of repertory programming, and yet, and yet, and yet here is that season all the same. The Basil Dearden Season continues next with:

I Believe in You (1952) is an earnest British flashback and voiceover ex-Colonial Office probation officer seeks leisure and seeks social service courtroom-based teenage tearaway and juvenile threat social conscience anti-fun-fair young love and petty crime social melodrama modest Ealing drama exposing post imperial exhaustion, moral fog, bureaucratic hopefulness, and social ache, where reform curdles, idealism bruises, and British decency quietly erodes under persistence film noir by Basil Dearden, and starring Joan Collins, Laurence Harvey, Cecil Parker, Harry Fowler and Sid James.

Rancho Notorious (1952)

Rancho Notorious (1952) is a Fritz Lang female boss violence against women, rape, hate, murder and revenge western pursuit and narrative themes detection and deduction and lustful romance, incidental 'Chuck-a-Luck' music outlaw atmospheric hideaway Technicolor sexy and smouldering one woman and about twenty men pulp adventure starring Marlene Dietrich, Arthur Kennedy, George Reeves and Jack Elam.

Well, the title song promises hate, murder and revenge so this is clearly a noir-inflected product of the cinematic studio.

Diplomatic Courier (1952)

Diplomatic Courier (1952) is a Henry Hathaway Cold War espionage in post-war Europe screwball-adjacent drama romance chase military police procedural thriller, with Tyrone Power, Patricia Neal, Hildegard Knef, Stephen McNally, Karl Malden and special spot appearances from Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin, and a further dynamic and fun extra cross dress appearance

As for screwball, there is a certain sure pedigree of connecting dramatic matter which links the screw of the ball and its previous decades of filmatics and is indicated in Diplomatic Courier (1952), highlighted and brought to our attention when Tyrone Power describes Patricia Neal across a Trieste café bar table as 'screwey'. 

Cosh Boy (1953)

Cosh Boy (1953) is a exciting but also earnestly vile teen exploitation juvenile threat ditto post war youth trouble boom psychopatriarch urban noir also known as The Slasher (1953) movie which studies juvenile delinquency and the spectre of moral collapse in Post-War Britain using the crime thriller format and which charts the birth of cruelty as a form of social and parental guidance for the worrying young persons' culture which the cinema and its co-habiting rock n roll and jazz exponents were cashing in upon, coshing in you might say — — and be warned — — Cosh Boy (1953) has the most vile and violently cruel conclusion in all of Limey post war silver screen flickery. The most violent ending of any film of the decade — reckons .

Wide Boy (1952)

Wide Boy (1952) is a post war Limey spiv noir which is a blend of police procedural, classic fated weakened male lead noir, lousy husband noir, blackmail noir, and the typical descent into crime downward trajectory film noir which was popular as a medium backdrop in the dispositif-forming 1950s, when either teenagers, war-shirkers, and unwise family men move from one relatively innocuous crime — the vending of black market stockings and fags — for wor post-war British purposes 'cigarettes' — to theft, to blackmail  — inevitably to murder.

Seamy Trümmerfilm glamour and ethical collapse collide in this low grade limey film noir.

Something to Live For (1952)

The Ray Milland season continues with a languid, almost metaphysical hesitation, like a thought groping its way through fog

Something to Live For (1952) is an alcoholic uncommunicative male melodrama romance and extramarital affair lousy husband Christmas-based suburban versus the ratted out city of advertising and Americana with its multiple booze options and constant idiotic nagging party scenarios, starring Ray Milland and Joan Fontaine, as the fated foetid couple at large battling the booze against a stable marital backstop of two young boys and the perfected wife=figure, as played by Teresa Wright

The Captive City (1952)

The Captive City (1952) is a small town suburban journalism and media gambling and local corruption organised crime exposé with flashback and voiceover film noir, with epic desk to camera and such a strong Kefauver theme that Estes Kefauver himself appears in the film.

Super strong in its categories, this noir is nearly a classic film noir, and maybe even is such, certainly it is a class film noir, if not a classique. Close up paranoid photography and murder, newspaper men against the odds, small town atmosphere to perfection and an intriguing thug hood and mookery-style delivery under professional organised crookery.

The Thief (1952)

The Ray Milland Season dilates in time, endures with fascination. 

The Thief (1952) is a non-verbal one of a kind atomic age location-shot nuclear secrets classic Ray Milland and Russell Rouse film noir, both innovative and inventive, curious and classic, telling the engrossingly spun paranoid tale of one man's turning Communist spy and his discovery and having to go on the run, with escape and capture fantasy played out across New York, in some most famously shot locals and corners.

The Steel Trap (1952)

The Steel Trap (1952) is a classic-style fifties loner opportunist trash nailbiter heist and paranoia robbery and flight from suburbia film noir starring Joseph Cotten as an weakened male noir lead bank employee who comes up with something of a scheme which once executed, unravels in a fateful manner as he tries to make various flights and escapes and handle the pressure of his actions as they crescendo to a noirish finale.

That finale is a film noir fiction, and this film noir has one of the less noir-like summations as we return to the scene of the real crime, which is suburban America bub.

The Sellout (1952)

The Sellout (1952) is a journalism and media small town crooked cop courtroom and corruption kangaroo and criminal court repping high class low profile film noir drama.

Little known and little loved The Sellout (1952) is a film noir gem, and buzzes with tension and all the undercurrents of psychological and physical force that noirs up the focused greed and determination of the rounded and flawed characters of its small town setting.

Flesh And Fury (1952)

Flesh And Fury (1952) is a rise and fall glamour and gloves biting the dust deaf and mute boxing exploitation film noir with Tony Curtis, Jan Sterling, Joseph Pevney, Mona Freeman and Wallace Ford.

It is almost in a way a new and undiscovered media, what might be called simpleton noir. Joseph Pevney’s Flesh and Fury occupies a fascinating position within the boxing genre, offering a melodramatic yet compelling exploration of identity, class, and vulnerability. 

Scandal Sheet (1952)

Scandal Sheet (1952) is a Phil Karlson journalism and media noir secret past murder drama categorising a cheap, cruel and disgusting press as noir as the swindling murderers who run it, based on a novel by Samuel Fuller, the film director, screenwriter, novelist, journalist, actor, and World War II veteran known for directing low-budget genre movies with controversial themes, often made outside the conventional studio system. 

Scandal Sheet (1952) does remain an engaging noir film directed by Phil Karlson, featuring Broderick Crawford as managing editor of a sensationalist newspaper, John Derek as an ambitious reporter, and Donna Reed as a principled journalist. Based on Samuel Fuller's novel The Dark Page, the film opens with the murderer's identity revealed—editor Mark Chapman (Crawford) kills his ex-wife, setting off a tense storyline as he encourages his staff to solve the very crime he committed.

Affair in Trinidad (1952)

Affair in Trinidad (1952) is an exotically located crypto-Nazi post-war thriller vehicle for the return of Rita Hayworth who had wowed the world in Gilda, and appears here collided once more with some of the same cast including the rough and sarcastically toned Glenn Ford and the bumbling native idiotically styled  craven lackey themed performance by Steven Geray.

It is not as bad as it sounds, and although not a classic noir nor even a noir much discussed, nor a classic of any kind of noir not even non-noir or faux-Caribbean noir, for anyone in the swing of the full film noir journey much of the usual enjoyment is found here, in both the slightly angrier than usual performance from mug in the tropics, Glenn Ford, and the constant soft-focus camera lingering on the multiply costume changed gorgeousness of Rita Hayworth.

This Woman is Dangerous (1952)

This Woman is Dangerous (1952) is a screen-scorching lady gangster dilemma woman-based crime drama with a timely titular suggestion concerning the moral and health and safety proclivities of a gender-based social entity played by Joan Crawford.

A slightly peculiar air of crime fantasy permeates this oddly composed domesticated film noir.

This Woman Is Dangerous is a classic 1952 film noir and crime drama produced by Warner Bros. The movie features Joan Crawford, David Brian, and Dennis Morgan, and tells the story of a woman involved with the criminal underworld who faces the challenge of losing her sight. 

The screenplay, crafted by Geoffrey Homes and George Worthing Yates, draws from a narrative by Bernard Girard. Felix E. Feist directed the film, with Robert Sisk serving as producer.

Sudden Fear (1952)

Sudden Fear (1952) is a paranoid woman psychological stalking thriller film noir from the golden age of sinister and romantic wife's suspicion of her husband pictures.

Ever since Suspicion indeed, on the one hand, and Rebecca on the other, volumes of reel of film have told the tales of the paranoid woman of the era, she is the very sight of the times and the very words sudden fear themselves may be used to describe noir itself, it's attack vogue, it's play in the dark nature, the insuring lustre of stars on the screen, reworking in this case the themes, of suspicion, and the key player in the play of death is a dictating machine, a media within the media.

My Six Convicts (1952)

My Six Convicts (1952) is an earnest prison reform noir drama movie from the very high water mark of the classic film noir era.

Yet maybe just floating upon that watermark does not mean your every film production is a classic, and most certainly of all, unlikely to be a classic of the film noir style.

What My Six Convicts (1952) does manage is a sympathetic-psychopathic portmanteau of movie moodiness with the nascent form of the movie madman being treated of as seriously as it could have been after just having undergone a fantastical 1940s of fun and fear, in which cod-psychoanalytic crime detection became 

The film kicks off with John Beal's arrival at the prison, tasked with trialing a psychological rehabilitation system for convicts. However, progress is slow until Millard Mitchell's seasoned safe-cracker takes a chance on the new doc.

Don't Bother To Knock (1952)

Don't Bother To Knock (1952) is a psychological character study thriller film noir starring Anne Bancroft, Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe and directed by Roy Ward Baker. 

The screenplay was written by Daniel Taradash, based on the 1951 novel Mischief by Charlotte Armstrong. 

In the picture, Monroe plays a blinder as a disturbed babysitter watching a child at the same New York hotel where a pilot, played by Widmark, is staying. 

He starts flirting with her, but over the evening her strange behaviour makes him increasingly aware that she is most mentally disturbed indeed. 

Marilyn Monroe's better known for any number of reasons, but often these reasons are not acting. Here she plays Rose Loomis, she’s got scars on her wrists, a past as murky as the Hudson River, and a penchant for trouble. Rose is the niece of the hotel’s elevator man, a guy who knows more about the guests than the bellhops know about their tips.