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.

Man Hunt (1941)

Man Hunt (1941) is a hunted man World War II anti-Nazi political romance drama thriller made by the master of plastering the paranoia far and wide and dep into and out of the cinematic shadows, yes it is Fritz Lang, the plasterer of these shadows, the far and beyond the pale of the scale past maestro of so many of the defining motions of film noir.

Man Hunt is one of Fritz Lang's most compelling films, showcasing his mastery in creating action-packed, humorous, and emotionally gripping thrillers. With the collaboration of superior scenarist Dudley Nichols, Lang crafted a literate and imaginatively photographed film that, despite occasional implausibility, captivates the audience from the start.

Ace in the Hole (1951)

Ace in the Hole (1951) is the ultimate journalism and media noir with the most vile connivance going down between Kirk Douglas as a manically ambitious and revenge-fuelled journalist and a local sheriff in a life or death rescue situation.

Ace in the Hole, which also known as The Big Carnival is directed by Billy Wilder and stars Kirk Douglas as a disgraced reporter who stops at nothing to try to regain a job on a major newspaper. The film co-stars Jan Sterling and features Robert Arthur and Porter Hall.

Kirk Douglas plays "Chuck" Tatum, a frustrated former big-city journalist stranded working for a small  Albuquerque newspaper. Because of his megalo-manic ways and urge to revenge himself he exploits a story about a man trapped in a cave to restart his career, but the situation fast escalates into an out-of-control circus which will end in death, and more death.

Cloak and Dagger (1946)

Cloak and Dagger (1946) is a Nazi nuclear secrets behind enemy lines espionage thriller made partially in the film noir style by Fritz Lang, starring Gary Cooper and Lilli Palmer.

One of a handful of major Hollywood stars of the Golden Age who remained a virtual stranger to film noir, Gary Cooper plays a bachelor nuclear physicist named Alvah Jesper who is working in the United States on the Manhattan Project to build a nuclear bomb. 

Recruited into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) his mission is to make contact with a Hungarian nuclear physicist, Katerin Lodor, who has been working on the German project to make a nuclear bomb and has escaped into neutral Switzerland. 

House by the River (1950)

House by the River (1950) is a lousy husband historical 'accidental' murder body in the river sex pest film noir, directed by Fritz Lang and starring Louis Hayward, Lee Bowman and Jane Wyatt.

The lead character is a manipulative and power-crazed failing writer, who finds that the murder of his maid, and the publicity it gives him, has a huge effect on his writing career.

He of course next makes the mistake of writing out his murderous tale of inappropriate groping lust into a novel, but this is not his undoing.

His undoing is his guilt and his ineptitude at manipulating those around him, which he achieves through a mixture of anger, belligerence and snobbish posturing as he bullies his rather weak brother into greater complicity in the crime.

Clash By Night (1952)

Clash By Night (1952) is a romantic-unromantic dockside drama destructive love drifter-comes-home film noir by Fritz Lang, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Douglas and Robert Ryan.

For a film noir there are few of the elements we normally might expect to see from the form, and yet with the addition of a fairly noirish cast, and some dark and unpleasant behaviour and characterisation from Robert Ryan, Clash By Night (1952) squeezes into the fold because of anguished performances, again largely delivered by the alienated woman hater played by Robert Ryan.

Barbara Stanwyck plays Mae Doyle, a woman who returns to her hometown, the fishing town of Monterey, California, after 10 years on the East Coast. 

You Only Live Once (1937)

You Only Live Once (1937) is a 1930s couple on the run prison crime drama noir by Fritz Lang, and a super-early film noir classic, the bleakness of which the United States was not quite ready to face.

The picture's true noir inclination arises from the fact that it is about destiny and fate, and is the subjectively told story of the interlocking forces that serve to ruin the lives of a positive and beautiful young couple.

Although everything may at times seem to be going well for this couple, the truth is that everything is going badly. 

An early entry into the sub-genre of fugitive lovers on the lam pictures, the story leans on the legend of Bonnie and Clyde and shows how three times jailbird Eddie Taylor (played by Henry Fonda) is released, after strings are pulled,  into the arms of his adoring gal, Jo Graham (Sylvia Sidney). 

While The City Sleeps (1956)

While The City Sleeps (1956) by Fritz Lang is late enough in the cycle to be classed as knowing-noir - an almost self-aware example of the medium, that has mastered the tropes, themes, acting style and drama of the film noir phenomenon - enough to package up the groove and bottle it. 

While still a classic of the film noir style, many of the more significant tropes which formed the medium in the 1940s are curiously absent. While The City Sleeps is not a film of shadows, and neither is it a production heavy with cigarette smoke, hoods in hats and of course femmes fatales.

Still however, While The City Sleeps is considered by many to be a fine example of classic film noir.

It certainly has an A-list of film noir graduate class of 1956 noir as they come actors in it, including Ida Lupino, Dana Andrews, Thomas Mitchell and Howard Duff.

What makes this journalistic story of a psychopathic killer being caught by the press in concert with the cops a classic of film noir then? Perhaps it is because the story it tells of this killer loose in New York, as told by Fritz Lang, simply in and of itself contains enough material to be a Grade A example of the style, as it stood, towards the end of the cycle.

You and Me (1938)

You and Me (1938) starring George Raft and Silvia Sidney is an early film noir from Fritz Lang, set in a department store which is staffed by criminals on parole.

Delightful within You and Me is the German expressionist sensibility which is quite apparent in the photographic style, but which the American audiences may not have been quite ready for. 

Most especially in the scenes where the large criminal gang are together, there is a certain flavour of the director's earlier film M (1931), stylised at times by the actors facing directly into the camera to achieve an arresting effect — as well as powerful and small touches which carry great weight.

Likely the most memorable of these describes the relationship between the two young lovers George Raft and Sylvia Sidney, whose hands touch as they pass on an escalator. The way this shot is managed speaks volumes, and in the midst of a chaotic crime caper, which to be fair has as many romantic and screwball aspects to it as it does full film noir flavour, it's among the most powerful of moments.

The Big Heat (1953)

The Big Heat is a 1954 film noir by Fritz Lang, starring Gloria Grahame, Glenn Ford and Lee Marvin. 

The many themes of cop life and criminal life are present, but the script of William P. McGivern's 1953 book called for some family life too; which is always a foreign presence in film noir.

Usually, if a Mr and Mrs are sitting down to a home cooked steak, and the baby girl is playing nearby, something may be afoot. The family is the unseen locus of much of film noir.

Here, Mr and Mrs Cop are seen at home perhaps a little too much; and its a signal that bad things are a-coming.

Although there are spoilers all across this website, a special SPOILER ALERT need be issued for Fritz Lang's 1953 noir, The Big Heat.

It isn't so much around the ending or the way things work out, its just that the likely most significant thing which takes this almost lackadaisical Langian noir out of the realms of the mere crime film en passant, is what happens at home, and the tragedy that befalls that home.  

The Blue Gardenia (1953)

The Blue Gardenia (1953), by Fritz Lang, is a cynical take on how the press handles brutal murder cases. 

Richard Conte is the slick as whistle reporter, determined to prove that the press has more might than the police, and is willing to use his position as the city's ace reporter in order to solve the murder.

Proof, if more were needed, that the mainstream home of any social comment in the 1940s and 1950s could be found in film noir. 

Indeed, the power of the press is as significant as the other beneath-the-surface aspects of the story; and this includes the idea of a woman being drunk equating to some kind of sexual consent.

The Blue Gardenia is the first part of what might be sometimes known as Fritz Lang's 'newspaper noir' trilogy, which also includes While The City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

The drunkenness of the pretty young woman played by Anne Baxter in The Blue Gardenia is almost as a form of drink-spiking. Raymond Burr, the womanising press artist at the centre of the tale, is quick to fling a few of his favourite hard beverages down her throat; the Polynesian Pearl Diver, it's called.

She drinks one, she drinks two, and the guzzling with gusto turns sour and a murder is committed.

Scarlet Street (1945)

Scarlet Street is a 1945 film noir, directed by Fritz Lang, and is one of what you may call Lang's dream film noirs.

The dream film noir is a heady and difficult combination, and was almost exclusively the creation of Fritz Lang, who employed psychology and hidden impulse very well in his work, and did so brilliantly in The Ministry of Fear, with its dream Nazis, and most successfully of all in The Woman in the Window. (1944).

The same applies to many of Fritz Lang's films, such as The Secret Beyond the Door (1947).

Fritz Lang was born to this. Lang was born to mix the heady visuals of the new cinema with the relatively recent findings of psychoanalytic theory. All this amounts to in practice, and in film noir, are dark desires, so-called because they are both illicit and unknown.

Often in film noir, a man seeks to escape domesticity, while at the same time in film noir, a woman often feels trapped by it, subjugated by the commercial forces that were fast growing the world about her.

Human Desire (1954)

Fritz Lang's Human Desire (1954) is a dirty, deceitful, drunken diesel-ride — to the death.

Set in and around train yards, and in the trains themselves, Human Desire is an adaptation of a novel by Emile Zola, although the story and the characters are perfect for film noir.

There's the returning war veteran, often a theme in the style — except this time it is the Korean War, and it's Glenn Ford, playing the uncomplicated rail-man Jeff Warren. 

There is a psychopathic drunk, who has his own problems, although the main problem is his inability to control his temper, especially when it comes to Gloria Grahame, playing his missus.

And there's the femme fatale, too — here in the finely spiteful form of Gloria Grahame, who is doing her best for Number One, which in this case means escaping from a violent marriage.

Hangmen Also Die! (1943)

At the height of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, four German exiles in Hollywood:

• director Fritz Lang
• playwright Bertolt Brecht
• composer Hanns Eisler 
• and actor Hans Heinrich von Twardowski

... combined their skills to make Hangmen Also Die!, a surprising film noir propaganda piece about the Czech resistance.

Twardowski plays Reinhard Heydrich, an SS Obergruppenführer and the 'Reich-Protector' of Czechoslovakia, an infamous character from history and known alternately as 'The Hangman' and 'The Butcher of Prague'.

When he is assassinated by a surgeon (played by Brian Donlevy), the city is locked down and the doctor must rely on the help of the resistance to evade capture. 

Hangmen Also Die! is a fine mix of war picture, film noir and political thriller, with other surprising elements including mad Nazi darkness to the fore.

The Woman in the Window (1945)

It’s plastered on thick.   

Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944) opens with Edward G. Robinson giving a college lecture, while behind him the words SIGMUND FREUD are written on a blackboard.  

If only he had turned to read that board himself.  

Ten minutes later Joan Bennett, playing the strange femme fatale of the title, turns up in a see-through blouse, and asks him to her apartment to see her etchings. 

That would be enough for many pictures, but in terms of the psychological goodies of film noir, The Woman in the Window probably has it in greater quantities than any other movie of the era.

The story is as fine a descent as featured in any film noir.  After psychology professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) sends his wife and two children off on vacation, he sees a striking oil portrait of Alice Reed played by Joan Bennett in a storefront window.

Later, he meets the subject of the portrait, who is standing near the painting watching people gaze at it. Reed convinces Wanley to join her for drink, and thereafter there's murder, shootouts, clues, crime scenes and comic dialogues ... culminating in one of the greatest story-telling cliches of all time.

The Secret Beyond the Door (1947)

The Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1947, with Joan Bennett and Richard Redgrave) was released at the height of the brief boom in what is styled by this website at least, as the ‘paranoid woman film.’

In these momentarily fashionable movies, female sobs glance from wall to wall, doors loom large, keys symbolise everything, and worst of all — your husband wants to KILL YOU.

The psychology is always cod, but to make it even fishier, a psychoanalyst character is usually thrown in.

In The Secret Beyond the Door, one of the lead’s friends pipes up at the half way point and announces: “Paging Dr. Freud!”

Excitement, mystery and nerves on edge — is this what every woman longs for?

Ministry of Fear (1944)

Ministry of Fear (1944) is an espionage dream Nazi spy thriller starring Ray Milland, presenting an almost surreal succession of events and clues as one man is sucked further into a murderous Nazi spy plot as he inadvertently receives something the enemy agents are after — in a cake which he wins at a bizarre midnight village fete.

The Nazis in Fritz Lang's film noir mid-war favourite Ministry of Fear aren't presented in the typical style of the day.

The Nazis in this film noir classic don't wear swastika armbands and nor do they make fascist speeches about the benefits of the Reich's new order, a sight common enough from other mid-War propaganda.

There were many films made about WWII, during WWII. The movie Nazis that made the most impact at the time were in the style of the pompous evil-doers of films like Sherlock Holmes And The Voice Of Terror (1942); or Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943).