A Man Alone (1955)

Übrigens ist er nicht in der Ray-Milland-Saison enthalten.

A Man Alone (1955) is a Ray Milland directed and starring revenge framed man adventure romance angry mob and innocent man wrongly accused father down with a fever nobody's blamin you can make up your own mind, my word against his dangerous man noir inflected gunman film western directed by and starring Ray Milland as Wes Steele, Mary Murphy as Nadine Corrigan, Ward Bond as Sheriff Gil Corrigan, Raymond Burr as Stanley, Arthur Space as Doctor Mason, Lee Van Cleef as Clanton and Alan Hale as Acting Sheriff Jim Anderson.

The Trouble With Harry (1955)

The Trouble With Harry (1955) is an Alfred Hitchcock shaggy dog black comedy iconic and laconic absurdist Beckettian farcical narcissistically inclined fantasy romance melodramatic lampoon burlesque send-up Technicolor travesty with John Forsythe, Mildred Natwick, Jerry Mathers, Edmund Gwenn, Shirley MacLaine in her film debut, and Royal Dano, and is one of Hitchcock’s few unequivocal forays into comedy, though it remains consistent with his habitual use of irony and dark, tongue-in-cheek humor while being also notable for its unusually frank dialogue, exemplified by John Forsythe’s unembarrassed declaration of his wish to paint Shirley MacLaine’s character wiff no clothes upon her!

Let me go on, The Trouble With Harry (1955) is not an film noir, nor has much noir adjacent styles themes nor tones, nor noir inflections as they are called, but as a Hitchcock film made in the era, noir abiding, and not a classic of anything much other than perhaps curiosity or absurdism, it is still be included in our global survey of the decade.

Cast A Dark Shadow (1955)

Cast A Dark Shadow (1955) is a psychopath targeting elderly widows black widower greed and murder English film noir suspenser tale of polished homicide with English cuppa tea undertones and dark shadows of psycho-style fifties persecution and cunning styled as a Limey film noir tale of manipulation and Freudian hang-ups drawing room crime thriller, directed by Lewis Gilbert and starring Dirk Bogarde, Margaret Lockwood, Kay Walsh and Robert Flemyng.

Joe MacBeth (1955)

Joe Macbeth (1955) is a feverish, noir-soaked transposition of Shakespeare’s blood-stained tragedy into a mobster film noir in which ensemble parking garage acting where ambition clashes with brass-knuckled loyalty collapses under the weight of prophecy, and a henpecked trigger man is whipped into grandiose dreams of power by his razor-edged wife, featuring back-alley execution, and guilt-ridden hallucination seeping from the same anxious postwar mood of rising urban brutality and moral corrosion, and starring Sid James as an American, an oddity in itself, and Paul Douglas as Macbeth and Ruth Roman as the all alluring femme fatale star of the show.

The Ship That Died of Shame (1955)

The Ship That Died of Shame (1955) is a wartime flashback Basil Dearden nautical noir smuggling returning veteran adventure bereavement melancholy crime and coastguard foggy channel rockin manly 50s British film noir, which does ultimately serve noir but manages to swerve noir, while being a good yarn and ripping adventure, with the tragic bombing of a wife and the original sound stage equipped with aides throwing buckets of water over the actors during the rougher sea segments of the shooting, a surefire Limey seafaring movie staple.

This film has an Alfie Bass bonus. It has a Bill Owens count that is among the highest in film noir.

Killer's Kiss (1955)

Killer's Kiss (1955) is a moody voiceover and flashback classic boxing and voyeuristic intrigue-driven Stanley Kubrick low budget auteuristic film noir which distils elements of the style into a commercial feature film, almost in fact a moulding of the medium by the master-to-be into a noir-by-numbers example of the form as it was then being recognised by the more observant and critical critics and students of the cinema, as it began to cleave itself away from the staid almost televisually-based look and feel of the mid-decade.

That can be said because 1950s noir, and noir of 1955 and beyond, did tend toward production with a television set in mind, and Kubrick's take, while featuring television as a minor but key plot component, does lean with an artistic eye into the shadowy roots of the style, opting into darkness and closed up lighting as a final look.

We're No Angels (1955)

We're No Angels (1955) is a Michael Curtiz Humphrey Bogart and Peter Ustinov and Aldo Ray Christmas themed inappropriate island based prison break comedy in full studio colour as the trio fun and blunder through some uncanny voyeuristic crapulent more than semi-sexist kind of misery as comedy experience as they play three escapees from Devil's Island, the penal colony of Cayenne (French: Bagne de Cayenne), commonly known as Île du Diable, which was a French penal colony that operated for 100 years, from 1852 to 1952, and officially closed in 1953, in the Salvation Islands of French Guiana.

Man with the Gun (1955)

Man with the Gun (1955) is a lone gunfighter town in distress drifter narrative gunslinger and anarchy western with noirlike tones, and starring Robert Mitchum and Jan Sterling.

In the scorched townscape of Sheridan, 1955’s Man with the Gun offers a monochrome portrait of institutional paralysis and a solitary man’s iron remedy. 

At the heart of this tight-lipped Western, Robert Mitchum stalks the frame with coiled menace as Clint Tollinger, a man whose profession is extermination. 

Rififi (1955)

Rififi (1955) is a classic for-all-time French crime heist criminal gang suspense film noir adaptation of Auguste Le Breton's novel of the same name.

Directed by American blacklisted filmmaker Jules Dassin, the film stars Jean Servais as the aging gangster Tony "le Stéphanois", Carl Möhner as Jo "le Suédois", Robert Manuel as Mario Farrati, and Jules Dassin as César "le Milanais". 

This equippe du crime collab to commit an almost impossible theft, the burglary of an exclusive jewelry shop in the Rue de la Paix. 

The centerpiece of the film is an intricate half-hour heist scene depicting the crime in detail, shot in near silence, without dialogue or music. The fictional burglary has been mimicked by criminals in actual crimes around the world, making of Rififi (1955) more than just a classic of cinema, but a criminal touchstone in tis own right.

New Orleans Uncensored (1955)

New Orleans Uncensored (1955) is a dockside labor-relations boxing mob corruption romance drifter narrative film noir set in America's second largest port, after New York, as the film makers and their voiceovers remind us de temps en temps.

New Orleans Uncensored is a dismal and entertaining noir waterfront drama set in the French Quarter and docks of New Orleans. This low-budget film punches above its balance sheet, as all such films must do, offering viewers an engrossing experience from the opening sequence. 

The plot revolves around freight theft on the docks, with several suspects in play. However, rather than keeping the audience guessing about the perpetrators, the film takes a unique approach by revealing the culprits early on and focusing on the systematic destruction of a criminal network.

The Night Holds Terror (1955)

The Night Holds Terror (1955) is a true-incident-based American crime home invasion exploitation procedural youth violence epidemic extortion hostage drama thriller with John Cassavetes and Vince Edwards noiring up the mid 1950s with a crazed taste for disturbin the suburban peace of the era. 

The Night Holds Terror (1955), directed by Andrew Stone, dramatizes the terrifying ordeal of Eugene M. Courtier, whose real-life kidnapping in 1953 inspired the film. On February 13, Courtier, an Air Force technician, was abducted along a highway in Lancaster, California, by three criminals: Leonard Daniel Mahan, James Bartley Carrigan, and Don Eugene Hall. 

The Master Plan (1955)

The Master Plan (1955) is a Cold War amnesia spy military paranoia post-Korean war mind-control McCarthy era blacklist ahead of its time Limey noir made by Cy Endfield, already exiled from America and resettling within the British film industry.

The Master Plan (1955) is another circa 1955 thriller loss mysteries which open on a transatlantic flight in 'you are American!' mid air kind of whimsy arriving in an all too wrong England, it is sufficient of a noir trope to be expressive for decades, the Korean War is also mentioned in passing quoting banter, while they still also have the overgrown headaches from what they call already the last war.

36 Hours, or as it is daftly or is it deftly otherwise known Terror Street own start this way these characters we meet on the plane, it's the same with another Cy Endfield fun piece from the exact same time, and no surprising because he did fly into England in intrigue and who knows, maybe even disappointment at the old boys of the OSS back home, rooting out the communists.

Blackboard Jungle (1955)

The Blackboard Jungle (1955) is the ultimate mid-1950s juvenile delinquent scare movie and features Glenn Ford in one of his best roles as a teacher in a violent urban school for boys. 

Within The Blackboard Jungle (1955) are both significant lies and truths, as well as discussion of racism underpinned by the thin air of misogyny, and an uncomfortable sexism which is constant enough to form an almost separate movie. Unlike in noir in toto, and this is not noir, there are no interesting roles for women in this man's, man's, man's, man's movie.

Women's Prison (1955)

Women's Prison (1955) is a high period women's prison drama film noir, with a wealth of noir talent and an outré head of steam as it tackles psychopathically sublimated sexual suppression in the form of a violent warder played by Ida Lupino.

Jan Sterling, Audrey Totter, Juanita Moore, Cleo Moore make a cell block of sass and noir dialogue, while outlandish banter and bravado make stir seem fun, although not for the mortally bullied cracked up manslaughter case of a gentle woman cast into hellish chokey, played by Phyllis Thaxter.

Howard Duff plays a pipe pokin heart throbbin prison doctor, who is deeply concerned for the welfare of in particular Phyliss Thaxter's broken form, as she is strait-jacketed, broken, and psychologically torn apart.

Hold Back Tomorrow (1955)

Hold Back Tomorrow (1955) is a serious but strange outré death row doomed couple fantasy film noir about two lost romantic souls converging in the darkest of circumstances.

In a dramatic move so odd it could only materialise in the liberally weird machination fantasies of the Hollywood machine in the death-of-film-noir period, which ranges across the five years between 1955 and 1960, a condemned man is offered the chance to have whatever he so desires, under the law, offering a crazed film premise that only a bluff and wild film noir producer in the 1950s could never refuse.

Creature With The Atom Brain (1955)

Creature With The Atom Brain (1955) is a science fiction noir horror police procedural zombie brain chip implant mindless surrogate domestic terror thriller directed by Edward L. Cahn.

Noir-flavoured science fiction horror exploitation cinema is an important enough niche on its own but adding radiation and nuclear threat and bottom slapping pipe-smoking patriarchy 

As with all good 50s noir and atomic paranoia narrative the suburban dream is safely central to the threat and is the world  normative and in toto at threat of tipping into a void, in this case a radioactive brain chip zombie plague that is able to significantly interrupt national infrastructure, but unable to interrupt the laughing marital rump slapping and after work cocktail of the pipe smoking patriarchy.

The Naked Street (1955)

The Naked Street (1955) is a death penalty pregnancy and child loss crime corruption and extortion frame up film noir by Maxwell Shane starring Anne Bancroft, Anthony Quinn and Farley Granger.

If film noir naming conventions are to be adhered to, then The Naked Street (1955) trumps top in many delightful ways, composed as it is of that favourite noir naming trope — the street.

Lassie slapping noir is a stryle of street noir dirty with villainy and snarls, here delivered by back-handin' Anthony Quinn, some super indented toothy noir by numbers, a film of straight lines.

Studio noir with cool and low down fast action location shooting blended everyday realism with a sense of poetic melancholy. Films of noir often depicted characters living on the margins of society, facing disappointment, disillusionment, and fatalistic views of life.

Murder Is My Beat (1955)

Murder Is My Beat (1955) is a cheapo classic class act Edgar G. Ulmer snow-time sleazy cop uh oh detective and sleazy dame thanks for the company, now it's time to take a little ride, who do you think you are film noir from the back annals of the lost lots of the dark style.

Even as it checked out and evolved into the new riffs of the 1960s and the miracle cop movies of the seventies did elect to emulate its own hey day with pictures like Murder Is My Beat (1955) which seems stuck to 1940s noir tropes in an almost nostalgic manner, as if the picture craved to be made in 1945 and not in 1955.

Patsy Flint as the voiceover tells us, has a hard little package with a cunning brain sharpened by constant grinding against the world. And is that kind of snapping theatrical flat wobbling noir, with its amazing snow-scene surprise, one of the best snow noirs on the block.

It's a frankly exciting story right on the ridge of peril, and with noir merit to spare. It slips in all types and travails, including "I'd seen enough killing in the Pacific," as the noir hero makes weary work in his suit and coat through the worst snow drift in film noir.

I Died a Thousand Times (1955)

I Died a Thousand Times (1955) is colour rural film noir one-last-job heist movie remake of High Sierra (1941).

Filmed in CinemaScope and Warnercolor this color film noir was directed by Stuart Heisler and features Jack Palance as paroled bank robber Roy Earle, with Shelley Winters, Lee Marvin, Earl Holliman, Perry Lopez, Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez, and Lon Chaney Jr.

The stereotypical, comedy-relief character played by black actor Willie Best in the original film was replaced by a Mexican stereotype played by Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez. The film marks the second motion picture appearance of Dennis Hopper's six-decade career, and Nick Adams makes an uncredited appearance as a bellhop.

Tight Spot (1955)

Tight Spot (1955) is a witness protection prison police tough-talking tough-cop versus mob boss film noir, inspired by Senator Estes Kefauver's tactics in coercing Virginia Hill to testify in the Bugsy Siegel prosecution.

It's based on a play by Leonard Kantor, and so is largely contained within a single set, a luxury hotel suite, and within the mix of styles are touches of screwball romantic comedy, courtesy of Ginger Rogers, and material far darker and more in line with the hand of noir. 

It takes place over a weekend before the start of a mob trial and with crucial witnesses murdered, prosecutor Lloyd Hallett (Edward G. Robinson) has only one long shot left in order to prosecute public enemy and nemesis mob boss Benjamin Costain (Lorne Greene)