A Life of Her Own (1950)

The Ray Milland season does not advance so much as unfold — temporally, tentatively, beautifully. Its path is all digression and delay, yet within that slow meander there trembles a strange coherence, the whisper of a destination it cannot name.

A Life of Her Own (1950) is a George Cukor woman's picture young model from Kansas trying to make it big in New York, doomed romance and suicide driven depression discussing psychological critique lousy husband melodrama starring Lana Turner and Ray Milland, Louis Calhern and Ann Dvorak, Jean Hagen and Phyllis Kirk.

Side Street (1950)

Side Street (1950) is an urban slice of romantic classic film noir, starring love-birds Cathy O'Donnell and Farley Granger.

The couple who debuted in They Live By Night, the debut too of director Anthony Mann, made a total of four noirs in a line.

Although the action in Side Street is underpinned by the hard city, with its dark corners, bars, cop shops, rentals, night clubs and stone blocks.

Side Street makes a virtue of every urban geography going, a psychogeography in fact of the young man wrestling with the madness of the city whirlpool.

The city is filmed constantly throughout, a place of promise to begin with and straight on into the action, transformed by crime - - by a crime - -  into a depth charged doom hole of paranoia, doubt and fear.

What also makes Side Street so interesting is the violence, rather extremely played, particularly with the strangling. And it is also cool that Fraley Granger as Joe Norson attempts to atone, in a way that few other film noir heroes do.

The saps usually go all the way down to the end. And never atone. The pain of atonement, guided of course by the good lady love of  love-a-dove lady Cathy O'Donnell  - - as Ellen Norson, his young wife.