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.

All About Eve (1950)

All About Eve (1950) is a six Academy Award winning all time classic best films of all time cynical and feminist masterpiece of late golden age Hollywood acting, screen-writing and direction telling of deceit, ambition and betrayal in theatreland, which was written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and produced by Darryl F. Zanuck and based on the 1946 short story (and subsequent 1949 radio drama) The Wisdom of Eve by Mary Orr, although Orr does not receive a screen credit, and stars Bette Davis as Margo Channing, a highly regarded but aging Broadway star, and Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington, an ambitious young fan who manoeuvres herself into Channing's life, ultimately threatening Channing's career and her personal relationships, as well as starring George Sanders, Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, and Hugh Marlowe, and features Thelma Ritter, Marilyn Monroe in one of her earliest roles, Gregory Ratoff, Barbara Bates and Walter Hampden.

A Star is Born (1954)

A Star is Born (1954) is a Judy Garland comeback star vehicle musical scratch the surface portrayal of Hollywood stardom and its machinery love story and doomed romance tale of alcohol, fame, and every day studio and star system misogyny, big production piece musical action and suicide and love and success and failure and the scheming folly of the industry that produced it, and while not only not a film noir but emphatically not a noir nor noir film, is still in its narrative and meta-narrative and reflective qualities, one of the darker musicals one might see, in its reflections made upon the place and time of Hollywood at the end of the golden era of the silver screen.

The Bigamist (1953)

The Bigamist (1953) is a downbeat lousy husband melodrama of loneliness and freezer salesmen about an almost accidental case of bigamy and the sad perils of being a man in the 1950s, told in flashback and voiceover, showing who a fifties bloke-man unwittingly partaking of two marriages for mundane and perfectly normal reasons, crafted in an eternally dramatically perfect style by the great master of film noir, Ida Lupino, and starring Ida Lupino herself, and Edmond O'Brien in the title role, and Edmund Gwenn as an avuncular adoption official, and Joan Fontaine, and Kenneth Tobey.

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

Sullivan's Travels (1941) is a drifter-narrative social message self-reflecting Hollywood blockbuster role reversal comedy social commentary prison and road movie media satire that looks at the business of the movie franchise ('Ants in your Pants 1939') in which the differences between worthy art and cinematic entertainment is pressed, as well as the truest social politics of the queer and socialist civil rightists kind

No it is not a film noir, c'est pas un noir mes flics et mesdames!

But there is still a reason it is here and many reasons it is relevant to our defence of the film noir form.

The social politics are true insofar as they are presented in 1941 before the mass media hold upon messaging defined social justice into some kind of communist nightmare.

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

The best Golden Age film noir movies such as Sunset Boulevard (1950) rank among the favourites of all movies lovers.

The best examples of the film noir style remain as the greatest examples of cinema as a whole, and the most popular. 

Given that as the Golden Age of Hollywood closed, nobody was specifically aware as such of there being a style or a genre called 'noir', it is surprising how cohesive the style was. Film noir really was a thing, and Sunset Boulevard is a classic example, of classic film noir.

That 'Golden Age' is usually said to be from 1930 until 1945, but it's hard to pin these things down.

Consistent to movie storytelling is time. Time in classical Hollywood is continuous, linear, and uniform, since non-linearity calls attention to the illusory workings of the medium. The only permissible manipulation of time in this format is the flashback, which is a staple of film noir, and comprises the entirety of Sunset Boulevard.

What's fascinating is that we can perhaps ask what it was that the makers of classic film noir era thought they were making? What were the workmanlike film noir cycle movies of the era aimed at; and what were the common reference points that allowed the style to develop?

Nocturne (1946)

Nocturne (1946) is a full-on film noir moody mystery melodrama, produced by long-time Alfred Hitchcock associate Joan Harrison. 

Within the excellent opening photography, we witness rakish Hollywood composer (Edward Ashley) dropping dead in his swanky Hollywood house.

The film noir police force think it's a straight up suicide, but maverick lieutenant hero Joe Warne (played by George Raft) suspects murder.

With no hanging about, Warne discovers that this Hollywood composer has broken the hearts of at least ten women in recent years, offering motive for murder aplenty.

The main suspect is Frances Ransom (played by Lynn Bari), who may or may not have been avenging her sister, the nightclub thrush Carol Page (Virginia Huston). 

Pursuing the case with enough firm diligence to get him at one stage thrown off the police force, determined copper Joe Warne of course refuses to give up.

There is a hint here of a sub-genre that would become larger by far as the years passed, the dark side of Hollywood as film noir, which remained popular as much among the community itself, as it was with the theatre-visiting public. Hollywood loves to film itself, murdering itself. In that glorious, glamourous heart, there is always a corrupting influence to be found. 

In a Lonely Place (1950)

In a Lonely Place (1950) by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, always turns up pretty high in those lists of classic film noirs.  

This probably has more to do with its adoption by the French New Wave than it does with true noir credentials, and the fact that it is one of Hollywood’s periodic flashes of its own underbelly.  

But Bogart is slick, wise-ass and selfish and so is the movie, which doesn't offer up a hero but instead presents a bitter and depressed cynic anti-hero incapable of heroism.  

It's a comment on the 1950s, when screenwriters were accused of communism and their friends often turned against them, and Humphrey Bogart plays it dark, often amoral, insisting that a girl find her own cab, refusing to show empathy for a murdered woman, remorseless when shown photos of a crime scene and sexually aroused when given the chance to re-enact a violent murder.