Thunder Road (1958)

Thunder Road (1958) is a free-wheeling and lurid hillbilly noir drama thriller about the moonshine business and a crazed item of uber-engine-block-rockin fun and double Mitchum-based racing madness and mannish boyhood aggression among the backwood backwaters of the moonshine states of Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee in the late 1950s, with added cult-movie drive-in status and plenty machine action and moody maleness, old and young.

It's a noirish crime story with more than just a few late period swiping stabs at the style.

Boy must ya hate 1958 and this movie which opens with the banjo pickin moan of authority that complains millions of dollars are lost to the treasury through taxation each year by means of the power of illicit whiskey, boo hoo. Who cares!

Naked Alibi (1954)

Naked Alibi (1954) is a cop on the edge psycho killer chase thriller that endeavours to spill the ills of suburban America into the criminal wilds of Mexico, as an unhinged killer baker bridges the merciless and pointless gap between the normative strains of the American Dream and the animal flavours of the real world of criminal human agony.

The two tend to meet flatly in the face of the stylistically drowning form of mid 50s noir, when the residues of dramatised psychologically criminality, portrayed with such fun in the 1940s, turn to sour and serious and usually quite odd and unexplained abnormality, as the noir ideals begin to fade mid-decade.

Naked Alibi  (1954) stands as a testament to the enduring allure of film-noir, even as the genre evolved through the 1950s. The film brings together a trio that guarantees a noir masterpiece: Sterling Hayden, Gloria Grahame, and the shadowy ambiance of noir cinematography.

The Houston Story (1956)

The Houston Story (1956) is a corporate managerial Texas-based oil-boosting racket noir from the high era of corporate and racket noir.

It's a tough tale of industrial scale mob dodging oil thievery from the slick black beating heart of the Texas oil industry.

Seedy and pulpy and violent and silly, with a streak of cabbie noir and a lot of dirty oil scenery as well as some sordid poolside lechery, The Houston Story is a rewarding noir of parts.