The Naked Spur (1953)

The Naked Spur (1953) is a bounty hunter chamber piece in the wilds classic Technicolor character-driven super-national park cinematic landscape featuring taut and rugged four men and a girl on the trail road-movie-style buzzard bait irascible western treatise on the moral consequences of greed directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart, Janet Leigh, Ralph Meeker and Millard Mitchell. It is a film that features more plaster foam rocks than any other that anyone can remember from the early 50s.

Touch of Evil (1958)

Touch of Evil (1958) is an Orson Welles late noir period border-hopping cinema-literate classic film noir marvel of visual architecture and one of the high cathedrals of twentieth-century film, an orgy of chiaroscuro light and shadow, carefully calculated mise-en-scène, and baroque camera movements so aggressive they seem on the verge of toppling the frame. 

If it lacks the gravitas of Welles' debut, it compensates by revealing a director entirely freed from the burden of prestige, indulging instead in excess, sleaze, formal genius, and creative destruction. It is a masterclass in cinematic rule-breaking that turns every aesthetic choice into a moral judgment.

Psycho (1960)

Psycho (1960) by Alfred Hitchcock is a noir-fuelled summation of thirty years of graphic and exploitative cinema, not just signalling the end of the classic film noir era, but bringing on many new types of film — the psycho-serial-killer horror film — the slasher —  the film that you see from beginning to end — the sight of a brassiere — jump scares shocks and a surprise ending. And a flushing toilet Code-lovers.

There is much to signal the changing of the era in Psycho, beginning with Hitchcock's inspired choice to make the film in black and white. For one Hollywood Golden Age fan at least, Psycho is the end of the line.

Psycho is not just the end of The Golden Age of Hollywood but for all its genius and for the sheer of its enjoyment and our never tiring of its technique and merits —  for all these things and more Psycho also heralds the opening of the age of disgust.

Pete Kelly's Blues (1955)

Pete Kelly's Blues (1955) is a music drama film starring and directed by Jack Webb which has film noir overtones.

It's the movie of the radio series of the same name - - the motion picture event no less! Taken to the screen by its creator Jack Webb.

Instead of firing up the tropes and tiring displays of middle of the road standard-as-you-go methods of storytelling, Pete Kelly's Blues delivers the tropes cold and plays them by the book, making for a strange and slight story that is easy in the telling, but doesn't deliver big on surprise, despite there being a bundle of muscle gunplay and murder throughout.

Jack Webb as Pete Kelly barely smiles as this colourful crime drama unfolds, although there is not much to smile about, aside from when he is rejecting Janet Leigh's frolicking advances.

Rogue Cop (1954)

Rogue Cop (1954) opens with no fanfares and no music at all in fact. Clearly the producers were going for the music of the streets.

And what is the music of the streets? 

It's the footsetp of a crooked cop, the whispering of a stool pigeon, the gasp for life of a man stabbed to death in a penny arcade, and its the sirens which open and close this film noir police procedural tale of coppers on the take.

To commence with, a grumbling burlesque dancer wanders into a penny arcade and why didn’t she know this was going to cheapen her day further, is beyond us. 

But a murder quickly turns things on their tails, and the story of Rogue Cop begins.

So much of film noir takes place inside police procedural. Desks, ID parades, arguments with the boss, locker rooms, stool pigeons and bad cop / bad cop routines abound.

Act of Violence (1949)

A former prisoner of war, Frank Enley (Van Heflin) is hailed as a hero in his California town.

However, Frank actually aided his Nazi captors, and he closely guards this secret!

Frank's shameful past comes back to visit him when fellow survivor Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan) emerges, intent on making the turncoat pay for his betrayal. 

As Joe closes in on Frank, the traitor goes into hiding, abandoning his wife, Edith (Janet Leigh), who has no clue about her husband's wartime transgressions. When Frank begins to truly fear his nemesis, played by the relentlessly limping Robert Ryan, he begins to speak of him as if he were speaking of the stalking figure of death itself. 

And his paranoia is total:

"You don't know what made him the way he is - I do!"