Ladies in Retirement (1941)

Ladies in Retirement (1941) is a historical woman's picture psychological social thriller Cockney talkin gothic Victoriana shadows in the marshes foggy soggy film noir thieven and murder drama of sisterly crazed dead bird collecting feminist examination of the pressures social, psychological and detrimental to the capable woman in the society of yore, as dramatists of 1939, a curious and exciting drama from the times when plays made films.

In the murky domain between madness and decorum, Charles Vidor's 1941 film Ladies in Retirement emerges as an exquisitely wrought chamber piece of deceit, loyalty, and murder. 

The Sea Wolf (1941)

The Sea Wolf (1941) is a nautical noir ghost ship of shame and cruelty dramatic abduction and high seas wrecking crew medical and maritime madness Jack London adapted tale of intersecting American narratives combining the frontier of the sea with the oldest narrative tropes known to the continent, including the olden mania of the rogue seamaster and the anti-Nietzschean struggle for the victory of normalcy over ubermenshcary.

Michael Curtiz's 1941 adaptation of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf occupies a peculiar intersection of seafaring adventure, psychological realism, and the film noir sensibility emerging in Hollywood during the wartime period. 

Lust for Gold (1949)

Lust for Gold (1949) is a bookend narration-style lost goldmine murder greed and deception lousy husband historical western meets modern day media film noir of the western stamp, one of several noirs which combine past and present in a treasure huntin narrative.

All of which is made perfectly desperate by the acting of Ida Lupino, who does in the great noir tradition perform the most desperate of acting styles, making of everything a high stakes showdown, as is fitting of her role as the First Lady of Noir.

Outrage (1950)

Outrage (1950) is a powerful woman's social message rape-discussing drama film noir from Ida Lupino, the undoubted quintessential queentessence of noir and lady noir and women's noir and femme-noir, and all things that do resolve upon the maximum that may be said of this gender and sex in the medium we best adore, and medium that best expresses the century. 

The fact is and was that America in 1950 was so neck-deep in a formal misogyny which allowed casual sexism to flourish in every look and leer, and in which even the children wolf whistle the older women.

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.

Woman in Hiding (1950)

Woman in Hiding (1950) is a woman against the world lousy husband flashback murder and female seeker hero film noir, starring Ida Lupino as a wife on the run, escaping from a murderous marriage and finding love on the run in the form of lackadaisical magazine and cigar seller Howard Duff.

Corporate villainy also appears in this car smashin chase and hide thriller in the form of Stephen McNally playing an industry boss who is going to be appropriate screen material for the 1950s, straight outta war and into world domination, starting with mob behaviour in the boardroom.

I would seem from the Wikipedia entry on Woman in Hiding (1950) that not everybody agrees that this is a film noir. The works that are cited are the super-seminal and all-ruling guide to the subject of film noir,  Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton (2002). A Panorama of American Film Noir (1941-1953), and Ian Brookes Film Noir: A Critical Introduction. 

On Dangerous Ground (1951)

On Dangerous Ground (1951) is a classic Nicholas Ray urban rural violent cop film noir starring Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino in a tale of loneliness and duality combining the full and contrasting forces of both the wildscapes of the north and the urban environments on the individual.

Robert Ryan plays Jim Wilson a brutalised city cop, in danger of losing his job due to his lack of control when it comes to managing violence in his job. 

Ida Lupino plays Mary Malden, a blind woman who characteristic of blindness in the movies at the time — is symbolically set to allow the hero to finally 'see'.

Beware, My Lovely (1952)

Beware, My Lovely (1952) is a home invasion amnesia Christmas-themed paranoid delusional maniac film noir starring Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan, two of noir's greatest acting talents.

Robert Ryan plays a strange kinda killer in this low-key film noir which takes something of a path of its own off of the main noir highway, and which yet complies with many of film noir's best tropes.

Most clearly of all, Beware, My Lovely (1952) is suburban noir and is the kind of noir that was becoming increasingly popular in the early 1950s — the type of noir which dealt the goods not on the streets and criminal dives of the 1940s, but directly within the super-vulnerable domestic bliss of the 1950s.

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.

Moontide (1942)

Moontide (1942) with Ida Lupino, Thomas Mitchell, Jean Gabin and Claude Reins is a wacky tale of dockside folks getting up to all sorts of bumps, drunken maudlin dive haunting, flagon tanking, and trying to kill oneself in the waves.

Romantic drama noir takes a love story and mystifies it with crime elements one way or another, and here bathing in the moontide, a sense of sentimental shack dwelling darkness, adds some criminality while we witness the love of two misfits

This dockside light noir was directed by Archie Mayo and written by John O'Hara and an uncredited Nunnally Johnson, based on the novel Moon Tide by Willard Robertson.

Key to the production is the solid comic manliness of Jean Gabin, trans-Atlantically transported to an indeterminate American location where he gets up to all sorts of larks, most of which is not entirely noir but all of which are band-wagonning him quite well into the American heart. Daft docks drama noir at its best — and this is even before we have seen the antic disposition of Ida Lupino — something she was quite good at.

They Drive By Night (1940)

A box office hit in its day, They Drive By Night (1940), with George Raft, Ida Lupino, Ann Sheridan and Humphrey Bogart is a film noir trucker movie, which opens on the embattled lives of some West Coast fruit hauliers, and closes on murder, madness and corporate corruption ― as obsession and madness destroy femme fatale Ida Lupino’s life.

The rub is that director Raoul Walsh had a flair for subverting genres, and really only made what you might call “Raoul Walsh pictures” whatever the basic  genre ― and this one is about as Raoul Walsh as you can get.

It’s a trucker movie, it’s a comedy, it’s a romance and it’s a thriller. It’s a picture about class relationships and the cutthroat nature of business; and it’s a picture about madness and the little guy rising to the top.

Raoul Walsh ― who also made the following film noir favourites ― High Sierra (1941); Pursued (1947); and White Heat (1949) ― had a feeling feeling for regular people, informal surroundings, and he portrays the hustle and bustle of working life very well.

The Man I Love (1947)

The Man I love (1947) is not the most classifiable of film noir productions from the 1940s but it does say plenty about the style and the era.

It's also potentially a rare film noir in that it attempts to close in on the female experience of family life, dating, night life and petty criminality. Gender roles are clear in The Man I Love, as they are in all cinema of the 1940s. But they are still overturned in places.

And if you have found the overturning of social norms in the cinema of the 1940s, you have almost always certainly found film noir, even if your movie doesn't feature paranoia, corruption and the dark criminality and murder more normally associated with the style.

The Man I Love is not an immediately obvious placement in the film noir canon, and yet with its female seeker hero in the form of Ida Lupino, working her way through night clubs on the West Coast, this film has noir chops to spare.

Private Hell 36 (1954)

The 1954 crime film noir thriller Private Hell 36 seems somehow familiar.

From the fade into the New York skyline and the rising incidental music, there seems to be something about it that is so well known as to be embedded in our media subconscious.

What is it?

Perhaps Private Hell 36 feels like we have just come off a commercial break.

It feels so much like the classic cop shows which were to follow on the heels of the many police procedural thrillers of the 1940s and 1950s.

This might be to do with director Don Siegel. Siegel went on to give voice to some of the best cop action of the 1970s in particular. Over a few years, for example, he offered this little run:

• Coogan's Bluff (1968)
• Madigan (1968)
• Death of a Gunfighter (1969)
• Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)
• The Beguiled (1971)
• Dirty Harry (1971)

Certainly these are not all cop films, and yet there's plenty crossover between the wild west and the city beat, with Clint Eastwood and John Wayne both featuring. But there is a template here for the kind of lawlessness versus the law, with a very rough divide between the two, that became the norm for 1970s TV viewership.

And Don Siegel learned it all in film noir.

The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

One of several highway film noirs, The Hitch-Hiker (director: Ida Lupino, 1953) is brutal, effective and in its day introduced a new kind of criminal to the screen.  

With a compelling normality, The Hitch-Hiker shows the kind of pointless hold ups and killings that in the 1950s were generally framed as a social-problem crime film.  

The Hitch-Hiker is also a mess of huggable and homoerotic heteronormativity, with two very close men on a fishing trip (or is it?), bullied at gun point in their car and in the desert, by a dominating sadist, who has an evil ‘bum eye’ to boot.

The Hitch-Hiker follows the movements of killer Emmett Myers (played by William Talman), who robs and murders his way around the country.  

During the opening credits we get glimpses of Myers and his victims, setting the stage for the introduction of Roy Collins (Edmond O'Brien) and Gilbert Bowen (Frank Lovejoy), two buddies on their way to a fishing trip in Mexico.

Then the film opens and a lot more comes a rolling through the flood gates.

High Sierra (1941)

Although High Sierra (1941) is likely perceived by the public as a ‘Humphrey Bogart’ picture, it is not entirely fair to see it that way. 

Indeed, High Sierra is notable in many ways for how Ida Lupino’s character develops, and how she is portrayed. 

Viewers will also note that Ida has top billing too, before Bogart, and that is worth something!

Critically, Ida Lupino plays a fairly ‘straight’ role here, and hers is not a character the readily fits into the various tropes and stereotypes which it is often said, dominate the female portrayals in the style.

By ‘straight role’ we can confidently say the following of Ida Lupino in High Sierra ― her character is consistent and develops across the course of the action. 

While not cast as a femme fatale, or domestic simp of some sort, Ida's character, Marie, falls in love with Humphrey Bogart’s character, Roy, and remains true to the end. The entire episode is presented as her story, and her journey, with the viewer experience being hers.

Conversely, Bogart’s character is typical of a certain type of male from this era of film noir ― he may try to be doing good, but fate and his lower nature are in fact in control. 

This means Roy Earle (Bogart) regularly makes wrong decisions, and not just when he is railroaded into them. 

Jennifer (1953)

One of the lesser known wonders of the film noir style is the paranoid woman movie. 

Classics of the genre are well-known ― Rebecca ― and probably the cream of the complete crop ― The Secret Beyond the Door (1947).

Dark Waters (1944) is another downbeat and typically melodramatic example, while others like The House on Telegraph Hill (1951) offer less routine scenarios, and more complex outcomes.

And speaking of outcomes, and before we proceed, here is the habitual Film Noir Spoiler Alert.

There will be spoilers in this article, as if you didn't see any of this coming! Find the full Official Spoiler Alert here.

The setting for a typical paranoid woman film is always either a house, or a marriage, or preferably both. The two are hard to separate in the noir canon, and are usually haunted not by the dead, but by the weirdness or wickedness of the living.

Psychologically, these paranoid woman movies question marriage, and perform on a woman’s fears on entering into marriage. The idea is that in acting out these spooky and unknown scenarios offers a psychological satisfaction ― the opposite of a ‘triggering’  effect.

To ensure that nobody is triggered, indeed, and to make sure that the paranoid woman films perform as desired, their action is consistent and always to be expected.  Usually the only surprise is the reveal.

Out of the Fog (1941)

On the Brooklyn shore, there’s a mess of fog, and in that fog is a deep-seated and sordid corruption, seeping into the failing hearts of the innocent.

Down in this gutter, we find the broke, a bunch of hard working guys that are just trying to scrape together enough bits to secure their next fishing trip to the bay.

Out of The Fog (1941), starring Ida Lupino, is a moody yarn about a racketeer and his gormless marks, which features abundant fog and plenty of dark and moody water lapping sound effects.

Within and around this wafts John Garfield, who steps in an tries his hand at Bogart — or is it Cagney?

Hard to say.

Of course Bogart does Bogart best, and the same is to be said of James Cagney, but there’s a ton of film-flam holding John Garfield back in Out of the Fog, and try as he may, he just can’t see his way out of it.